Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 6. Juni 2008
Alternative Radio
Angela Davis
Rassismus damals und heute
University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 17 April 2007
Angela Davis ist eine
Ikone, eine Symbolfigur. 1972 wurde sie in einem Aufsehen erregenden
Prozess wegen Staatsfeindlichkeit verurteilt. Die weltbekannte
Wissenschaftlerin ist Verfasserin zahlreicher Bücher u.a. von
„Women, Culture and Politics“, „Blues
Legacies and Black Feminism“ und „Abolition
Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture“. Ronald
Reagan, damals noch Gouverneur von Kalifornien, schwor nach ihrer
Entlassung von der Universität von Los Angeles, dass er
dafür sorgen würde, dass Angela Davis nie mehr an
einer staatlichen Bildungseinrichtung unterrichten wird. Heute hat sie
einen Lehrstuhl an der University of California in Santa Cruz.
Zuerst möchte ich den Angehörigen und Freunden der
Opfer der Schießerei auf dem Campus der Virginia Tech
University mein tiefes Mitgefühl aussprechen. Dieses traurige
Ereignis zeigt, wie sehr Gewalt zu einer geradezu normalen
Ausdrucksform emotionaler Probleme geworden ist. Ich
befürchte, dass diese Tragödie dazu benutzt werden
wird, den Bürgern noch mehr Angst zu machen, nur um die
Sicherheitsmaßnahmen zu verschärfen und einen
Überwachungsstaat aufzubauen. Weil wir uns vor Terroristen
fürchten, willigen wir in einen weltweiten Krieg gegen den
Terror ein. Als man sich vor Kommunisten wie mir fürchtete,
bescherte uns das den Kalten Krieg, die McCarthy-Hysterie und den
Vietnamkrieg, den die Vietnamesen den „amerikanischen
Krieg“ nennen. Weil wir uns vor Verbrechen fürchten,
gibt es immer mehr Gefängnisse und immer mehr Todesurteile.
Warum fürchten wir uns vor Terrorismus, aber nicht vor
Rassismus, Sexismus oder Hass? Warum fürchten wir uns nicht
vor einem Präsidenten der uns im 21. Jahrhundert in ein
amerikanisches Imperium treiben will, warum nicht vor der
Verstümmelung unserer Demokratie oder vor der Privatisierung?
Dabei gäbe es viel zu sagen über die Privatisierung
der sozialen Aufgaben und des Krieges und über das, was Naomi
Klein den „Katastrophen-Kapitalismus“ nennt. Nach
dem Hurrikan Katrina machte ich noch Witze, dass Haliburton bald in New
Orleans auftauchen würde – und schon waren sie da!
Doch mein Thema heute sind die Bürgerrechte, die
Menschenrechte und der anhaltende Kampf für gleiches Recht
für alle in den USA und den sich daraus ergebenden
internationalen Konsequenzen.
Wenn Politiker und eine Mehrheit der Richter des Supreme Courts heute
fordern, dass man angesichts der bestehenden Rassengleichheit den Bonus
für Minderheiten, (affirmative action) abschaffen soll,
erscheint es mir umso wichtiger, darüber nachzudenken, was
gleiche Rechte für alle bedeutet. Nur Farbenblinde
können den allgegenwärtigen Rassismus
übersehen. Der Rassismus von heute unterscheidet sich von dem,
den die Bürgerrechtsbewegung bekämpfte. Heute
versteckt er sich hinter dem Krieg gegen den Terror und dem Irakkrieg.
Außer über die Schießerei in Virginia
berichteten die Medien auch kurz über den Irak. Fünf
Soldaten sollen dort getötet worden sein. Ob es sich um einen
oder um100 Tote handelt, es sind immer menschliche Tragödien.
Warum aber hören wir nie etwas über die irakischen
Toten? Es gibt Schätzungen von 500 000 bis 700 000 irakischen
Opfern, einige sprechen sogar von 1 Million. Das zeigt, wie rassistisch
wir sind, denn. Rassismus manifestiert sich nicht nur in
Rassendiskriminierung, Rassismus spielt auch eine wichtige Rolle bei
der Frage, wen der Staat bestraft und wen nicht. An jedem beliebigen
Tag eines Jahres sind in den USA 2,2 Millionen Menschen eingesperrt -
in Landesstrafanstalten, Staatsgefängnissen, Arrestzellen in
Reservaten, Militärgefängissen und staatlichen
Abschiebelagern. Das bedeutet, dass im Laufes eines Jahres
über 13 Millionen Menschen erfahren, was es heißt,
eingesperrt zu sein. Das sind 13 Millionen Menschen ohne Rechte, ohne
Freiheiten, ohne Wahlrecht, ohne Bürgerrechte.
