Angela Davis on the Prison Abolishment Movement, Frederick Douglass,
the 40th Anniversary of Her Arrest and President Obama's First Two Years
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/19/angela_davis_on_the_prison_abolishment
October 19, 2010
For over four decades, Angela Davis has been one of most influential
activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon of the
1970s black liberation movement, her work around issues of gender,
race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social
movements for years. She is a leading advocate for prison abolition,
a position informed by her own experience as a fugitive on the FBI's
Top 10 most wanted list forty years ago. Davis rose to national
attention in 1969 when she was fired as a professor from UCLA as a
result of her membership in the Communist party and her leading a
campaign to defend three black prisoners at Soledad prison. Today she
is a university professor and the founder of the group Critical
Resistance, a grassroots effort to end the prison-industrial complex.
This year she edited a new edition of Frederick Douglass' classic
work, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself. We spend the hour with Angela Davis and play rare
archival footage of her.
--
AMY GOODMAN: Over four decades, Angela Davis has been one of most
influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon
of the 1970s black liberation movement, her work around issues of
gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and
social movements across several generations. She is a leading
advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own
experience as a fugitive on the FBI's top-ten most wanted list forty years ago.
Angela Davis rose to national attention in 1969 when she was fired as
a professor from UCLA. It was Ronald Reagan who had her fired as a
result of her membership in the Communist party and her leading a
campaign to defend three black prisoners at Soledad prison. This is a
clip from an NBC newscast in 1969 after the UCLA Board of Regents
voted to fire her. It begins with then California Governor Ronald
Reagan explaining why he pushed for her ouster.
GOV. RONALD REAGAN: Academic freedom does not include attacks on
other faculty members or on the administration of the university or
speaking to incite trouble on other campuses. Now, I think, once
again, in this particular case, we're talking simply about an issue
of whether to hire or not. And this comes up a great many times, and
there are many people who are decided not to hire, and it does not
become a great case in which publicly there has to be a debate as to
why we chose someone else instead of this other individual.
NBC NEWS: While the Regents were voting, Ms. Davis was a few blocks
away in a rally, protesting the treatment of black prisoners in
Soledad State Prison. She sees her dismissal as a case of political
repression, which she may or may not challenge.
ANGELA DAVIS: I'm going to keep on struggling to free the Soledad
Brothers and all political prisoners, because I think that what has
happened to me is only a very tiny, minute example of what is
happening to them. I suppose I just lost that job at UCLA as a result
of my political opinions and activities.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1970, Angela Davis was charged with murder after guns
used in a botched kidnapping attempt to free the prisoners were
alleged to be hers. Davis briefly escaped capture before her arrest
here in New York City forty years ago this month. In an interview
from prison then, she talked about the role of prisons in the black
liberation struggle.
ANGELA DAVIS: There came a point where the revolutionary forces at
work in the black community began to express themselves in jails and
prisons. However, unlike, say, the campuses, unlike any other area in
the society, even the armed forces, the room for any kind of
meaningful political activity is so narrow that obviously, as soon as
the prison officials became aware of what was happening, they would
confront these new developments with the most devastating kind of
repression imaginable. And this is why, when I was involved in all of
the problems at UCLA surrounding my membership in the Communist party
and when I was fighting for my job, I had just become aware of what
was happening in the prisons, and I always insisted that people who
were supporting me in my fight to retain my job, regardless of what
my political beliefs and political activities were, had to look at the prisons.
AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, speaking from prison forty years ago. In
1972, she was acquitted of all charges in a trial that drew
international attention.
Instead of shying away from public life, Davis resumed her academic
work and social activism. Today she is professor emerita of history
of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and a visiting distinguished professor at
Syracuse University. She is founder of the group Critical Resistance,
a grassroots effort to end the prison-industrial complex.
Her books include Women, Race and Class, Abolition Democracy, Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism, Are Prisons Obsolete? This year she came
out with a new critical edition of Frederick Douglass's classic work
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,
Written by Himself. She will be appearing with the author Toni
Morrison at the New York Public Library on October 27th for an event
called "Frederick Douglass: Literacy, Libraries, and Liberation."
