Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

“The soaring numbers of people behind bars all over the world and the increasing profitability of the means of holding them captive is one of the most dramatic examples of the destructive tendencies of global capitalism.”

While Davis focuses on capitalist individualism as a dangerous way of thinking, she also cites mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex as the main symbol in her sharp criticism of global capitalism. To Davis, the exponential rise in the number of people incarcerated in recent decades is a result of a failing, not successful, system, which she attributes to the profit-driven nature of the prison-industrial complex due to capitalism. Davis envisions a future based on abolitionist theories that does not prioritize profits over people.

“I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.”

Davis provides this quotation in response to a question by Frank Barat asking her “is the struggle is endless?” Davis paints a picture of evolving struggles that take on new forms or come up in different parts of the world. However, her message remains consistent throughout: We must be prepared to continue fighting for freedom. She invokes one of the world’s best-known and most respected activists, Nelson Mandela, to inspire her audience to be willing to engage in a constant struggle.

“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.”

Davis provides this statement in the context of a discussion on abolition of the death penalty. As she does throughout the book, Davis uses an optimistic tone. This is because she recognizes the difficult nature of achieving a future that involves goals like the end of the death penalty in the United States or prison abolition. She hopes to remind readers that the struggle must continue even when things seem impossible to achieve.

“What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle survived. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”

This is a powerful statement by Davis in response to Frank Barat’s interview question asking her what keeps her going after decades of activism. It provides insight into Davis’s personal sources of inspiration and highlights her emphasis on the power of the collective and community. Her answer is one of many ways in which Davis hopes to inspire readers to take part in activist and freedom struggles and remain optimistic even in the face of challenging battles for freedom.

“Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.” 

This quotation explains racism as a foundation for many modern-day issues. Davis emphasizes throughout the book the need to look at structural racism. By recognizing the deep roots of racism within complex institutions, we can recognize how it feeds many social problems. The prison-industrial complex in particular developed out of racism, too, just like the institution of slavery, and Davis notes this by pointing to the high number of police killings and Black individuals incarcerated in the US today.

“They say that freedom is a constant struggle. / They say that freedom is a constant struggle. / They say that freedom is a constant struggle. / O Lord, we’ve struggled so long. / We must be free, we must be free.”

This is a freedom song used during the 20th-century freedom movement that Davis alludes to in Essay 5. It conveys the reality of a long, never-ending struggle for freedom. She highlights the irony of how the song says “we must be free” because the struggle has been so long, “[b]ut are we really free?” Davis rhetorically asks (62). Davis does not believe so and spends the entirety of the collection hoping to inspire action among readers and to remind them that the struggle continues and has been ongoing over centuries.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

This is one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous quotes, and Davis invokes it to solidify her argument that struggles are interconnected and therefore we need global solidarity. Davis uses this quote by arguing we have a personal stake in other struggles that may seem wholly unrelated to our own struggles. By doing so, she demonstrates that we must support and provide solidarity to others globally in their fight against oppression in order to truly be free ourselves.

“Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators, but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.”

This passage shows the true impact of collective effort in effecting change. Davis references multiple historical figures, past and present, who have been given the spotlight with respect to particular key historical events. Davis instead offers an alternative viewing and challenges the overemphasis on single individuals. For example, she challenges the manner of depicting the abolition of slavery with a narrative that focuses on Lincoln as the person who freed slaves. She does this to demonstrate the power each person has to be a part of a collective movement for freedom.

“And so we see this dialectical development of the Black liberation movement. There is this freedom movement and then there is an attempted to narrow the freedom movement that it fits into a much smaller frame, the frame of civil rights is not immensely important, but freedom is more expansive than civil rights.”

This quote is part of Davis’s criticism of historical closures that place movements in the past as having been concluded. Freedom encompasses more than civil rights. Applying a narrower framework to the freedom movement creates a perception that the struggle is already over. By analyzing dialectical narratives, Davis challenges this perception by noting freedom has yet to be won.