- 2 -
In Florida will sich Gouverneur Crist jetzt für das Wahlrecht
für Strafgefangene einsetzen. Warum wohl hat man das nicht in
schon vor den Wahlen im Jahr 2000 gemacht? 950 000
Gefängnisinsassen hatten damals kein Stimmrecht. Und das nur,
weil sonst der heutige Präsident die Wahlen verloren
hätte, Gewonnen hat er sie ja sowieso nicht. Warum lassen wir
zu, dass Gefangene kein Wahlrecht haben und von politischen
Entscheidungsprozessen ausgeschlossen bleiben? In anderen
Ländern stellt man in Gefängnissen Wahlurnen auf. Es
gab Zeiten, als auch Studenten nicht auf dem
Universitätsgelände, sondern ausschließlich
in ihren weit entfernten Heimatgemeinden wählen durften. Ist
das nicht eine interessante Parallele zwischen Universitäten
und Gefängnissen? Haben Gefangene keine Bürgerrechte,
nur damit wir sehen, wie frei wir sind? Wir leben also in einem Land,
das sich durch Gefängnisse definiert. Ist Ihnen schon einmal
aufgefallen, wie oft das Wort „Gefängnis“
in unserem Alltag, im Fernsehen, in Filmen und Illustrierten auftaucht?
Und deshalb glauben wir, dass wir darüber informiert sind, was
in diesen Anstalten vor sich geht und wir uns nicht weiter darum
kümmern müssen. Es gibt Kriminologen und
Strafrechtler, aber gibt es auch eine kritische
Gefängnis-Forschung? Ich fordere die völlige
Abschaffung von Gefängnissen. Denn auch kritische Studien
bergen die Gefahr, dass man sich mit seinem Studienobjekt identifiziert
und Bürgerrechte nur mehr im Zusammenhang mit ihrer
Abschaffung sieht. So war es schon bei der Sklaverei, denn auch Sklaven
hatten keinerlei politische Rechte. Wie kann man Sklaverei per Gesetz
abschaffen? Artikel 13 unserer Verfassung verbietet Sklaverei und
erzwungene Dienstleistungen, trotzdem wurde meinem Volk lange Zeit nur
eine Staatsbürgerschaft 2. Klasse zugestanden. Wenn die
Sklaverei völlig abgeschafft worden ist, warum dauerte es dann
noch 100 Jahre, bis die Schwarzen im Süden das Wahlrecht
bekamen? Als ich mich zum ersten Mal in die Wählerlisten von
Birmingham, Alabama eintragen lassen wollte, wurde mir das verwehrt,
weil ich – die Hochschulabsolventin- angeblich nicht
ausreichend lesen und schreiben konnte! Ich habe die Erniedrigungen,
unter denen die Schwarzen zu leiden hatten, am eigenen Leib erfahren:
getrennte Schulen, getrennte Nachbarschaften, getrennte
Kultureinrichtungen, getrennte Clubs, getrennte Jobs, getrennte
Gewerkschaften. Außer bei ganz besonderen Anlässen
trafen wir nie mit Weißen zusammen. Auch diese seltenen
Zusammenkünfte unterlagen einem strengen Protokoll. Schwarzen
und Weißen war jeder gesellschaftliche Umgang untersagt.. Ich
durfte nur bestimmte, markierte Straßenseiten
benützen, nur auf Klos gehen, die für
„Farbige Frauen“ vorbehalten waren, ich konnte mir
nur bei für Schwarze bestimmten Bibliotheken am Stadtrand
Bücher ausleihen. Nie hätte ich davon zu
träumen gewagt, an der für Weiße
reservierten Universität von Alabama zu studieren. Doch dank
der Bürgerrechtsbewegung gibt es das alles nicht mehr. Heute
darf ich wo immer über die Straße gehen, darf jede
Damentoilette benützen, jedes Museum besuchen und
Bücher im Stadtzentrum ausleihen. Ich kann Vorlesungen an der
Universität von Alabama halten, bei deren Betreten ich
früher verhaftet worden wäre. Aber es wäre
übertrieben zu behaupten, dass es in meiner Heimatstadt
Birmingham in Alabama keinen Rassismus mehr gibt, denn noch heute ist
Armut vorwiegend schwarz, ihre Schulen sind schlechter, wenige von
ihnen schaffen es auf die Universität oder gar auf die ehemals
weißen Hochschulen.
