Angela Davis quotes on feminism, racism, capitalism and revolution
10 min read
Angela Davis is an American political activist, academic, and author whose work focuses on pertinent issues in society, such as women’s rights, gender equality, prison reforms, and politics. It is a no brainer, therefore, that Angela Davis quotes are not only powerful but popular as well.
Source: Getty Images
Davis, who is also known for her work with the Communist Party USA and her involvement in the Black Panther Party during the Civil Rights Movement, was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in ‘Dynamite Hill’, a neighborhood which was notorious for racial conflict. She went to segregated schools through high school and was involved in civil rights demonstrations from a young age.
In her adult life, Angela Davis has spent time traveling and lecturing, discussing issues regarding race, the criminal justice system and women’s rights. I kid you not, you can learn a whole lot from Angela Davis famous quotes.
Here are some of the most popular quotes by Angela Davis that will make you appreciate the activist even more.
Angela Davis quotes on racism
Davis confronted racial injustice from a young age. A member of The Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Davis also organized her own interracial groups, which were later broken up by the police.
Check out some of the most popular racism quotes from Angela Davis:
- In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.
Source: UGC
- When Obama was elected president, a prisoner said “one black man in the White House doesn’t make up for one million black men in the Big House.
- We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn’t happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
- If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
- Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
Source: UGC
- I feel 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 who is the perpetrator, then we won't ever succeed in eradicating racism.
- Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work.
- I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.
- Well of course there’s been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don’t have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.
Angela Davis quotes on revolution
Here is what she has to say about revolution:
- Radical simply means "grasping things at the root.”
- We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.
- I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.
Source: UGC
- You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
- The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?
- If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.
- Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.
- I try never to take myself for granted as somebody who should be out there speaking. Rather, I'm doing it only because I feel there's something important that needs to be conveyed.
- Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
- I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.
Source: UGC
- Anyway I don't think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do.
- Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
Angela Davis quotes feminism
As a proud feminist, Angela has a lot to say. Here are her quotes about gender equality:
- What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.
- 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 post colonialities and ability and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.
- This is a women's march and this women's march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence. And inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.
Source: UGC
- 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.
- I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
Angela Davis quotes on capitalism
Check out these powerful quotes about capitalism:
- It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.
- Racism is intricately linked with capitalism and I think it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place
- I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
- Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.
Source: UGC
- The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.
- I feel that the reason why racism is so blatant and has been a part of the history of black people from the time we were first kidnapped from the shores of Africa is because it has helped those capitalists gain more and more profit. If you look at any factory or any plant – who does the worst jobs? Who gets paid the smallest salaries? It’s black people. So racism serves as a buttress, as a justification for super-exploitation. And I feel that if we’re going to talk about the total liberation of black people, we first have to liberate ourselves from the material conditions of our oppression.
- We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations - that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor.”
Angela Davis quotes on social justice and prison reforms
She has a lot to say about the matter:
- Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.
- [Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
- The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
- Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners.
Source: UGC
- But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.
Angela Davis quotes on rape
Here are some of her famous quotes on rape:
- We cannot grasp the true nature of sexual assault without situating it within its larger sociopolitical context. If we wish to comprehend the nature of sexual violence as it is experienced by women as individuals, we must be cognizant of its social mediations.
- Furthermore, it is often assumed that rape is an act of lust and that, consequently, rapists are simply men who cannot control their sexual urges.
- The truth is that most rapists do not impulsively rape in order to satisfy an uncontrollable sexual passion. Instead, men’s motives for rape often arise from their socially imposed need to exercise power and control over women through the use of violence.
Source: UGC
- Most rapists are not psychopaths, as we are led to believe by typical media portrayals of men who commit crimes of sexual violence. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority would be considered “normal” according to prevailing social standards of male normality.
- If we assume that rape is simply a by-product of maleness, a result of men’s anatomical construction or of an immutable male psychological constitution, then how do we explain the fact that the countries that are now experiencing an epidemic of rape are precisely those advanced capitalist countries that face severe economic and social crises and are saturated with violence on all levels?
- Do men rape because they are men, or are they socialized by their own economic, social, and political oppression—as well as by the overall level of social violence in the country in which they live—to inflict sexual violence on women?
- Rape bears a direct relationship to all of the existing power structures in a given society. This relationship is not a simple, mechanical one, but rather involves complex structures reflecting the interconnectedness of the race, gender, and class oppression that characterize the society.
- We will never get past the first step in eliminating the horrendous violence done to women in our society if we do not recognize that rape is only one element in the complex structure of women’s oppression. And the systematic oppression of women in our society cannot be accurately evaluated except as it is connected to racism and class exploitation at home and imperialist aggression and the potential nuclear holocaust that menace the entire globe.
Angela Yvonne Davis has an inspirational life story that you should definitely read about. She is an activist, professor, writer, and advocate for oppressed people. Davis graduated from Brandeis University and completed her master's degree in California three years later. Later on, she began a career teaching and writing books. Today, Davis tours around the world, speaking on prison reform, feminism, and civil rights.
These Angela Davis quotes summarizes her goal in life - she is not afraid to speak out on social issues.
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Source: Legit.ng
