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    Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
    Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
    Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
    Audiobook5 hours

    Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

    Written by Angela Y. Davis

    Narrated by Angela Y. Davis and Coleen Marlo

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    About this audiobook

    In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

    Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles-from the black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

    Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "freedom is a constant struggle."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 13, 2016
    ISBN9781515978350
    Author

    Angela Y. Davis

    Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. An activist, writer, and lecturer, her work focuses on prisons, police, abolition, and the related intersections of race, gender, and class. She is the author of many books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.

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    Reviews for Freedom is a Constant Struggle

    4.5/5

    566 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      this has been such an eye-opener, thank you for writing this book

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      While this book may have been published in 2016 the content and issues spoken about are still ongoing today. Why are we, as a global majority, still in a constant struggle for freedom? Have we not looked past our own current individualized "fights" to recognize that we are incapable of seeing our contributions extend farther than our lifetimes or for generations to come? Maybe that is why the same struggles continue to present themselves.
      Angela Davis gives no holds barred explanations on so many struggles that we as African Americans continue to face throughout the generations. In essence, msny of us are products of this very racist and incongruent system.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I’m writing this four years after this was released and it’s something to hear how what Angela is speaking on, which has been for more that four years, has come to pass in today’s world. If you want to learn about intersectionality, feminism & one of the root intellectuals of police and prison abolitionist thinking, read this.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      So much wisdom and information! Definitely a must read book!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is a timely read in 2023 as it addresses the Palestinian struggle in concert with freedom movements globally as it stood in 2013-2016. How does biometrics and the wall in Gaza connect to schoolchildren in America? Which company realised it could expand the prison industrial complex into educational facilities? And what should we all be learning from feminism and the Black Radical Freedom Movement to bring into 21st century activism?
      Oh and Don't forget the 10 Points of the Black Panther Program! She'll make you google it.
    • 5/5
      Great book to make connections between what is happening in gaza
    • 4/5
      A great introduction to some of the biggest human rights struggles in the world, and how they are all connected to each other. Specifically, Angela's words manage to link the struggle for freedom and decolonisation in palestine, with racism and islamophobia in the usa and the rest of the world, to prison abolition, to mysoginy, to transphobia and homophobia, to capitalism. We can't have true freedom and liberation until all of us have human and civil rights!!
    • 5/5
      Absolutely loved this collection of essays on so many different topics that all intersect on the topic of freedom. The exploration of sexism racism and state violence is fascinating and I cant wait to read more of Angela Y. Davis' work!
    • 5/5
      “Feminism involves so much more than gender equality. And it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism—I mean, the feminism that I relate to. And there are multiple feminisms, right? It has to involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism, and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sex-ualities than we ever thought we could name.”

      It shames me to say that I had never heard of Angela Davis until recently when I read Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped From the Beginning. Through out this collection of interviews and speeches she shares about her ongoing fight for abolition of the prison-industrial complex, intersectionality between race, class, gender, and sexual/gender orientation, and how capitalism encourages voter suppression in the US and throughout the world. She also talks about how the FBI put her on the 10 most wanted list, and how these terrorist lists are used to suppress movements like BLM.
      This was just an introduction for me on who this amazing person is, and I will absolutely be reading everything I can on her.
    • 5/5
      I protested in Ferguson and Angela is right, it was my first time being exposed to teargas. I remember seeing Palestine solidarity flags while we marched through Ferguson and the city of Saint Louis. This book successfully links the struggle for Black Liberation with not just the Palestinian struggle against their settler colonizers, but also all oppressed people- pointing us to the necessity of having intersectionality in not just our identities, but our solidarities. She lays out how we must organize on a global scale, and how global movements are inspired by one another. A must read.
    • 5/5
      Powerful! So much to unpack. I took my time with this book and I'm glad I did. I took notes, discussed statements from the book with others, which lead to really rich conversations.
    • 5/5
      One of the very best, at her very best, spoken in her own voice: precious.
    • 5/5
      This book is phenomenal, but I am deeply concerned about the censorship happening on this platform. This is the second audiobook I’ve listened to where multiple seconds of text are essentially muted before the audio picks up again. At first I thought it was me or my device, but it would happen all the same. This is very disheartening, because these (Dr. Davis and Dr. Salcel who wrote A Passion for Ignorance) are highly researched and peer reviewed concepts by recognized experts in their fields, not fool-hearted talking heads depending on the blind faith and fear of their followers.