- 3 -
Die legalisierte Rassentrennung ist abgeschafft, aber die
institutionalisierten, rassistischen Strukturen bestehen weiter. Warum
sprechen wir von verstecktem Rassismus? Sehen wir nicht, wie wenig
Schwarze, Latinos und indigene Amerikaner studieren, aber wie viele von
ihnen in Gefängnissen sitzen? Als man im Süden noch
an allen Ecken und Enden die Zeichen der Rassentrennung sehen konnte,
war uns der herrschende Rassismus bewusst. Heute sind diese Zeichen
verschwunden, aber die Diskriminierung hält an. Warum
verschließen wir unsere Augen vor dem Rassismus, der unserer
Gesellschaft und der ganzen Welt so schadet und großes Unheil
über sie bringt? Auch Chancengleichheit schließt
Rassendiskriminierung nicht aus. Welcher Bürgerrechtler
hätte je gedacht, dass eine schwarze Frau einmal
Außenministerin werden würde. Ich
persönlich würde einen weißen Mann
Condoleezza Rice vorziehen, sofern er – im Gegensatz zu ihr -
gegen Rassismus und gegen Krieg ist. Anders als ich, geht sie davon
aus, dass sie ihren Erfolg ausschließlich ihrer
eigenen Leistung verdankt.
Nicht immer fielen die Siege der Bürgerrechtsbewegung so aus,
wie wir es uns erhofft hatten. Doch unser Kampf war nicht vergeblich.
Auch wenn wir die Welt nicht ändern konnten, den Kapitalismus
nicht überwanden und der Sozialismus nicht siegte, haben wir
viel bewegt.. Aber für soziale Probleme gibt es keine
dauerhaften Siege. Morgen schon kann wieder alles anders sein. Das gilt
auch für die Bürgerrechte von Nichtweißen
und Frauen. Viele der schon immer privilegierten weißen
Männer betrachten sich plötzlich als
schutzbedürftige, diskriminierte Minderheit. Das
führt dazu, dass Menschen glauben, sich dafür
schämen müssen, wenn sie von der Affirmative Action,
dem Minderheitenbonus, profitiert haben.
Ich beobachte auch einen gefährlichen Hang zu Individualismus,
der mit dem kapitalistischen Streben nach persönlichem Besitz
einhergeht und droht, Einzelnen die Leistungen der Gesellschaft
zuzuschreiben. Justizminister Alberto Gonzales, Richter Clarence Thomas
und Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice sind dafür gute
Beispiele. Auf diese Weise kann man jedoch keine sozialen Strukturen
verändern. Was wir brauchen, ist Fantasie und
Vorstellungskraft. Vor nicht allzu langer Zeit hielt man jeden
für verrückt, der sich eine Welt ohne Sklaverei und
ohne Rassenschranken vorstellen konnte. Genauso müssen wir uns
eine Welt mit gleichen Rechten für Frauen und Männer,
ohne Kriege, ohne Rassentrennung, ohne Fremdenhass und ohne
Grenzzäune, die Mexikaner und Zentralamerikaner zu Feinden
machen, vorstellen. Es darf weder staatliche noch häusliche
Gewalt geben, keine Gefängnisse, keine Folter, keine
Todesstrafe. Ich verlange nicht von Ihnen, dass Sie aufhören,
Ihr Leben zu genießen, aber ich flehe Sie an, engagieren Sie
sich, damit sich dieses Land und diese Welt zum Besseren
verändern.