“I think about the violence of my own youth in Birmingham, Alabama, where bombs were planted repeatedly and houses were destroyed and churches were destroyed and lives were destroyed, and we have yet to refer to those acts as the acts of terrorists. Terrorism, which is represented as external, as outside, is very much a domestic phenomenon. Terrorism very much shaped the history of the United States of America.”

Davis brings in personal anecdotes of her own experience witnessing terrorism by racist groups growing up. She juxtaposes this experience with how the terrorism label is used today. In doing so, she highlights the irony in the idea that terrorism is something external or foreign despite the reality of a long history of domestic terrorism in the United States.

“Acknowledging continuities between nineteenth-century antislavery struggles, twentieth-century civil rights struggles, twenty-first century abolitionist struggles—and when I say abolitionist struggles I’m referring primarily to the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment, the abolition of the prison-industrial complex—acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.”

This quote reflects a central theme, that of continuities of struggles. Davis repeatedly highlights connections between past and present movements to show they are part of one continuous, ongoing struggle. We cannot isolate movements as if they are unrelated. Instead, she notes the similarities between the goals of abolitionist movement of the 19th century and today’s abolition movement against the prison-industrial complex.

“This use of the war on terror as a broad designation of the project of twenty-first century Western democracy has served as a justification of anti-Muslim racism; it has further legitimized the Israeli occupation of Palestine; it has redefined the repression of immigrants; and has indirectly led to the militarization of local police departments throughout the country.”

Davis brings her analysis into a modern-day context by looking at how the “war on terror” following September 11, 2001, led to terrorism acquiring a broad definition. Under this broad definition, there was an increased use of the label of terror on Muslims and immigrants, but also an increased use of violence as part of “counterterrorism.” Davis especially notes the militarization of the police in the United States as a direct result of this broader terrorist label, under which activists fighting against racist violence are often included.

“Our understandings of and resistance to contemporary modes of racist violence should thus be sufficiently capacious to acknowledge the embeddedness of historical violence¾of settler colonial violence against Native Americans and of the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans. Our work today is evidence of the unfinished status of planetary struggles for equality, justice, and freedom.”

Throughout the book, Davis attempts to draw a line that connects historical violence, particularly genocide against Indigenous peoples and slavery against Africans, to present-day violence. By making this continuous line, Davis hopes we can see the persistence of racist violence and the deeply entrenched nature of structural racism, albeit in new forms, such as the prison-industrial complex.

“When you were urged to go home and go back to business as usual, you said no and in the process you made Ferguson a worldwide symbol of resistance. At a time when we are urged to settle for fast solutions, easy answers, formulaic resolutions, Ferguson protestors said no. You were determined to continue to make the issues of violence against the Black communities visible. You refused to believe that there were any simplistic answers and you demonstrated that you would not allow the issue to be buried in the graveyard that has not only claimed Black lives but also so many struggles to defend those lives.”

Ferguson is a repeated example throughout the book Davis uses to support her arguments and central themes. She praises the movement for exemplifying what she believes movements for freedom should strive for based on lessons learned from the past. For this reason, Ferguson acts as a symbol of global resistance to structural racism and violence. By highlighting Ferguson protestors’ refusal to give up, Davis demonstrates the collective power seen in Ferguson to push for bigger changes. Ferguson also modeled how movements can push for systemic change and challenge closures by refusing to be relegated into the past or accepting easy solutions.

“Finally we see a movement that values radical Black women, that values radical Black queer women. When Black women stand up¾as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.”

Davis advocates for movements to follow feminist methodologies, particularly Black and women-of-color feminisms, that center around intersectionality. She provides this statement as part of her praise of modern movements like Ferguson and younger generations that have finally begun valuing the role of Black women and Black queer women in radical movements.

“The call for public conversations on race and racism is also a call to develop vocabulary that permits us to have insightful conversations. If we attempt to use historically obsolete vocabularies, our consciousness of racism will remain shallow and we can be easily urged to assume that, for example, changes in the law spontaneously produce effective changes in the social world.”

