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Last January, Angela Yvonne Davis turned 80 years old. The afro mane of this black panther accused of terrorism – and among the ten most wanted by the FBI in the seventies – is white, very white. She now walks slowly, as if measuring each step. But when Angela Y. Davis speaks, the rest remain silent. Her voice cuts through the noise of this chaotic era. This was the case at the end of March, when she presented her most recent book at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in downtown San Francisco (USA). Her ideas, unlike her body, do not age, they resist the passage of time.
Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises (Abolition: politics, practices, promises) brings together several of his most relevant essays and speeches in two volumes. The texts are proof of her mutation between radical academic, political prisoner, revolutionary icon, until she established herself as one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. “These essays were written in a historical moment very different from the current one,” notes Davis. But the clarification is ambiguous. Her work feels so timely and relevant that it is uncomfortable. It's as if her words draw a perpetual scene where little has changed. Or perhaps as if, where there was light, today there is shadow. The oppression and violence that Davis resisted for half a century suffocate and attack the same objectives.
“Welfare, immigration, and crime are popular topics in current American political discourse,” he wrote in 1996, in one of the texts included in the anthology. The context? A campaign where human mobility and crime were topics of debate in the dispute between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. This 2024 is a critical year in United States politics. Presidential elections will be held in November. Polarization, prejudice and violence set the pace of the race for the White House. In 1996, the social climate was practically the same. Republicans and Democrats turned, in the philosopher's words, “to the discourses of the immigrant and the criminal to construct a retrograde racial policy that poses a great threat to democratic possibilities in the future.” That future that the activist then envisioned is the present. Is today.
Davis's intellectual work is a pillar of critical thinking about the ahistorical nature of prison, racism, and the persecution of LGBTIQ+ people and migrants. Since the 1980s, Davis insists that the number of people in prison has grown steadily as a result of the failure of the punitive system in the country with the highest prison population in the world. Today, the United States remains at the forefront of that ranking with 1,230,100 people deprived of liberty, according to official data. The figure, corresponding to 2022, represents an increase of 2% compared to 2021.
Of the total prison population, 32% are African American; 31% white; and 23% of Hispanic origin; a percentage that must be stopped at when, in 2024, Donald Trump secures a place on the ballot with a xenophobic and supremacist speech that gains followers. The Republican has not hesitated to reinforce his rhetoric and point out that immigrants “poison the blood” of the United States and offers a “cleansing” of the country through changes in legislation to control the border with Mexico. It is even more dramatic than the recent surveys reveal that support for the tycoon is increasing among Latino communities.
But there are other bars that Davis insists on opening. Bars that constrain the possibility of free human existence in its broadest sense. “Love and sexuality have borne the weight of freedom,” the author recognizes today that, in 1997, she came out as a lesbian in a society that confines and classifies identities into uniform labels. Paradoxically, at the end of the 90s the thinker was opposed to the principle that the personal is political. For her, politics was the public sphere and she preferred to keep her privacy out of that arena. But when she approached the female musicians who, through the blues, sang about desiring other women, about sexist violence, about jealousy, emancipation, Davis was faced with the fact that the readings could only be intersectional: from race, class, identity, gender. She was basically embodying what is currently called intersectionality. It was this pioneer who understood—before the term was even introduced in gender theories and studies—that what is located in the private sphere can catalyze changes in public policy.
That's why he gets a little uncomfortable when particular adjectives are foisted on him. “I'm not brave,” she says. “I am part of a whole, of the fight.” And he adds that, despite the ups and downs, she has lived long enough to witness changes that were only possible thanks to grassroots organizing, collective work. What he has not been able to witness is his ultimate desire for education to be the vehicle for the great project that is freedom and the tool to block the way to inquisitorial initiatives that persecute and attack conquered rights.
Angela Yvonne Davis turned 80 and abolition is still a utopia. But she doesn't get tired. As if it were a final provocation, she wrote: “For Gina” in the dedication of her anthology. Gina, her partner.
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