Quotessence
Home / Books / Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

Book by Angela Y. Davis · 18 quotes · Antiracism, Abolition, Feminism

Filter quotes by topic

AllAntiracismAbolitionFeminismActivismEssentialismPrison AbolitionPrison Industrial ComplexAssimilationBlack Freedom MovementBlack LiberationBlack Panther PartyCivil Rights MovementFergusonGenderMass IncarcerationTerfAmerican IndiansAusterityBlack FeminismBlack Liberation Movement

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement Quotes

“The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results. And it shows us that we not only should not try to assimilate trans women into a category that remains the same, but that the category itself has to change so it does not simply reflect normative ideas of who counts as women and who doesn’t.”

FeminismGenderAssimilationEssentialismTerf
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“Many of us then thought that what we needed to do was to expand the category “women” so that it could embrace Black women, Latina women, Native American women, and so forth. We thought that by doing that we would have effectively addressed the problem of the exclusivity of the category. What we didn’t realize then was that we would have to rewrite the whole category, rather than simply assimilate more women in to an unchanged category of what counts as “women.”

FeminismTransformationGenderAssimilationEssentialism
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“In the United States we are at such a disadvantage because we do not know how to talk about the genocide inflicted on indigenous people. We do not know how to talk about slavery. Otherwise it would not have been assumed that simply because of the election of one Black man to the presidency we would leap forward into a postracial era. We do not acknowledge that we all live on colonized land. And in the meantime, Native Americans live in impoverished conditions on reservations. They have an extremely high incarceration rate—as a matter of fact, per capita the highest incarceration rate—and they suffer disproportionately from such diseases as alcoholism and diabetes. In the meantime, sports teams still mock indigenous people with racially derogatory names, like the Washington Redskins. We do not know how to talk about slavery, except, perhaps, within a framework of victim and victimizer, one that continues to polarize and implicate.”

HistoryUs HistoryReparationsNative AmericansAmerican IndiansRevisionist HistoryWhitewashingNative Mascots
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“... all over the world the institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems... prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state's inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.”

PalestinePrison Industrial ComplexBlack Liberation
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners. Therefore if, and this is one of the problems with all of the reform movements, if you think of the prisoners simply as the objects of the charity of others, you defeat the very purpose of antiprison work. You are constituting them as an inferior in the process of trying to defend their rights.”

Prison Abolition
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors. Just send them to prison. Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence.”

AbolitionMass IncarcerationPrison Industrial ComplexPrison AbolitionCarceral State
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“The Black Power movement—or what we referred to at the time as the Black liberation movement...was a response to what were perceived as limitations of the civil rights movement: we not only needed to claim legal rights within the existing society but also to demand substantive rights—in jobs, housing, health care, education, et cetera.”

Civil Rights MovementAntiracismBlack Liberation MovementBlack Freedom Movement
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“More often than not, universal categories have been clandestinely racialized. Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history, the very category human has not embraced black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.”

RaceSocial JusticeActivismRace And Racism In America
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image

“It is a mistake to assume that all we have to do is guarantee the prosecution of the cop who killed Michael Brown. The major challenge of this period is to infuse a consciousness of the structural character of state violence into the movements that spontaneously arise.”

ActivismAbolitionFergusonAntiracismMichael Brown
Book:Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement
Create image