      If not corrected, I will have to leave this platform.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      By the time I finally bought this I had picked it up so many times at the bookstore and lingered over it. But I am finally getting to it today thanks to the Juneteenth Readathon.I don't often take notes while reading unless the book is for a book group or buddy read, but I have a page of notes from this -- facts that shocked me (Nelson Mandela was on U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008!) and lines that wowed me. Don't let the small size of this book fool you -- it packs a lot of punch. And systematically -- against oppression everywhere and not letting itself be pinned down to an individual person, place, or institution.I really need to read more by Davis.
    • 3/5
      Great book, and Angela Davis just further radicalizes me against capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and the injustices of the world.

      One of the few times I think the audiobook was just as good, or better as it would have been written, since this book is a collection of Angela Davis' speeches and interviews she's given over a timeframe. These speeches generally were themed, and about the protests in Ferguson Missouri, the oppression of Palestine, the prison industrial complex, or black feminism. She has an amazing ability to weave all these topics together throughout her interviews and speeches, and to make them all linked.

      Truly a powerful and inspiring collection of speeches. I definitely want to read more of her, and I also want to read more about the authors/activists she mentions, such as Assata Shakur, Michelle Alexander, and a few others.
    • 4/5
      Published in 2016, this short work consists of interviews with and speeches by Angela Davis from 2012 to 2015. Among the principal themes are the following. Intersectionality: Both analysis and organizing increasingly recognize how different issues such as race, sex and class interconnect in experience and in struggle, such as the situation of black trans women. This also includes the intersection of domestic and international issues. Palestinians who saw on television the use of tear gas against protesters after Ferguson tweeted the protesters on how to deal with tear gas based on their experience with tear gas used by Israeli forces. South Africans and Palestinians were labeled terrorists by their opponents and the same thing has been happening in the US. The real terrorism is the violent treatment of oppressed peoples by the powerful.Prison-industrial Complex. Both in the U.S. and abroad, the prison is used to warehouse people who represent social problems, such as immigration. It reflects the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era. Increasingly privatized, they have become major profit centers for corporations and in the case of the United States incarcerated black individuals approach the number of slaves in the old South. Michelle Alexander has dubbed the prison industrial complex the “new Jim Crow.” Prisons should be abolished.Feminism. Feminism involves not just the rights of women but an approach to analyzing issues and developing strategies. A feminist approach permits one to criticize President Obama at the same time as supporting some of his actions. Black women organized the civil rights movement.History of Black Struggles for Freedom. Lincoln did not free the slaves. They freed themselves and enabled the Union to win the Civil War. If the Union had assisted former slaves after the Civil War we would not have needed the civil rights movement of the 1960s nor still be fighting issues of equality and discrimination today. Change has come from mass movements, not from individual leaders. For example, many unsung black women organized civil rights movements that escalated to prominence leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It is not that leaders like Nelson Mandela and MLK do not play an important role, but we need to recognize that it is collectivities that achieve successes and not individual leaders, and that leaders should not be sanctified or otherwise put on a pedestal. And women should also be leaders.International Struggles: South Africans and Palestinians were labeled terrorists by their opponents and the same thing has been happening in the US. The real terrorism is the violent treatment of oppressed peoples by the powerful. As Palestinians support struggles in the US, activists here should support the boycott movement against Israel.Militarization of the Police: The murder of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson starkly showed the militarization of the police in the United States. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, pointed this out, although Pres. Obama was silent on the subject. We don’t just need better prisons and better policing; rather, we need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them.Systemic Racism: Racism is not just a question of bigoted or prejudiced individuals or symbols like the Confederate flag. Our police practices, prison complexes and the death penalty all incorporate structural mechanisms of state violence that fall most heavily on nonwhite people. “Black lives matter” recognize this disparate impact, which is why when Hillary Clinton declared that “all lives matter” she was implicitly denying systemic racism.
    • 4/5