Professor Angela Davis joins me now for an extended conversation from
Ithaca, New York.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Angela Davis.
ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you very much, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have just taken not only listeners and viewers,
but you, as well, on a journey through your life. It was quite
remarkable to see then-Governor Ronald Reagan speaking about you. Why
was he so intent on preventing you from taking on your assistant
professorship at UCLA?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I've always thought that it was not so much about
me as an individual as it was about discovering a scapegoat who could
be targeted in order to frighten people away from the radical
movement at that time, and especially the black liberation movement.
You know, one of the points that I became aware of after I was
arrested was that literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of black
women were stopped and arrested. And, of course, not all of them
could have looked like me. So, yeah, I think this was a part of a
strategy of terror designed to prevent people from getting involved
in movements at that time.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, of course, it only mobilized people. He put
pressure on the California Regents. They fired you before you could
even teach your first class, except you did. What did you have?
Something like 150 people enrolled in the class? But 1,500 people
came out as you decided to teach it anyway, even though you were fired?
ANGELA DAVIS: Yeah. Yeah, that was really a marvelous display of
solidarity. I, myself, was really shocked to see so many people. And
it was interesting, because that first class was in a course that I
had designed toa course by the title of "Recurring Philosophical
Themes in Black Literature." I was teaching in the Philosophy
Department, but we did not have at that time a field called black
philosophy or African philosophy or African American philosophy. So I
was improvising, attempting to address some issues that would also be
relevant for the contemporary period.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to a break, and we're going to come
back. And we want to talk about your life, and we also want to talk
about this very interesting new critical edition of the Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, with essays
thatwritten by you, Angela, as well as your lectures on liberation.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
We'll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Angela" by John and Yoko. That's right, John Lennon and
Yoko Ono, Plastic Ono Band. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,
The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest for the hour is
Angela Davis.
Angela, does that song bring back memories?
ANGELA DAVIS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, it does, yes. I can hardly
believe that forty years have gone by, four decades. And it's
interesting because on October 13th, a couple of days ago, someone
said, "Isn't this the anniversary of your arrest?" And I thought
about it, and I said, "Yes." The person said, "Isn't it the thirtieth
anniversary of your arrest?" And I said, "Actually, it is. But it's
not the thirtieth, it's the fortieth." And I had to explain that I
generally remember the date of my liberation, but I tryI think I
repress the date of my arrest.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's talk about that. So, you went from, well,
first getting a job to be an assistant professor at UCLA to Ronald
Reagan, then governor, having you fired, to teaching 1,500 people
anyway, because they came out in solidarity, students and professors,
to ending up in jail. How did you wind up in jail?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, while I was teaching at UCLA, I received threats
literally every day, death threats. As a matter of fact, someone even
came into the Philosophy Department looking for me. I was not there.
And they attacked, physically attacked, Professor Kalish, who was the
chair of Philosophy Department at that time. So it was necessary for
me to have security, and during those days it was armed security. On
the campus, the UCLA police accompanied me to each class, and they
searched my car each day to make sure there had not been a bomb
planted, and so forth. And I also had to have people who were doing
security for me in my house and wherever I went. I should say theI
always like to point out that the UCLA police did a marvelous job of
doing security on the campus, but they waved goodbye to me every day
as I exited the campus. And I used to like to say that UCLA wanted to
make sure that I wasn't killed on the campus; they really didn't care
what happened after I left the campus.
But in any event, I purchased a number of weapons. And people who did
security for me used those weapons. One of the persons was the
younger brother of George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson. And on August
7th, 1970, he took those weapons and went into a courtroom in Marin
County, San Rafael, California. And Jonathan was killed in the
process, as were a number of prisoners. You know, Jonathan was very
young and very passionately involved with his brother's situation,
George Jackson. He really wanted to see his brother free. And while
he was active in the campaign to free him, as many of us were, I
don't think that Jonathan recognized that perhaps we could indeed
free them through our activities, organizing activities, the building
of a mass movement. In any event, as a result of the event on August
7th, I was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, because
the guns that were used were registered in my name. And after that,
of course, I was placed on the FBI's ten most wanted list. I was
underground for several months, until I was arrested in New York City
on October 13th, 1970.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were held for more than a year in prison.
