Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

Davis adopts an inspirational tone in her speeches in Essays 5 and 7 as they not only are meant to inform and persuade like prior essays, but also are a call for action to her audiences. Essay 6 brings a modern-day context to her key arguments. Throughout these pieces, Davis is critical of society’s collective understanding of past movements and “closures” that serve as barriers to movements, and she relies heavily on juxtaposition and highlighting irony to support her arguments throughout these three sections. While these essays do refer to prior themes, such as intersectionality, they also heavily discuss the theme of continuities, not closures, by analyzing the role of language and historical narratives in different contexts.

In Essay 5, Davis turns history on its head by challenging the common narrative used to refer to historical movements, particularly the civil rights movement. Her argument encourages her audience to ponder their own memories of what they have learned about history. She draws particular attention to the word “freedom,” which is not equivalent to the term “civil rights” although the two terms are often used interchangeably. Davis makes a purposeful decision to say, “Black freedom movement,” or sometimes “Black liberation movement,” because using “civil rights’’ allows the movement to become a closure, filed away into the past as completed. She is deeply critical of superficial understandings or actions, such as naming streets after Martin Luther King Jr. that only serve to deflect from unresolved social problems. She juxtaposes the 900-plus streets named after King with the approximately 2.5 million people in various jails, prisons, and youth facilities in the United States, painting a stark contrasting picture.

Davis would likely comment similarly on cultural symbols or gestures that emerged during the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was killed in summer 2020, including streets painted with “Black Lives Matter” or the renaming of a street as “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” In fact, the Black Lives Matter DC Twitter account did criticize such actions as empty, distracting gestures, in a manner reminiscent of Davis’s argument. Without dismissing the significance of achieving civil rights or even renaming streets after MLK, Davis hopes to inform readers about the true expansive nature of freedom, which, as the title of the book reminds readers, is a constant struggle. To her, the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program exemplifies what freedom should strive for, and she notes key goals of the program as the same ones that remain unachieved since the 19th century. Thus, Davis creates a picture for her audience of a counter depiction of this country’s history, one that reveals a direct line from the oppression in the past to present-day suffering. Doing so provides support for her repeated argument that we must draw connections through an exercise of intersectionality to understand what must be done to achieve freedom. It is through her urging for continuities, not closures, that Davis recalls the overarching themes of recognizing collective efforts over individual ones and making connections between struggles through intersectionality.

In Essays 5 and 6, Davis continues her discussion and analysis of the impact of language by looking at the word “terror.” Essay 6 is the only published essay in the book focusing almost exclusively on the concept of terrorism and serves as a commentary on racist state violence within the context of ongoing national conversation following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. Davis also incorporates more personal anecdotes, which serve as a method of persuasion by reminding readers of what she herself lived through. Davis uses her own experiences being placed on the FBI wanted list and witnessing terrorism by racist groups in her Birmingham neighborhood as evidence of the skewed application of the terrorist label, juxtaposing this terrorism she and Black families experienced with her and Assata Shakur’s being labeled as terrorists themselves.

Through these personal experiences, Davis also highlights the irony of terrorist labels applied to those viewed as external or foreign when the long history of domestic terrorism in the United States is overlooked. Terrorism and racist violence are at the roots of this country’s history, from genocide to colonization to slavery to police killings. Davis similarly reminds her audience in Essay 7 that the roots of racist and state violence began with genocide and colonization against Indigenous peoples of America. She continually models how to think through an intersectional lens by connecting the past to the ongoing work in the present, an approach she argues is crucial to understanding the struggle for freedom as a continuous one.

Davis also notes how any expansive freedom effort or agenda throughout history is erased with the history that we are commonly taught and barriers placed in front of movements. Davis strives to demonstrate in her analysis that dialectical labels or descriptions are just examples of ways institutions impede progress by trying to stop movements from continuing or by placing movements in the past. She weaves a connecting line by drawing similarities between several examples. The FBI’s placement of Assata Shakur on the terrorists list was notably done in 2013 amid a growing Black Lives Matter movement. Davis characterizes it as a calculated move, discouraging others from fighting for freedom by indirectly applying the terrorism label to present-day activists. Davis sees this as essentially another attempt to enact a historical closure. Her argument is similar to her analysis of the dialectical watering down of the Black freedom movement of the 20th century in the official narrative or her criticism of the rare inclusion in historical education of the Radical Reconstruction era or the Black Panther Party. Her argument reveals the insidious nature of how our collective understanding is misguided or discouraged away from fighting for aspects of a broader movement for freedom that remain unachieved since the abolition of slavery.

Thus, her main purpose in rejecting any attempt to enact closures is also to urge her readers to continue to fight against oppression anywhere and everywhere. Essay 7 deepens her analysis by offering insight into how we can counteract this language by learning how to talk about race and enriching our vocabularies to combat closures and ensure continuities of movements. Davis emphasizes the solution to the language issues lies in the teachings of Black feminism. Returning to the theme of Black feminism’s intersectionality lens, Davis asks readers to look to Black feminism to propose abolitionist goals, teach us to make necessary connections between struggles, and reject universal slogans like “All Lives Matter” that only serve to entrench the status quo. She particularly highlights the role of Black women in building movements, citing Ferguson as a symbol for resistance and the impact of the protests as finally recognizing the leadership of women. An example is seen with the relatively recent founding of the Black Lives Matter movement led by Black women.