I know VERY little about them beyond basic info one would see on the news, but after listening to Davis relate them to the movements here, it's easy to see how it's all the same fight. Most interestingly she talks about Palestine and expresses solidarity with Palestinians' struggle for liberation. Though my interest waned towards the end, it was because I read it all at once instead of over time.

Activist and organizer that she is, Davis frequently issues a demand to her readers and audiences: oppositional political thought and action needs to consciously attend to intersections of various kinds—between public and private violence, between struggles to change institutions and to transform the self, and to the tributaries that flow between domestic policing and overseas military violence. Only by connecting struggles in places imagined as discrete will it be possible to recognize and confront these renovated forms of spatial apartheid, and the renewed forms of racial/nationalist supremacy that increasingly hold sway in the shrinking kingdoms of Western prosperity—in the United States, Israel, Britain, and beyond. Angela Davis, has a kind of, varied staccato, style of speaking, which, while it serves its purpose, of allowing her time, to think, and read, and form thoughts as she goes, ends up being, a little monotone. 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 apple type who is the perpetrator—then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism. We're so used to viewing genocide as overt - the death camps of the Holocaust, or the mass murders in Rwanda, or the persecution against the Rohingya in Myanmar, just to name a very few.

Or, in other words, talking about "the Zionist's media's tentacles" plays into a classic antisemitic troupe of Jews controlling the world, of Jews doing evil and getting away with it because they're so powerful. I listened to this on audio, read by Angela Davis herself, and, as much as I wish I could say that it worked for me, it really didn't. Some salient takeaways I walked away with included: the drawbacks of individualism and the strength of collective movements for social justice, the necessity of taking a global perspective on issues of equity and justice, and how we can opt into oppressive systems even if we hold marginalized identities (e. Many of us had more time to think about and interrogate our current world which, consequently, forced us to imagine a world beyond the violence and drudgery of capitalism. Du Bois to the Black Panther Party, than it is today, when we are led to imagine that racial discrimination is primarily a matter of individual attitudes, that colonialism is past, and that existing capitalism is the only horizon of reasonable struggles for justice.

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. A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza like the one that was offered several times and was turned down? and in 1951, a petition was made to the UN for relief from the genocide black people were experiencing in the US. Israel has also helped US in military training and security, so she emphasizes on how the forced apartheid is a global issue that we all need to identify with.

We cannot assume that the worst is over just because white people are no longer burning crosses or screaming the n-word. I think that, as far as content, the ideas and concepts and arguments and connections she presented on the various topics in these talks, it was brilliant. It could do with a newer edition were she can share lectures or essays on the hellish panorama of the past couple of years. In particular, where I believe the strength of the book really lies is in its ability to articulate the very complex nuances and antagonisms that exist in our world; it provided me with a better perspective on issues that feminist scholars have been discussing and theorising and has led me to apply them to the material world.

These essays take us back in history to the founders of revolutionary and anti-racist struggle, but they also take us toward the possibility of ongoing intersectional solidarity and struggle. A fast-paced series of speeches, interviews, and essays, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle examines how ostensibly disparate social movements around the world in fact share deep and meaningful connections that might link them together in a global struggle for human liberation. This is vintage Angela: insightful, curious, observant, and brilliant, asking and answering questions about events in this new century that look surprisingly similar to the last century. It's hard to think outside of the reality and systems that we exist in, but that is the only way we can begin to change them.

She provides the example of thinking that changes in the law spontaneously correspond to real world changes, when countless examples have shown that this is far from the truth. This book is slim, partially composed of a written interview exchange between Davis and the editor, and finished up with transcriptions of recent speeches Davis has given. Angela Davis not only talks about movements and topics she is passionate about - like prison abolition, feminism, rights for BIPOC - but also emphasizes on the importance of understanding the history Black people have gone through, what civil rights movements have achieved for the people in the United States and other countries around the world, and what it means to stand in solidarity with Black people and other minority groups.