Vielen Dank
ANGELA DAVIS
Racism: Then & Now
University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 17 April 2007
Angela Davis is one of
the iconic
figures of this era. She was acquitted of conspiracy charges in 1972
after one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. She went on to
become an internationally regarded scholar and writer. She is the
author of many books, including "Women, Culture and Politics" and
"Blues Legacies and Black Feminism." Her latest is, "Abolition
Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture." Governor Ronald Reagan
of California vowed when he fired her from her position at UCLA that
she would never again teach in the state system. Today, she is a
tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Before I begin this evening, I would like to acknowledge the tragic
events that happened at Virginia Tech University yesterday morning. I'd
like to say that I know that all of us deeply empathize with the
families and friends of the people who were killed on that campus. This
was the worst mass shooting, apparently, in the history of this
country. But I think as we symbolically express our sympathies to the
families and friends of the dead students, we should reflect on the
extent to which violence has become a normal mode of behavior in this
country, made easily available as a mode of expression for a range of
psychological or emotional disorders. I'm beginning this way because
I'm very concerned about the interpretive context that has been created
for us.
I say this because I checked my e-mail
just before
coming this evening and discovered a message from I won't say whom, but
from some higher-up on my own campus, regarding security measures on
the campus. I'm concerned that we're now being asked to accept as a
solution to that horrible tragedy increased security measures. I'd like
us to reflect on what it means to witness the growing development of
something we might call the security state, a security state that
relies on our collective fear. We fear terrorists, and therefore we
assent to a global war on terror. We feared Communists, or I guess I
should say they feared Communists because I was one of the Communists
they feared, and therefore the Cold War, the hysteria of McCarthyism,
the Vietnam War, or what the Vietnamese call the American War. And,
actually, I think now might be a good time to change that and refer to
the American War from the vantage point of people in Vietnam. We fear
crime, and therefore more prisons, ever larger numbers of people
incarcerated, ever larger numbers of people put to death.
This horrible tragedy in Virginia has made me wonder what it is that
instructs our fear. How do we learn how to fear terrorism but not
racism, not sexism, not homophobia? I wonder why we don't fear a
president who is at the helm of a 21st century drive for global
American empire. I wonder why we don't fear the distorted way in which
democracy is being defined under the auspices of the current
administration. And I wonder why we don't fear privatization. We could
talk about all of the social services that have been privatized. We
could talk about the privatization of war as well. We could talk about
what Naomi Klein has called "disaster capitalism." It was really
interesting, when Katrina happened, in the immediate aftermath of
Katrina, I was joking with some friends, and I said, "The next thing
you know, Halliburton is going to be in New Orleans." I was laughing
about it. And then, of course, there they were.
I think it might be important for us to reflect on
what it
is that shapes and elicits and defines our fear. This evening I've been
asked to talk about civil rights, human rights, the unfinished work of
the struggle for equality here in the U.S., its connections with other
struggles, the transnational dimensions.
I'll begin by saying that we are, at the beginning of the 21st century,
continuing to live the history that we often relegate to the past. At a
time when many of the political leaders in this country and the
majority of the Supreme Court justices argue that precisely because
racial justice has been achieved, affirmative action is no longer
necessary to achieve racial or gender equality, I think it might be
important to think about the meaning of justice, the meaning of racial
justice, the meaning of gender justice, and to talk about race. The
principle of color blindness has so saturated our ideas about race that
we now tend to believe, at least those who voted to eliminate
affirmative action in California, here in Washington, and just recently
in Michigan, that the only way to achieve racial justice is to become
blind to the work that race does, which means that racism itself gets
ignored.
I would like us to think deeply this evening about
the
extent to which we live with, are influenced by, and in large measure
accept racism as a fact of social life. And I would like us to think
about what questions we might ask about the various ways racism
transforms and becomes something quite different from the racism
against which the civil rights movement struggled. That leads me to
ask, where does race live? Where does racism live? Where did it reside
in the past? And how do we shrink the spaces haunted by racism in order
to begin to send it on its way? So we want to talk about something like
the migrations of racism. We might ask, to what extent has the
so-called war on terror and the current war in Iraq transformed the way
racism manifests itself? And why do we have trouble perceiving that
racism? Why do we have trouble perceiving the war in Iraq as a racist
war?
Of course, yesterday, as I was watching the news
about the
events at Virginia Tech, there was a brief report on what happened
yesterday in Iraq. Apparently, there were five solders killed
yesterday. We learn every day what the death toll is, right? Of course,
numbers can't begin to capture the fact that anytime anyone loses his
or her life, it's a major tragedy, whether it's 5 or whether it's 100.
