A review by colin_cox
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis
5.0
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is a collection of interviews, speeches, and short essays from Civil Rights activist and academic Angela Y. Davis. The book is relatively short (150 pages), but in its brevity, it does something I like: it presents a thinker like Davis in an informal, approachable way. The interview chapters, for example, are quite striking in their clarity. At times, theoretical essays and books feel impenetrable, but asking a thinker like Davis to sit and answer a set of questions has the effect of simplifying the complexity of her thought. This is not to suggest we should jettison one in favor of the other, nor is it to suggest that Davis is needlessly obscure in works such as Women, Race, and Class. Instead, I want to imagine that books like Freedom Is a Constant Struggle creates a symbiotic relationship with denser, more theoretical tomes.
A consistent theme in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is intersectionality, which Davis connects to the Black feminist tradition and defines in a far less politically divisive way. Of intersectionality, she claims, "In many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation" (45). She continues, "When we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine" (45). What Davis describes is a picture of intersectionality best understood as a hermeneutics of connection. Particularist moves contra Davis (Ferguson as an isolated problem, Israeli police repression in Palestine as an isolated problem, and so on) perpetuate larger, systemic forms of oppression because particularist thinking sees singular examples of, for example, racial oppression and discrimination as just that, singular. We must, therefore, reject what Davis describes as neoliberalism's "attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms" (50). This is not to say we should not fight singular forms and examples of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, and so on. Davis argues that while fighting those fights, we must remain attuned to how these singular examples connect to something much larger.
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is not where anyone should end when exploring the work and thought of Angela Y. Davis. It is, however, an excellent place to start.
A consistent theme in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is intersectionality, which Davis connects to the Black feminist tradition and defines in a far less politically divisive way. Of intersectionality, she claims, "In many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation" (45). She continues, "When we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine" (45). What Davis describes is a picture of intersectionality best understood as a hermeneutics of connection. Particularist moves contra Davis (Ferguson as an isolated problem, Israeli police repression in Palestine as an isolated problem, and so on) perpetuate larger, systemic forms of oppression because particularist thinking sees singular examples of, for example, racial oppression and discrimination as just that, singular. We must, therefore, reject what Davis describes as neoliberalism's "attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms" (50). This is not to say we should not fight singular forms and examples of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, and so on. Davis argues that while fighting those fights, we must remain attuned to how these singular examples connect to something much larger.
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle is not where anyone should end when exploring the work and thought of Angela Y. Davis. It is, however, an excellent place to start.