ANGELA DAVIS: I was held for sixteen months. I was released on bail
before my trial took place. So the whole ordeal lasted about eighteen
months. I was arrested in October of 1970, and my trial concluded
with an acquittal at the beginning of June, on June 4th, 1972.
AMY GOODMAN: How did your experience in prison and going through what
you went through then shape you today and your work in these forty
years, in these four decades?
ANGELA DAVIS: Of course, one always creates narratives of one's life
in retrospect. And I do think that the period of time I spent behind
bars helped to consolidate an interest which was already there,
namely, working around cases involving political prisoners. George
Jackson, of course, helped us to understand that it wassn't just a
question of freeing political prisoners, but it was a question of
looking at the institution of the prison and its repressive role and
its role in shoring up and reproducing a racism.
Actually, I can talk about the fact that my mother was involved in
campaigns to free political prisoners. She was a very active member
of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, but she had
been involved as a college student in the campaign to free the
Scottsboro 9. So, I had actually, in a sense, followed in the footsteps
AMY GOODMAN: And the Scottsboro 9? The Scottsboro 9 were...? The
young men who were accused of rape.
ANGELA DAVIS: Nine young black men who were accused of rape in
Alabama and who were arrested and held in prison for many years, some
charged with death. And the last Scottsboro defendant was not
released until the 1980s.
AMY GOODMAN: You've mentioned your
ANGELA DAVIS: And so, I was saying that that
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
ANGELA DAVIS: No, I was saying that, in a sense, that work around
political prisoners is, in part, an aspect of the way I grew up. It
was, in a sense, in my blood already, when I began to work on cases
such as the campaign to free Nelson Mandela, the campaign to free
Lolita Lebrón and the Puerto Rican political prisoners, and of course
the Attica Brothers and many others.
AMY GOODMAN: You were born, Angela Davis, in Birmingham, Alabama,
home of Bull Connor. Interestingly, Condoleezza Rice just came out
with a memoir of her time in Birmingham, her civil rights growing up,
as she describes it.
ANGELA DAVIS: Yes. We werewe grew up in the same area. I didn't know
Condoleezza Rice. She lived in a different part of the city, and
she's somewhat younger than I. But it's always interesting to see how
trajectories can be so markedly different, even though one had what
one might consider to be a similar upbringing.
AMY GOODMAN: Very interesting. And we can have a longer discussion
about that. Maybe we'll have you and Condoleezza Rice on.
ANGELA DAVIS: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: And it would be a very interesting time of reminiscence.
ANGELA DAVIS: I'm not sure about that, but...
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it's interesting. Recently we had Michelle
Alexander on, the author of The New Jim Crow, and she said there are
more African Americans under correctional control today, in prison or
jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade
before the Civil War began, which is an interesting way to link your
work today around the issue of prisonsthe US has more prisoners than
anywhere in the worldback to the middle of the nineteenth century,
when Frederick Douglass was enslaved, your newest book.
ANGELA DAVIS: Absolutely. And, of course, any of us who are
interested in African American history, and particularly the black
liberation movement, have to address Frederick Douglass, the system
of slavery. And we've come to think about the prison-industrial
complex as linked very much to slavery, as revealing the sediments
and the vestiges of slavery, as providing evidence that the slavery
we may have thought was abolished with the Thirteenth Amendment is
still very much with us. It haunts us, especially in the form of this
vast prison-industrial complex, a prison system within the US that
holds something like 2.5 million people, more people in prison than
anywhere else in the world, more people per capita, as well. The rate
of incarceration, one in 100 adults in the US is behind bars. And
that's really only because of the disproportionate number of black
people and people of color whose lives have been claimed by the prison system.
As a matter of fact, it's very interesting that we think about the
history of the prison system in this country as grounded largely in
the northeastern penitentiaries, the Auburn system here in New York,
not very far from where I am teaching, and the Philadelphia system.
And as a matter of fact, Robert Perkinson has written an interesting
new book called Texas Tough, in which he argues that the Southern
system, which emerged in the aftermath of slavery, which made use of
the violent forms of repression that were linked to slavery, is as
much a part of the genealogy of punishment in the US as the New York
and the Pennsylvania penitentiaries.