But I'm interested in the fact that we rarely hear the numbers for
Iraqi people. Why is that? As difficult as it might be to move beyond
the barrier of those numbers, at least we would have something to work
with. And, of course, estimates range from, what, 500,000 to 700,000,
and some people say that 1 million people have been killed during the
war in Iraq. I wonder why it is that we can't even have a conversation
about that.
That has a lot to do with the way in which our
emotions
have been trained by racism, how our emotions have been taught by
racism. This is not only the case for-I'm not talking about racism as
something that cannot affect those whose bodies are racialized as the
target of racist discrimination. You see what I'm saying? All of us
sustain these ideological influences. We learn to think in racist
terms. How many black women in this lecture hall have ever walked to
the other side of the street if they see a young black man with baggy
pants, the stereotype?
Racism plays a major role in determining who is
subject to
state punishment and who is not. The prison population-and how many
people are in prison now? Over 2 million. But that is only on a given
day. Those of us who don't work with numbers as a matter of course, we
use numbers because we always think of numbers as the hard evidence,
right? If you have the figures, you know exactly what's going on. But
we often fail to think about the mystifying power of numbers. So, yes,
there are 2.2 million, according to the census that the government
performs of jails and prisons. There are 2.2 million people
incarcerated in a county jail, state prison, federal prison, jail in
Indian country, military prison-am I missing any?-federal detention
center, particularly for immigrants, on any given day. But that means
that over the course of a year, you have over 13 million people who
have had that experience of being incarcerated. We're talking about a
huge number of people. And when you consider the disproportionate
number of people of color, and the ideological role that imprisonment
plays in our lives, I want to suggest that the prison population in
this country provides visible evidence to us of who is not allowed to
participate in this democracy, that is to say, who does not have
rights, who does not enjoy liberties, who cannot vote, who cannot be a
part of the body politic, who is subject to civil death.
In Florida, Governor Crist has decided that he's
going to
push for a change in the laws regarding felony disenfranchisement. Have
you heard about that? Why didn't someone do that before the 2000
election? Because it is clear that of the 950,000 people who are
disenfranchised in Florida, had a small fraction of them voted, there
would have been no question about the defeat of the current president.
There is a question about the victory, right? I won't say that he was
elected, because he wasn't elected. But there would have been no
question about the defeat. Nine hundred fifty thousand people. Florida
has the largest population of former felons who are disenfranchised in
the entire country.
But still, people in prison cannot vote. I think it's really
strange that we don't question that, that we just assume that because
you are incarcerated, you should not have the right to vote, you should
not be a participant in the political arena, you should be banned,
barred. I wonder why that is, because there are quite a few countries
where people vote when they're in prison. They just put polls up and
let people vote. It used to be that students couldn't vote, and they
didn't have polls on campuses. If you didn't go home, where you were
registered, there was no way you could vote. Do you remember that?
There are actually are similarities between universities and prisons.
We could pursue them if we wanted to.
But the point that I'm trying to make right now is
that
prisons tell us that we are free. We are able to recognize ourselves as
rights-bearing subjects, as participants in a democracy because we get
to look at this institution that has walled off those who are not. And
because there are those who are not, by comparing ourselves to them, we
know that we are. In a sense, you might say we know that we are alive,
at least politically or civilly alive, by looking at those who have
been relegated to civil death.
I guess the point that I'm making is that this
institution
we call the prison, that serves as a receptacle for so many of the
things we don't want to talk about, don't want to think about-it's
really interesting that here in this country, at least, we inhabit an
image environment that is saturated with representations of the prison,
if you think about how many times during the course of one day or one
week you encounter some reference to a jail or prison. It would be
interesting to keep an account, especially people who watch TV, of how
many television programs, movies, and magazine articles, whatever. And
the saturation of the image environment leads us to think that we
actually have some knowledge about this thing, that we could kind of
take it for granted, that we know what it is. But, as a matter of fact,
this institution has been marginalized in terms of our own
consciousness and so marginalized in terms of our own intellectual
engagement, marginalized in the sense that there are these disciplines
that are supposed to deal with the institution. There is criminology,
of course, penology. Increasingly, there has been more of an
interdisciplinary attempt to understand the institution.
