Analyzing the Speeches of Angela Y. Davis

Racism and Gender Oppression
In the speeches of Angela Y. Davis, black female activist of the 20th century, one sees a remarkable discernment of the underbelly of the U.S.—or what she calls the US Organization.[footnoteRef:1] Her experience growing up as a minority in a world where segregation was accepted by the majority of the population, and the education she received from her parents, helped her to realize that just because society was ordered in a certain way did not mean that that way was necessarily right. This paper will analyze the speeches of Angela Y. Davis and discuss some of the themes that emerge in them so as to better understand the role that minorities have played in the history of the U.S., and how the “organizers” of US society have continuously used underhanded methods to marginalize and oppress these minorities. The perspectives of Alan Gomez, Vijay Prashad and Julia Sudbury will be used to help shed light on these themes. [1: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 196.]
The Rise of the Prison-Industrial Complex according to Davis
Angela Davis describes the rise of the prison-industrial complex as being “accompanied by an ideological campaign to persuade us once again…that race is a marker of criminality.”[footnoteRef:2] In other words, the prison complex is there to herd blacks into a system, whereby they are branded like cattle—marked as being lowlifes, degenerates, trouble makers—and then re-introduced into society among the “civilized” set. Upon re-introduction into society, they are marginalized even more than they were before they were arrested; at which point they are now doubly repulsive to “civilized” society: they are both black and ex-convicts. Thus, the prison complex is there to serve a purpose: it is there to oppress and marginalize a racial minority. Slavery is no longer permitted thanks to the Great Emancipator, but that does not mean the elite rulers of the country had to allow blacks to rise up: no, they just developed a new form of slavery and oppression: the prison-industrial system—and then they began arresting blacks for “crimes” that in any real, civilized society would never have been considered criminal in the first place. [2: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 38.]
This notion is supported by Alan Eladio Gomez, who describes the inmates’ treatment at Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972 as another form of oppression and controlled practiced by the rulers in order to further change and subvert the minorities they wanted to oppress: “Designed to ‘cure’ deviants, the behavior-modification programs at Marion functioned to control and forcefully change inmate behavior, beliefs, and thoughts. Including practices as varied as brainwashing, the use of snitches and rumors, pornography, sensory deprivation, arbitrary beatings and sanctions, and complete physical, emotional, and intellectual isolation, prison authorities implemented such techniques to control, dehumanize, coerce and, as one prisoner described it, ‘legally assassinate’ the rebellious—including writ writers—black Muslims, and suspected militants.”[footnoteRef:3] The descriptive passage is worth quoting in full because it describes the exact nature of the prison system. This was not a place where delinquents were sent to be reformed. It was a place where adversaries of the rulers’ regime where sent in order to be thought-policed and brainwashed into being passive servants in a system designed to support the interests of the rulers. It was like the Gulag in Soviet Russia, where the dissidents were sent—those who dared to criticize Stalin and his repressive and oppressive policies. [3: Alan Gómez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review 96 (2006), 59.]
Racism, Gender Oppression, the Regulation of Sexuality, and Global Capitalism
Davis’s interpretation of the prison-industrial complex and of the order of the U.S. as a whole is filtered through the lens of racism and gender oppression. Linked to these concepts are the regulation of sexuality and the issue of global capitalism—the unregulated pursuit of market dominance, materialistic conquest, and material gain in a zero sum game. She identified all of these things as coming from a “patriarchal structure of the cultural nationalist US Organization” which “left no space for contestation” from women, especially from black women.[footnoteRef:4] Julia Sudbury supports this interpretation, arguing that “we need to challenge the tendency for discussions about the global economy and state violence to lose site of the intimate ways in which gender and sexuality are inscribed in macro-level processes of exploitation and violence….”[footnoteRef:5] In short, gender oppression and the regulation of sexuality are ways of control that the rulers of the US Organization, as Davis calls it, use to corral and herd the masses. They are part of the same system of tactics used by rulers in which racism and capitalism are wielded to drive people apart, to drive people against each other, to pit blacks against whites and whites against blacks; to pit the poor against the wealthy and the wealthy against the poor. The aim is simple: to divide and conquer. Davis’s response is to resist division and to organize: to promote solidarity and harmony in the face of this aggression. [4: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 196.] [5: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and 
Empire,” Social Justice 31.2 (2004), 10.]
Prison Expansion and Race as a Marker of Criminality
Race as a marker of criminality was only made possible thanks to the expansion of the prison-industrial complex. Being black could not be associated with being a criminal until there were actually enough prisons to house all the blacks that the US Organization wanted to arrest. By arresting entire generations and communities of black people, the US Organization was essentially identifying being black as being a criminal in the “civilized” world. Davis does not state that there are no young black criminals; on the contrary, she admits that there are—just as there are young white criminals. Her contention is that “the wholesale criminalization of young black men” is unacceptable and unjustifiable.[footnoteRef:6] By taking the individual and making him serve as the representative of the group, the racist doctrine towards blacks is propagated—but that doctrine would not be able to exist in the first place if it was not supported by the facts, i.e., that young blacks were routinely being arrested. Yet, as Davis notes, “it was assumed that people went to prison in order to pay their debts to society, and to learn how to become better citizens.”[footnoteRef:7] That assumption need no longer be held, because the prisons that Davis experienced were inhuman places where inmates were treated like chattel. They were roomed in cells where there were no windows. There was no light, no connection to the outside world, to nature. These were not methods conducive to rehabilitation or to making people better. They were methods conducive to breaking the spirit of a people. These were tactics designed to dehumanize and destroy the black community. [6: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 39.] [7: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 39.]
