Angela Davis has written and seen more than I could ever imagine. She’s been a noted member of the American Communist Party and she has also been an associate of the black panther party, the black liberation army, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Having been around all of these formative groups, and having been instrumental in most of what I think of as the civil rights movement and the contemporary struggle for equality, she is a stalwart in her own right. Cornel West called her a “long-distance freedom fighter” and this short, concise offering from her, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, premieres that aspect of her work and offers the reader a window-seat to all of the intersectionalities she fights for and the little known factors that create the inequalities within.
What you should take away from this read
As mentioned earlier, this is a short book. A collection of interviews and speeches spanning from 2013 to 2015, Freedom is a Constant Struggle offers glimpses into the impact of corporations, namely G4S, a transnational security corp, on governmental actions and governmental response. According to Davis G4S is in the backgrounds of the Ferguson Uprising as well as the Israeli apartheid/occupation of Palestine. American and Israeli cooperation with this corporate entity resulted in the militarization of the police in both countries – with the Israeli Police forces actually training St. Louis police chief Tim Fitch, three year prior. Davis highlights this and a very important incident that occurred during the uprising, the recognition of the very same arms being used in Ferguson as Palestine. Palestinians and the people of Ferguson communicating via social media as a means of making the struggle of oppressed people a global issue within the people and not just within the confines of the deteriorating United Nations is one of the most interesting developments that Davis seeks to conceptualize and make visible in the book.
Davis is also known for her decades long work against the mass incarceration epidemic within the United States. She indicates that the enormous number of people behind bars is indicative of the destructive tendencies of a global capitalist system, citing the health care industry and G4S as primary beneficiaries of this epidemic. G4S is deeply involved in the global prison-industrial , operating private prisons all over the world, and Davis even implicates them in the efforts to blur the boundaries between schools and jails (specifically within poor communities of color), highlighting the familiarities in the look and feel of schools, architecturally and technologically.
It’s a lot to unpack and even though it’s a short read, it’s not something that you just drill through. It’s an active read, and one needs to make sure that they are highlighting and taking time away from it to ponder just what it hopes to convey and to follow the lines of the global network of activism Davis weaves. It’s definitely a worthy offering and I suggest it!