But I should say parenthetically that the field
that is
tentatively called critical prison studies-have any of you heard of
that? -It's funny. Of course, you put "critical." "Critical"
is
supposed to make anything okay, as long as you say "critical." I
mention this because I for one have been very reluctant to identify
into that field, even though a lot of the work that I do is around
these issues. And that is because I consider myself an abolitionist,
because I want to see the abolition of this institution which
constitutes now the dominant mode of punishment. And I'm really afraid
that by establishing this field, critical prison studies, you have this
sort of relationship to the field that becomes the source of your
research and your reputation, and you become kind of parasitically
attached to it. So a question I've been really struggling with is, how
do you define a field that would itself go out of existence in
accordance with its object?
Why was I saying that to you? I was actually talking about the central
role that prisons play in our lives that we don't recognize, and how
the very notion of civil rights is very much predicated on the
assumption that these civil rights can be negatively perceived by
looking at those who have been relegated to civil death. In a sense you
can say that this started with-didn't necessarily start with, but
slavery played a role in establishing that dialectic, because slaves
were very clearly relegated to political death, social death, civil
death.
I'm concerned about the fact that when the
Constitution
putatively abolishes slavery, how can a constitution abolish slavery? I
think we treat law as our religion. We believe what the law says. But
how can the law abolish an institution that had played such a role in
shaping the destiny of this country in so many ways? And then we think
the Thirteenth Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted"-it's interesting that the parenthetical remark is even
longer than the declarative remark-"shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
But that makes me believe that the authors were
largely
talking about involuntary servitude. As I was having a conversation
with a group of students just before this and was talking about some
questions that one might ask about that Thirteenth Amendment, that
plays such an important role in the history of civil rights in this
country, and we take it for granted. We take for granted that that
institution called slavery ceased to exist. And we give this agency to
the law.
So we could ask, what did the authors of the Thirteenth Amendment mean?
Were they talking about slavery as human property? Is that what they
were talking about? Were they talking about forms of punishment,
corporal punishment, all of those forms of punishment associated with
slavery? Were they talking about the fact that slavery is
noncitizenship? What were they talking about? What is it that they
wanted to abolish? My people continued to have what we all refer to as
second-class citizenship for long time, right? So I don't think that
was what was meant. Or if the meaning was there, it actually didn't
happen. If slavery had been abolished in its entirety, why did it take
another 100 years for black people in the South to achieve the right to
vote? I can tell you that when I first registered to vote-I
actually tried to register to vote because I'm from the South-I wasn't
allowed to because I was not literate enough. Was this after I had
graduated from college? I didn't pass the test. Birmingham, Alabama. I
suppose I'm arguing that we still live with the vestiges of slavery,
which is one explanation for the failure to accord equal rights to all
people who live in this country.
But then I want to talk about what it means to
have equal
rights, because I think that we take that notion for granted. As I said
before, we implicitly compare those rights with those who do not have
rights. So the prisoner becomes the negative measure of what it means
to be a participant in civil society, what it means to enjoy civil
rights.
Since I was asked to talk about civil rights, I
was
actually going to talk a little bit about growing up in the South, but
I think I'll just summarize it, because I see I'm only on page 6 of 17.
Maybe I'll skip it.
Audience: No.
Maybe I should just talk faster. I'm from the
South.
That's my problem. And I grew up under what you might call the visible
vestiges of slavery, the enforced inferiority of black people: separate
school system, separate neighborhoods, separate cultural institutions,
separated clubs, segregated jobs, segregated labor unions. Our lives
were actually such that we never encountered white people except in
highly structured circumstances. And the circumstances were always
governed by a protocol that we had to learn. It was illegal for black
people and white people to have social interaction with each other. I
can remember several times when I was a teenager, I would be driving
with some friends, we would be stopped because somebody in the car, one
of my friends, was very light-skinned so the cops thought she was
white. It's interesting to me now that all we had to do was to tell the
white cop, "Oh, she's not white. She just looks like she's white." And
that was an explanation. He said "Okay." But I had to learn the
protocol of racism. I couldn't cross the street because there were
racial zoning laws. I could not enter a rest room unless it was marked
"Colored Women." I very early had to learn how to read. Seriously. I
could not check books out of the public library unless it was a branch
specifically designated for black people. I could not imagine attending
the University of Alabama, which was reserved for whites only.
But, of course, as we know, the civil rights
movement
successfully challenged racial segregation. So now when I go back to
Birmingham, I'm not encumbered by this protocol, by these zoning laws.
I don't have to worry that there might not be a colored ladies' room,
or I can walk into any museum in the city, or I can visit the main
library downtown. I can be invited even to speak at the University of
Alabama, where I once would have been arrested if I tried to enter the
campus.
