Angela Davis on Racism, Prison, and Gender Oppression

Introduction

In the speeches of Angela Y. Davis, Black female activist of the twentieth century, one sees a remarkable discernment of the underbelly of the United States — or what she calls the US Organization. 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 analyzes the speeches of Angela Y. Davis and discusses some of the themes that emerge in them, so as to better understand the role that minorities have played in the history of the United States, 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 are used to help shed light on these themes.

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."² In other words, the prison complex is there to herd Black Americans into a system whereby they are branded like cattle — marked as being lowlifes, degenerates, troublemakers — and then re-introduced into society among the "civilized" set. Upon re-introduction into society, they are marginalized even more than they were before their arrest; at which point they are now doubly repulsive to "civilized" society: they are both Black and ex-convicts. Thus, the prison complex serves a purpose: it is there to oppress and marginalize a racial minority. Slavery is no longer permitted thanks to emancipation, but that does not mean the elite rulers of the country had to allow Black Americans to rise up. Instead, they developed a new form of slavery and oppression — the prison-industrial system — and then began arresting Black people for "crimes" that in any genuinely civilized society would never have been considered criminal in the first place.

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 control practiced by the rulers in order to further subjugate 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."³ This descriptive passage is worth quoting in full because it captures 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 were sent in order to be thought-policed and brainwashed into passive servitude within a system designed to support the interests of the powerful. It resembled the Gulag in Soviet Russia, where dissidents who dared to criticize Stalin and his repressive policies were sent.

Racism, Gender Oppression, the Regulation of Sexuality, and Global Capitalism

Davis's interpretation of the prison-industrial complex and of the order of the United States 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 as coming from a "patriarchal structure of the cultural nationalist US Organization" which "left no space for contestation" from women, especially from Black women.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 sight of the intimate ways in which gender and sexuality are inscribed in macro-level processes of exploitation and violence…."⁵

In short, gender oppression and the regulation of sexuality are tools of control that the rulers of the US Organization use to corral and herd the masses. They are part of the same system of tactics — alongside racism and capitalism — that rulers wield to drive people apart, to pit Black Americans against white Americans and vice versa, and to set 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.

Conclusion

Angela Davis takes a hard, pragmatic look at American society and finds that what is most problematic is the way 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 era of slavery — the ends are the same: to subjugate and exploit minorities. Racism, gender oppression, capitalism — all of these are tools of the state's rulers, wielded to marginalize, oppress, and divide, and to keep communities from genuinely becoming communities, because a unified community might actually stand up and reclaim ownership of itself. Analysis of Davis's speeches, supported by the perspectives of Alan Gomez, Vijay Prashad, and Julia Sudbury, helps to demonstrate that the reality of oppression in the United States is one that must be confronted by everyone — not just minorities — because, as Davis makes clear, 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, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 191–198.

Sudbury, Julia. "A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and Empire." Social Justice 31.2 (2004): 9–28.