AMY GOODMAN: We, by the wayI want to let our viewers and listeners
knowhave a Facebook page, facebook.com/democracynow, where you can
post questions for Professor Angela Davis. She's speaking to us from
Ithaca College in Ithaca, New Yorkand a shout-out to our friends at
Ithaca Collegeand has written a new critical edition that features
her lectures on liberation, along with the Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. And I
would like to go there now with you, Angela Davis, the idea of the
plantation-to-prison pipeline. Let's start from the beginning. And
why now, at this point in your work, in your activism, in your life,
you've chosen to go back to, to bring out once again and give us your
critical perspective on Frederick Douglass? Why was he so
significant. And tell us about his life, as you respond to that question.
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, Frederick Douglass is, of course, the germinal
figure in the history of African American liberation. But Frederick
Douglass is also an absolutely central figure in US history. And I
think that it is important to understand his contributions,
particularly given the fact that we constantly refer to him. And in
my introduction, I pointed out that when Barack Obama was campaigning
for office, he very frequently referred to thatperhaps the most
famous passage in Frederick Douglass's work, which was a speech that
he gave on West Indian Day. And it begins, "If there is no struggle,
there is no progress."
I thought that it might be important to think about Frederick
Douglass from the vantage point of where we are in the twenty-first
century, particularly given the feminist contributions, given the
contributions of black feminism, particularly because, historically,
the conceptualization of freedom has been linked to manhood, the
conceptualization of black freedom to black manhood. And I refer to
that passage that everyone who has read Frederick Douglass knows,
about his confrontation with the slave breaker Covey. And in the
aftermath of this physical altercation, in which Frederick Douglass
emerges as the winner, he realizes that he has, in the process,
defended his manhood. But that is his way of experiencing the
possibilities of freedom. So I ask in that introduction, you know,
what about women? What is the trajectory of freedom for women? And in
the nineteenth century, of course, at least within the literary genre
of the sentimental novel, that trajectory ended with marriage. So
marriage was the equivalent form of freedom for women. And I also
refer to Harriet Jacobs' wonderful narrative, Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl, in which she makes a point of pointing out that her
story does not end with marriage, but rather with freedom. So the
question is, how can we recognize the masculinist dimensions of our
conception of freedom and move on from there here in the twenty-first century?
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the significance of Frederick
Douglass being enslaved as a youth, as a teenager in St. Michaels?
Interestingly, Covey's property in St. Michaels is called Mount
Misery, is now owned by, well, former Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. That's his vacation home. He bought it in 2003 to be near
his close friend Vice President Dick Cheney. But
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, it's very interesting. Go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: I don't know if there's a "but" there, but if you can
talk about how Frederick Douglasswhat his role in the abolition
movement was and how the abolition movement shaped not just Black
America, shaped America?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, Frederick Douglass was the most prominent black
abolitionistthe most prominent abolitionist, I would argue, because
such an amazing figure as William Lloyd Garrison, the great white
abolitionist, also had his problems. And then I would like to perhaps
point out that we have still not come to grips with the fact that
John Brown was a part of that abolitionist movement. He was during
that time referred to as insane, and many people treat him today as
if he must have been mentally disordered in order to devote his life
in that way to the struggle for freedom for black slaves. Frederick
Douglass was the germinal figure of the abolitionist movement.
And abolitionthe abolitionist movement is important for us today,
because it continueswell, it has its contemporary presence in what
we call the twenty-first century abolitionist movement, which
attempts to, first of all, of course, abolish the death penaltyand
I'm thinking of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is such an important figure in
that abolitionist movementand to abolish the prison-industrial
complex. We see the effort to abolish imprisonment as the dominant
mode of punishment and to shift resources from punishment to
education, to housing, etc., in a way that is very similar to what
Frederick Douglass might have argued with respect to the abolition of
slavery. And, of course, here, we also have to mention W.E.B. DuBois,
who called forwhose notion of abolition democracy is very much an
inspiration for those of us who are struggling to abolish the
prison-industrial complex today.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, and then we're going to come back.