Thus, the role of prison expansion in the markering of race as a sign of criminality was that the prison was the place where the criminality was impressed upon the mind. The prisoner was made to feel subhuman. The prisoner was beaten into submission and made to think that there was no other option: the black prisoner was nothing to society and should never think of himself as something important or special. The prisons were places where the black minorities were sent in order to be “educated” on their own inhumanity. This was the “lesson” that was taught them. It was the lesson that Vijay Prashad noted was taught to every generation of minorities in the US Organization who opposed the Organization’s ways.[footnoteRef:8] [8: Vijay Prashad, “Second-Hand Dreams,” Social Analysis 49: 2 (Summer 2005), 195.]
The Decision to Become an Activist-Intellectual
Davis states that there is no one moment at which she “became” an activist—and the mere question of being asked when she became an activist causes her to go back into her memories to see if she can identify the point. She first states that she thought that moment came in 1963 following the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing of the Baptist church.[footnoteRef:9] Davis states: “This egregious act of racist violence thus had a profound effect on me…But I later reminded myself that I had been engaged in radical activism long before the 1963 bombing”[footnoteRef:10]—which shows that activism is not something one suddenly starts doing but is rather a process that develops over time. There is no one single start point. Instead, it is part of one’s character and one becomes aware of it being part of one’s life just as one becomes aware of one’s own self over time. It is much the same way that a country develops a sense of itself, a sense of its own issues and problems and how to address them over time. Vijay Prashad describes this development as “civilization-making”—though his depiction of it is rather like the inverse of Davis’s coming to awareness: Prashad’s vision of America is one in which repression and oppression are the norms and every generation of minorities must contend with the tyrannical tactics of the elite ruling class.[footnoteRef:11] [9: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 35.] [10: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 36.] [11: Vijay Prashad, “Second-Hand Dreams,” Social Analysis 49: 2 (Summer 2005), 195.]
Thus, for America, the country had resisted introspection and thus continued to resolve its cognitive dissonance by changing its perception of the reality instead of addressing the reality itself. For Davis, she reflected on her own development and realized that activism for her was never about deciding to take a stand but rather the natural evolution of awareness, of a mind and heart oriented towards the good: for her, there had been a “protracted process of learning how to live with racial segregation without allowing it to fully inhabit my psyche….My parents made sure that all of their children recognized that racial segregation was not a permanent set of relations. They encouraged me and my siblings to be critical of the way things were….”[footnoteRef:12] This encouragement from her parents undoubtedly helped to develop her character and turn her more and more towards activism as she matured. Activism was, in this sense, the natural expression of an awareness that the social order presented by the rulers of the U.S. was not one that ought to be accepted by minorities—and as a critical human being, she had the right, the power, and the ability to challenge that order and that system. She was given, in other words, “a freedom vision,” as Julia Sudbury calls it.[footnoteRef:13] [12: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 36.] [13: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and 
Empire,” Social Justice 31.2 (2004), 9.]
Lessons for Scholars and Activists Seeking Democratic Alternatives to Mass Incarceration
Lessons for scholars and activists who seek democratic alternatives to mass incarceration can be found in Davis’s speech on the need for a new abolitionist movement. In it she states that “when abolitionists raise the possibility of living without prisons, a common reaction is fear—fear provoked by the prospect of criminals pouring out of prisons and returning to communities where they may violently assault people and their property.”[footnoteRef:14] This fear has to be eradicated. One should go about this issue with calmness and equanimity. Then one can arrive at positive and practical solutions—such as the one that Davis suggests: the decarceration of women as a way of beginning the process. Since the majority of women in prison are there for nonviolent offenses, removing them from the criminal justice system and putting them into a program designed to address their actual needs (many of them are involved with drugs or prostitution and thus likely require economic and/or psychological support), would help to reduce the prison-industrial complex. It would allow funds to be redistributed so as to address the needs of males in prison and begin a similar approach of decarceration for men who are jailed for nonviolent crimes. Going about this issue calmly is thus the first step to finding utilitarian solutions. [14: Angela Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012), 29.]
Conclusion
Angela Davis takes a hard, pragmatic look at American society and finds that what is problematic about it is the way that people accept the herd mentality forced upon them by their rulers. The prison system today is no different from the old plantation system during the times of slavery. The ends are the same—to subjugate and exploit the minorities. Racism, gender oppression, capitalism—all of these are tools of the states’ rulers: they use them to marginalize, oppress and divide—to keep the community from actually becoming a community, because if it did it might actually then stand up and take back ownership for itself. Analysis of Davis’s speeches, supported by the perspectives of other writers like Alan Gomez, Vijay Prashad and Julia Sudbury helps to show that the reality of oppression in the U.S. is one that has to be confronted by everyone—not just minorities—because we are all in this together.
Bibliography
Davis, Angela. The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2012.
Gomez, Alan. “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review 96 (2006): 58–86.
Prashad, Vijay. “Second-Hand Dreams,” Social Analysis 49: 2 (Summer 2005): 191-198.
Sudbury, Julia. “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and Empire,” Social Justice 31.2 (2004): 9-28.