-She was a part of the 3rd wave feminist, specifically the black feminist movement. So she was concerned with not generalizing the female population and its diverse issues. That the feminist movement must broaden its horizons and realize that it must respond to a greater number of issues. In other words the movement must not shy away from complexity, after all feminism is a complex issue. (I really don't like referring to feminism as an issue, I think it's misleading, and makes you sound like you're taking sides. I prefer to think of it as a perspective, I'll probably talk about that a lot in this blog.)
-She also held communist beliefs and taught at UCLA. However, this was very controversial and Californian government officials, including Governor Regan, tried to stop her from teaching.
-She was associated with people involved in some violent civil rights acts, I think someone was even killed, and she was arrested and spent over a year in prison after being charged with being an accomplice. There were national/world wide campaigns advocating for Angela's release.
So these were the things I did know, but one thing that she talked about in her interview was her childhood.
-Angela's parents were both very politically active and were members of the communist party themselves. In fact there were times at which they had to go into hiding. Also, she grew up during the McCarthy era and attended a progressive New York school that even taught Marx without anti-Communist sentiments. This background information really gave me a better context for the rest of Angela's life, the things I already knew a little about.
When I went to Smith Auditorium to see Angela speak there was a large line outside even though I had elected to show up 1/2 an hour early. It was pretty cool to see so many people there, looking around at the audience it was possible that there were even more visitors than Willamette students. That kind of surprised me a little, not because so many people would come to see Angela Davis, but because more people didn't come to see her speak. I mean I've been to a few MLK celebrations in Smith in the past and they are not always so exciting, but this is Angela Davis, I can't think of a better known speaker that has come to Willamette. I guess that she may be less known to people my age as most of her newsworthy activity happened well before I was born.
She started out talking a lot about the civil rights movement, which honestly wasn't that exciting. I think she felt the need to pay tribute to MLK which is understandable. While history is important and always relevant to what's happening today, I definitely didn't come to hear Angela just give a history lecture. Fortunately she soon transitioned into talking about prison structures. Her set up was pretty typical, and mostly based in her structural philosophy. She noted as well that military structures function in a similar way, drawing comparisons between the two structures. They target low income people with few options but to turn to crime or join the military. They also are involved with large amounts of capital and are privatized in order to generate profit. They are seen as necessary structures in our society and are not usually criticized of being oppressive structures. The similarity to slavery was distressing.
I think this is where she got to the theme of her speech, maybe it was slightly before this, I don't remember exactly, "Justice is Indivisible." Which is a fairly obvious concept but really applies to what she is talking about. We often turn a blind eye to prisons and the military and don't really acknowledge that they are unjust institutions. In fact we accept that they are necessary and that they must exit. This gets kind of crazy when you look at how incarceration rates have grown so rapidly. I mean to think that we really need to be locking this much of our population up, that this is the only option, is a little scary when you realize it was not that long ago that we had significantly less people behind bars. Clearly there must have been some better solution that we've forgotten about, as it is now it seems pretty dysfunctional.
She went on to give a really interesting anecdote about coal miners in Columbia who were having their land taken away from them. I guess by interesting I meant terrible and really sad, but it was interesting how interconnected it all was and how it related to this injustice that we just don't acknowledge.
When she got to questions I was pretty nervous, usually when speakers come people just ask the worst questions. Really they are just talking and stating their opinion, but fortunately this time there were some pretty good ones and Angela became even more animated and gave some pretty candid responses that were really awesome. I think that a lot of what she was saying during her talk, she was kind of censoring herself, but she let a little of that go during Q&A. Here were some highlights:
-She talked about victims of structural racism and accountability, which is always something that I have a hard time figuring out. In a nutshell she says that we shouldn't ignore accountability, but we must also keep in mind that some individuals have a vast terrain of choices and other have a much more limited terrain.
-On Obama she said that it is possible to be critical of some things but be supportive of others. I thought this was a much more productive way of looking at the presidency than he's doing a good/bad job. It also goes to the idea that we need to encourage complexity rather than simplicity.
-Prison is the default solution to all of our problems we should be dealing with substantively.
Anyways, Angela Davis is so cool and has definitely been the best speaker that's come to Willamette that I've seen.
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