Angela Davis is our guest. Professor Davis is now teaching at
Syracuse University. She is professor emerita of University of
California, Santa Cruz. She is an author and activist. Her latest
book is the release of a critical edition of the Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.
This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, yes, Ma Rainey, here on Democracy Now!, certainly
ties in to an earlier book of Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey met Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
In fact, if we can be a little stream of consciousness here, Angela
Davis, our guest for the hour, how would you tie in Ma Rainey with
the resistance movement that we're talking about today?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I think that the blues women, blues men, but
especially blues women, gave expression to a whole range of social
issues from the vantage point of working-class black women. And I
came to study women and the blues because I was dissatisfied with
what was available in the written archives regarding the history of
black women's feminist approaches. So I made an argument in that book
that many of the issues that we claim as feminist issuesviolence
against women, for example, the relationship between intimate
violence and institutional violencecould be discovered in the lyrics
of the blues, in the work of Ma Rainey and, of course, Bessie Smith
and Victoria Spivey and many others.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Davis, we've just gotten a Facebook question.
Folks going to facebook.com/democracynow. Daniel Chard writes, "In
your book Abolition Democracy, you briefly discuss the US prison
system as a form of state terrorism. In what ways do prisons function
as a form of terrorism?"
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, prisons create the assumption that those who are
a threat to our safety and security are behind bars, but in
actuality, the techniques of violence, the techniques of terror that
are most dangerous, are the ones used within the system itself. And I
would say that it's not simply a question of racist repression. It's
also a question of gender repression. It's also a question of
repression of sexualities. You know, one of theas I've been pointing
out, one of the most interesting developments within the anti-prison
movement looks at the way in which the prison itself serves as a
gendering apparatus, looks at the violence inflicted on people who do
not identify as male or female in the conventional sense, who
identify as transgender or as gender-nonconforming, the violence that
is inflicted on people who do not subscribe to compulsory
heterosexuality, violence against lesbians, violence against gay men,
so that you might say that the prison is this institution that is
grounded, in so many ways, in violence.
And the violence of slavery, which we assume was abolished with the
Thirteenth Amendment and afterwards, is very much at work within US
prison institutions. And because the prison has been marketed on the
global capitalist circuit, we discover these prisons, the US-style
prisons now, all over the world, in the Global North as well as the
Global South.
AMY GOODMAN: How would you like to see them changed? You're a founder
of the Critical Resistance movement in this country. You talk about
the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. What would you want
to see in this country?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I would like to see, as Fay Honey Knopp, who was
an abolitionist during the '70s and the '80s and one of the
co-authors of a wonderful book called Instead of Prisons: An
Abolitionist Handbook, you know, I would like to see an emphasis on
decarceration, an emphasis on ex-carceration. You know, I would like
to see us examine the ways in which the criminalization of certain
behaviors, such as drug use and drug trafficking, has allowed the
prison system to expand the way that it has. The vast majority of
women who are behind bars are in prison in relation to a drug charge.
I would like to see us decriminalize drug use, for example. I would
like to see us engage in a national conversation on true alternatives
to incarceration. I'm not speaking about house arrest and probation
and parole and so forth. I'm talking about ways of addressing social
problems that are entirely disconnected from law enforcement.
And that would mean an emphasis on education. As Frederick Douglass
pointed out, education is indeed the way to liberation. Frederick
Douglass taught himself how to read and write, because he recognized
that there could be no liberation without education. Now there seems
to be a greater emphasis on incarceration than education. So we have
to say, "Education, not incarceration." And then, of course,
healthcare, physical healthcare, mental healthcare. And, you know,
even though we should be happy that some kind of healthcare bill was
passed, but it doesn't even begin to address the real problems that
people have in this country. Mental healthcare, the prison system
serves as a receptacle for those who are unable to findpoor people
who are unable to find treatment for mental and emotional disorders.
So, in a sense, you might say that the abolitionist movement, the
prison abolitionist movement, is a movement for a better world, for a
different society, for a world that doesn't need to depend on
prisons, because the kinds of institutions that providethat serve
people's needs will be available.
