Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis
Angela Davis’ collection of interviews and speeches go beyond words of wisdom. Reading it four years after its publication’ in 2016 —after an agonizing presidency and in the midst of a revolutionary resurrection against police brutality — her life-long framework resurfaces like pink pansies emerging winter snow.
I was first introduced to Davis in college regarding her method of intersectionality, along with other pioneers such as Kimberle Crenshaw and bell hooks. Intersectionality essentially analyzes how multiple oppressions work together to produce injustice; for example, race and gender. This is no new information for those who have dove deep into Davis’ or Crenshaw’s work. But I missed something back then.
It is hard to talk about the application of Davis’ work without addressing the hyper-partisianship of our modern politics. The polarities in our society today are things that I have always held discord with; in a way that was hypercritical, rather than judgmental. This discomfort mostly fell on my peers or young acquaintances who expressed a particular view as a strong identity, rather than a struggle. Struggles mature, as Davis says, but identities? They strengthen, alongside ideologies; an inevitable concoction for passionate rams to butt head to head.
The first piece I underlined in Chapter One, titled Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism, was this: “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” In effort to reassure this ‘ever-expanding community of struggle’ I must first make a critique of individualism and identities that have created more dichotomies than likeness.
The present understanding of solidarity — though I will credit that this current moment makes me hopeful it is shifting — is very similar to the start of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the 19th century and the Gay Rights Movement of the 1960’s. Strong ties to identity, rather than common denominators of struggle, drew wedges between groups fighting for the same goal. For example, as Adam Grant explains in Originals, Lucy Stone, an early activist of women’s rights and antislavery, combined the struggles of both the female and African American/Black communities for voters rights. And she partnered with abolitionist Frederick Douglass to do so. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, however, strongly upheld the right only for those who identified as white female.
Similarly, during the the Gay Rights Movement, transgender individuals were forcefully kept out of the movement in fear that they would ruin the chances of winning rights for the LGBQ community. Identifying strongly with the LGBQ community pushed out the most marginalized and oppressed communities, black transgender individuals specifically, rather than strengthening relationships under common struggles. The movement, ironic to present times, turned primarily white middle-class.
But we eventually got our rights back then and we are all coming together today, so what’s the big deal? Well, there is no big deal as much as there is a part missing; the same part I missed in my lectures regarding Davis’ framework back in college. It is my opinion that much of the polarities we see today — in politics, religion, sexuality, race, gender, etc. — has very similar characteristics to some of our past liberation movements’ importance of identity rather than struggle.
I am referring to Davis’ view of feminism as a methodology and not an identity. In her speech delivered at the University of Chicago for the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture Annual Public Lecture (2013), she stated, “Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.” It is true that who we identify with predisposes us to struggles, so the first step is recognizing how someone identifies themselves. But when we don’t take a further step to analyze how their identities come with similar struggles to our own, we fail to recognize the global movement needed for justice to be served.
Shout out to my LGBT friends who recently received rights in the workplace!
This critique of the dichotomies we have created in society is not to say we are intentionally doing something wrong. Perception is reality. But we are missing a step to catalyze the change we really want to see. Individualizing and strongly identifying ourselves categorizes us in boxes where we are prone to miss similarities between another community/group. If feminism is a method to bring more togetherness and constructively critique our differences, then many of us have forgotten to apply it to thresholds that will reveal common ground.
Don’t get me wrong, this is no Kumbaya.
To have equality, we first must have equity: the prioritization of struggles. It is the exact argument between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter: it’s not that we shouldn’t care about all lives — we should— but we have to prioritize communities whom experience discrimination, statistically and historically, significantly more than others. And as Davis reminds us, solidarity, the path to freedom, is a global phenomenon under those common struggles.