But I would be grossly exaggerating the
contemporary
circumstances of my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, if I generalized by
saying that racism has been eliminated. Poverty is still concentrated
in black communities. Schools in black communities are still
substandard. Black people are still much less likely to attend college,
especially the historically white institutions. And the numbers of
black people behind bars are far greater today than anyone could have
ever imagined during the civil rights era.
It's true that particular manifestations of
racism, legal
racial segregation, have been eliminated. But we have become so fixated
on segregation as constituting the heart of racism that we cannot see
the deep structural and institutional life of racism. Here we are, more
than 50 years after the beginning of that civil rights movement, and we
have people like Ward Connerly, and I don't even want to start talking
about him. It seems that in the mid-20th century we understood the
impact of racial segregation, first of all, because it was inscribed in
the law. People could be arrested and sentenced to jail for violating
the segregation statutes. Segregation also was not only a system of
separation, it was a system of surveillance, a system of surveillance
that was supported by extralegal violence, by state violence. Of
course, we know the names of some of the people who were executed or
sentenced to death by the state, like, say, the Scottsboro Nine, and we
also know the names of some of the people who were victims of
extralegal racist violence, like Emmett Till or Viola Liuzzo or
Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney.
But the thing is, there are so many names we do
not know.
One of the things that happened when they were looking for Goodman,
Chaney, and Schwerner was that they found bodies and bodies and bodies,
anonymous bodies, bodies of people who had never been looked for. I
know that there are people currently working on the question of-maybe
you might call it some kind of reparations, connected to the civil
rights era, not slavery. Because, again, we talked about the law. The
subject of the law is always an individual subject. And if you think of
reparations as collective, reparations as institutionally based, it's
very difficult to achieve this through the law. But there are some
people who are trying to play the law's game by arguing that there are
people who participated in the civil rights movement who are still
alive and who can stand before the law.
I suppose the point I was trying to make is that
we tend
to think that racism was overt. Isn't that the word we use when we talk
about segregation, when we talk about that era of legalized racism?
Don't we tend to talk about it as being overt? And now we tend to think
that it's hidden. I wonder why. Maybe it's because we have again
learned not to notice it, because we have been persuaded that the only
way to eliminate it is by pretending that it doesn't exist, that the
only way to eliminate racism is to pretend that race doesn't exist.
Therefore on, a college campus, we don't notice the dearth of black,
Latino, Native American students. If we ever enter a prison, it's not
evident that we encounter a situation that is exactly the inverse of
what we encounter on a university campus. In the segregated South, the
signs of racism that were everywhere, the literal signs, made us pay
notice to it. But now that the signs are gone, discriminatory practices
continue under the sign of equality. So why do we not see the damage
that racism is doing to our society? Why do we not see the damage that
racist policies are doing to the world?
I'm not going to say racism is an
equal-opportunity
proposition here, but what I am going to say is that it does not
necessarily coincide with the bodies of the people who are either
explicitly or implicitly agents of racism Look at our government. Look
at Condoleezza Rice. Who could have imagined? When we were fighting for
civil rights, who could have imagined that there would have been a
black woman secretary of state, and then that's not all. It would have
been hard for me to imagine that I could say in the 21st century, I
would much prefer a white man to be secretary of state if he were
opposed to racism and opposed to war. Because a lot of times I think
her policies, her thinking is even more belligerent than-anyway, don't
let me get started.
One of the things I've said about her in the past
is that,
because we come from the same place, I started to get worried, because
I notice these remarkable similarities in the way we narrated our own
histories. And I said, how can this be? But then I realized that-I'll
just summarize it-she narrates her story as a story of individual
triumph. As a matter of fact, one of the things she said in an
interview was that when she was growing up in Birmingham, everybody
told her that in order to make it, a black person was going to have to
run five times as fast as a white person in order to get the same
thing. And she said, "But some of us ran eight times as fast." I would
do a whole analysis of the uses of biography and all of that, but I
think you get the point.
I wanted to say something about the civil rights
movement
and how the victories that we win are not always the victories that we
thought we were fighting for. I don't think we should regret those
struggles. Those struggles were absolutely important. But, of course,
many of us thought we were changing the world. Many of us, if you move
on from the civil rights movement and you talk about the liberation
movements-the black liberation movement, the Chicano liberation
movement, the Native American movements-we really thought that we were
joining the revolutionary impulse that was happening around the world.