And in this sense, we have to return to the notion of abolition
democracy. There were those who were struggling to simply get rid of
freedomsorry, there those who were struggling to simply get rid of
prisons and assuming that freedom would be the negation of slavery.
There were those who were struggling to simply get rid of slavery,
assuming that freedom would be the negation of slavery. But there
were those who recognized that there could be no freedom without
economic equality, without political equality, without educational
institutions. And even though we are under the impression that we
abolished slavery, we're still living with those vestiges, the lack
of an educational system that serves all people regardless of their
economic background, the lack of a healthcare system, the lack of
access to housing. And this is in large part the role that the prison
has played. It has become a receptacle for those who have not been
able to find a place in society. And this is true not only in the US,
but literally all over the world. This is why we are experiencing an
expansion of the prison system in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in
Latin America. And this is very much connected to the rise in global
capitalism. So, prison abolition is about building a new world.
AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I wanted to ask you about building a new
world and ask you about your thoughts on the eve of the election of
President Obama, what you were thinking, the hopes you had at the
time, and now, two years later, where we stand today. I mean,
November 4th, 2008, this remarkable moment, an African American man
elected in a land with the legacy of slavery, you know, the land of
Frederick Douglass. Where we came from then and where we are today,
Professor Davis?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, of course, initially, few people believed that a
figure like Barack Obama could ever be elected to the presidency of
the United States, and because there were those who persisted, and,
you know, largely young people, who helped to build this movement to
elect Barack Obama, making use of all of the new technologies of
communication. And so, on that day, November 4th, 2008, when Obama
was elected, this was a world historical event. People celebrated
literally all over the worldin Africa, in Europe, in Asia, in South
America, in the Caribbean, in the US. I was in Oakland, and there was
literally dancing in the street. I didn'tI don't remember any other
moment that can compare to that collective euphoria that gripped
people all over the world.
Now, here we are two years later, and many people are treating this
as if it were business as usual. As a matter of fact, many people are
dissatisfied with the Obama administration, because they fail to
fulfill all of our dreams. And, you know, one of the points that I
frequently make is that we have to beware of our tendency here in
this country to look for messiahs and to project our own possible
potential power on to others. What really disturbs me is that we have
failed. Well, of course, I'm dissatisfied with many of the things
that Obama has done. The war in Afghanistan needs to end right now.
The healthcare bill could have been much stronger than it turned out
to be. There are many issues about which we can be critical of Obama,
but at the same time, I think we need to be critical of ourselves for
not generating the kind of mass pressure to compel the Obama
administration to move in a more progressive direction, remembering
that the election was, in large part, primarily the result of just
such a mass movement that was created by ordinary people all over the country.
AMY GOODMAN: That issue of movements versus a person, that certainly
brings us back to Frederick Douglass, while such a significant person
within the abolitionist movement, needing that movement to change
America, and where you see movements today and also the power of
money. We're just about to come into another election day, midterm
elections, with money drowning politics now, unleashed throughout the
United States. Also the money and the power of the prison lobby in
this country, how prisons stay not because of the logic of prisons
necessarily, but because now they are big business, and the
privatization of prisons. Can you talk about how movements are
affected by money and the power of the corporation today, how you
think movements can take on this corporate money?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, of course, it is far more difficult than it has
ever been to engage in and move successfully in the direction of
progressive change, and this has to do with the fact that capitalism
has really consolidated its influence on so many levels, and as you
pointed out, privatization, not only privatization of prisons, but
privatization of educations. I think of, you know, Looking for
Superman and the move away from struggling for a public education
system, which is what we need, that will satisfy the needs of all the
people. So, privatization, corporatization, global capitalism, but
again, I don't think that we can assume that we are entirely
powerless if we have no access to that money.
AMY GOODMAN: We have fifteen seconds.
ANGELA DAVIS: Again, I would return to the election of Barack Obama.
Barack Obama was elected despite that kind of a lobby, despite the
power of money. And so, we have to continue the campaign for a better
world, drawing upon all of our resources.
AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I want to thank you very much for being
with us. We didn't have enough time. You can go to our website at
democracynow.org.
ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you very much, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
.
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