One practice that Davis argues is an essential part of any movement is developing proper language and methods to have conversations about concepts like race and racism. This means enriching our vocabularies to eliminate use of outdated terms and language that fail to advance understandings of these concepts. She warns that if we do not, society’s understanding will be superficial, leading to misguided assumptions that certain freedom struggles have reached a conclusion or that, for example, the abolition of slavery meant the end of cultural or economic slavery.

“Perhaps most important of all, and this is so central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as ‘normal.’” 

This is part of Davis’s argument that feminist theories involve challenging what has historically been considered “normal” or universal. Davis extends this argument to prisons and the concept of gender as binary. By rejecting what is seen as normal, we can incorporate groups that have historically been excluded, such as trans individuals, as part of the struggle for freedom. This practice is also key to achieving prison abolition.

“Feminism must involve so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.”

Davis endorses a version of feminism that goes beyond gender equality and gender topics, categories that feminism is traditionally associated with. Instead, Davis argues for a broader feminism that considers intersectionality of struggles, which involves other issues like capitalism. It is through this perspective that activists can expand and strengthen their analysis, and therefore their strategy.

“There is a feminist philosophical dimension of abolitionist theories and practices. The personal is political. There is a deep relationality that links struggles against institutions and struggles to reinvent our personal lives and recraft ourselves. We know, for example, that we replicate the structures of retributive justice oftentimes in our own emotional responses. [...] The political reproduces itself through the personal.”

This quotation references a famous feminist slogan, “the personal is political,” which Davis uses to demonstrate the links between our personal lives and political struggles. As part of advocating for an abolitionist way of thinking, Davis challenges readers to think about how we reproduce concepts of punishment and retribution that we see within institutions in our personal thinking.

“[T]he trouble with history can also be seen in the way in which our current mass actions are often subjected to a media process, a mediated process of becoming stale news. So that something that happened as recently as a year ago¾the Occupy movement¾gets pushed to the back of our historical memory.”

Davis comments on the challenge for today’s movements in dealing with the media, in which things easily garner national attention briefly then just as easily become old news and, in a way, placed into the past. Davis identifies this modern-day challenge as a barrier to momentum. She asks us to challenge this process by asking us to not forget movements just because they are no longer talked about, such as the Occupy movement, which created the space to discuss capitalism. Movements becoming stale news does not mean they have accomplished their goals.

“And it seems to me that the Black freedom struggle gets extended in many ways in the twenty-first century, and those of us who identify with the struggles of Black people for freedom in the United States of America should clearly identify with our Palestinian sisters and brothers today.”

One of the most important points Davis makes is that we should move beyond the struggles that we personally identify with. This is why she believes the Black radical tradition and freedom struggle encompass other struggles for freedom, including ones that Black individuals may not immediately identify with, such as the Palestinian freedom struggle. Going beyond identities and adopting a stance of intersectionality that includes the intersectionality between struggles allows us to develop a deeper understanding of our own struggles, too.

“Often people ask me how I would like to be remembered. My response is that I really am not concerned about ways in which people might remember me personally. What I do want people to remember is the fact that the movement around the demand for my freedom was victorious. It was a victory against insurmountable odds, even though I was innocent; the assumption was that the power of those forces in the US was so strong that I would either end up in the gas chamber or that I would spend the rest of my life behind bars.”

Davis references a personal anecdote relating to the successful global campaign for her freedom when she was in jail in the 1970s. She demonstrates personally how we can change our way of thinking in individual terms by placing herself as an individual who is part of a larger, collective movement rather than wanting to be seen a single, heroic individual. She additionally brings attention to the type of collective power she advocates for and that was the reason for her own freedom from jail. She creates a depiction of collective effort as extremely powerful by emphasizing that her freedom campaign was not only a victory, but also one that was seemingly impossible or very unlikely.

“Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”

Davis makes this statement in context of her discussion of the history of violence in the United States, starting from genocide and colonization against Indigenous peoples. The experiences of Native Americans centuries ago must be recognized and acknowledged to fully understand the story of other struggles, particularly that of Black individuals in the United States. Davis believes that in the stories of others, we will find connections to our own that help us create solidarity with others.