      This books collects several interviews with long-time activists Angela Davis as well as some articles and speeches.  The downside to this collection is that she touches on some of the same issues in each of the pieces (as you would expect of someone delivering speeches to new audiences) but the format of this collection doesn't allow the reader to see Davis delve deep into any of the issues.Davis reflects on the Civil Rights movement and feminist movies, her involvement in each, and their accomplishments.  She also compares it to the revival of activism in the Black Lives Matter movement that rose out of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri against the police killing of Michael Brown.  Davis urges the reader/listener to recognize the intersectionality of movements and that Americans need to broaden their scope to include global crises in their activism (with a particular emphasis on Palestine).Davis always offers harsh truths but is never disparaging of efforts towards revolutionary change that are incomplete.  Instead she encourages the reader to keep trying and keep struggling.  I'm particular impressed by her reflections that Black Americans truly defined democracy since they are the ones who advocated for true freedom, which is more than civil rights.  I have had this book for some time and to my shame only got around to reading it now, but I'm glad I've read since it speaks to issues that are front and center in the current moment.Favorite Passages:Trying and trying again. Never stopping. That is a victory in itself. Everyone and everything tells you that “outside” you will not succeed, that it is too late, that we live in an epoch where a revolution cannot happen anymore. Radical changes are a thing of the past. You can be an outsider, but not outside the system, and you can have political beliefs, even radical ones, but they need to stay within the bounds of the permissible, inside that bubble that has been drawn for you by the elites.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 a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.It’s very interesting that during the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that’s their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.The civil rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not underestimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework. Economic racism continues to exist. Racism can be discovered at every level in every major institution—including the military, the health care system, and the police. It’s not easy to eradicate racism that is so deeply entrenched in the structures of our society, and this is why it’s important to develop an analysis that goes beyond an understanding of individual acts of racism and this is why we need demands that go beyond the prosecution of the individual perpetrators.I fear that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist… The “bad apples” type of… …who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements—from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome.Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements—anchored by women, incidentally—that pushed the government to bring about change. I don’t see why things would be any different today.At this point, at this moment in the history of the US I don’t think that there can be policing without racism. I don’t think that the criminal justice system can operate without racism. Which is to say that if we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons. Without the kind of policing that we experience today. I think that different frameworks, perhaps restorative justice frameworks, need to be invoked in order to begin to imagine a society that is secure. I think that security is a main issue, but not the kind of security that is based on policing and incarceration. Perhaps transformative justice provides a framework for imagining a very different kind of security in the future.Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle. So whatever I’m doing I always feel myself directly connected to those communities and I think that this is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.Deep understandings of racist violence arm us against deceptive solutions. When we are told that we simply need better police and better prisons, we counter with what we really need. We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them. We will say demilitarize the police, disarm the police, abolish the institution of the police as we know it, and abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. But we will have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America.As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.But freedom is still more expansive than civil rights. And in the sixties there were some of us who insisted that it was not simply a question of acquiring the formal rights to fully participate in a society, but rather it was also about the forty acres and the mule that was dropped from the abolitionist agenda in the nineteenth century. It was about economic freedom. It was about substantive freedoms. It was about free education. It was about free health care. Affordable housing. These are issues that should have been on the abolitionist agenda in the nineteenth century, and here we are in the twenty-first century and we still can’t say that we have affordable housing and health care, and education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don’t even know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money. So it was about free education and free health care and affordable housing. It was about ending the racist police occupation of Black communities. These were some of the demands raised by the Black Panther Party.I tell you that in the United States we are at such a disadvantage because we do not know how to talk about the genocide inflicted on indigenous people. We do not know how to talk about slavery. Otherwise it would not have been assumed that simply because of the election of one Black man to the presidency we would leap forward into a postracial era.For some time now I have been involved in efforts to abolish the death penalty and imprisonment as the main modes of punishment. I should say that it is not simply out of empathy with the victims of capital punishment and the victims of prison punishment, who are overwhelmingly people of color. It is because these modes of punishment don’t work. These forms of punishment do not work when you consider that the majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them, because they’ve had no access to education or jobs or housing or health care. But let me say that criminalization and imprisonment could not solve other problems.We will have to do something quite extraordinary: We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.
    • 5/5
      Next up in #feminism and #socialjustice reading: this gem. It's a collection of interviews with and speeches by Davis, and it shows what an intelligent, collective-thinking person she is. She makes connections from Palestine to prison and terrorism to capitalism with such clarity. I think this book should be accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of intersectionality.