There was Cuba, but also the liberation movements in Africa and in
Latin America. Unfortunately, we didn't quite do that. A lot of us were
persuaded that we were going to bring capitalism down, that we would
have some kind of socialism. And we didn't.
But it doesn't mean that nothing has changed. A
lot has
changed. One of the things I've learned is that victories are never
permanently engraved in the social landscape. What they mean at one
point in history may be entirely different and even contrary to what
they mean at another moment. We should be especially aware of how the
notion of civil rights, especially for people of color, for women
especially, has now been redefined in a way that contradicts its
collective impact in favor of an individualized interpretation that
pits individual white men, members of a class that has been a bearer of
historical privilege-although not all white men have been privileged,
there have been poor white men-but the class as a whole, pitting them
against groups and classes that have suffered historical
discrimination. But this doesn't mean that the struggle for affirmative
action was a mistake, since it's now so often described as reverse
discrimination. And even people who were the beneficiaries of
affirmative action think of themselves as not deserving what they have.
A lot of them are even ashamed to admit that they had a scholarship or
a fellowship from an affirmative action program. Do you know what I
mean?
What that indicates is that social meanings are
always
socially constructed, but that we cannot leave it up to the state to
produce these meanings, because we are always encouraged to
conceptualize change only as it affects individuals. There is a
dangerous individualism that is not unrelated to the possessive
individualism of capitalism. And it is bound to transform the
collective victories we win. If we imagine these victories as community
victories and they are transformed into individual victories, then what
happens is that we seek heroic examples, we seek individuals. There is
a whole array of those individuals. Gonzales, Thomas, Rice. And then
what happens is that we forget about the structural changes that were
actually intended by those struggles.
I'll conclude by alluding to the importance of imagination. I always
say, I'm not a nostalgic person. I try hard not to be one of those
people who thinks of herself or himself as a relic, although I have to
admit that I know I get perceived in that way, as a historical relic.
But at the same time, I like to draw from my historical memory.
Historical memory is important.
Just as it was once important to imagine a world
without
slavery-and many people may have been thought insane for imagining a
world without slavery, to imagine a world without segregation. I can
remember when I was growing up in Birmingham, so many people took for
granted that this was just the way things were supposed to be, or at
least they were going to be this way forever. To imagine a world in
which women were not assumed to be inferior to men, to imagine a world
without war, to imagine a world without xenophobia. And the fenced
borders designed to make us think of people from Mexico and Central
America as the enemy. It is important to imagine a world in which
binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation or
association, and one in which violence is eliminated from state
practices as well as from our intimate lives, heterosexual and same-sex
relationships. And, of course, it is important to imagine a world
without war.
This is just the beginning of a very long agenda
for
social change. If we are to fashion ourselves today into agents of
social change, we will have to do a lot of work, a lot of work on
ourselves, a lot of work with each other, and we have to try to make
sense of what appears to be a really depressing world.
I think that we've learned how to respond to what appears to be a
morass that we are facing as, oh, it's just too much. Nobody can do
anything about it. Let's go back and enjoy our-what? Listen to our
music on our iPods. What else do we do? Shop, play video games. We have
all of these individual modes of distraction now. I think we have to
figure out how to build community. I love music and I listen to my iPod
all the time, so I'm really not criticizing anyone, but I want to feel
that there is an enormous community of human beings who share a vision
of the future. I want to know that we're committed to taking into
account all the things we've learned over the last decades, the
relationship between state violence and intimate violence, violence not
only individualized and domestic but also violence committed by the
state. State violence, war, prison violence, torture, capital
punishment are some of the forms of violence that help to constitute a
whole spectrum. While we can't effectively try to eliminate each aspect
simultaneously, we can develop an awareness of the connections. But
this is the beginning of a notherlecture.
So let me just conclude really now with a simple,
final
message that is a plea. Please get involved. Please try to make a
difference. Please try to turn this country and the world around. Thank
you very much.
Other AR Angela Davis programs -
Liberty and Justice for All?
Report from Harlem
The Prison Industrial Complex
Race, Crime & Punishment
What Will You Say in 2030?
Race, Power & Prisons Since September 11th
Radical Multiculturalism
Abolition Democracy
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