Angela Davis on the Prison Abolishment Movement,
Frederick Douglass, the 40th Anniversary of Her Arrest
and President Obama's First Two Years
Democracy Now!
October 19, 2010
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/19/angela_davis_on_the_prison_abolishment
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. [includes rush
transcript]
Guest: Angela Davis, professor emerita of history of
consciousness and feminist studies at the University of
California at Santa Cruz and a visiting distinguished
professor at Syracuse University. She is a founder of
the group Critical Resistance, a grassroots effort to
end the prison-industrial complex. She has just edited
a new edition of Frederick Douglass's classic work,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave, Written by Himself (City Lights). She
will be appearing with the author Toni Morrison at the
New York Public Library on Oct. 27 for an event titled
'Frederick Douglass: Literacy, Libraries, and
Liberation'.
=====================================================
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
to-a 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 that-written 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 try-I 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 the-I 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 were-we 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 prisons-the US has more prisoners than
anywhere in the world-back 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 way-I want to let our viewers
and listeners know-have 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 York-and a shout-out to
our friends at Ithaca College-and 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 that-perhaps 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 Douglass-what 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 abolitionist-the 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 abolition-the abolitionist movement is important
for us today, because it continues-well, 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 penalty-and I'm
thinking of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is such an important
figure in that abolitionist movement-and 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 for-whose
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 issues-violence against women, for
example, the relationship between intimate violence and
institutional violence-could 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 the-as 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 find-poor
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 provide-that 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 freedom-sorry, 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 world-in 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't-I 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
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