Angela Davis lecture
“Democracy and Leadership”
9/13/07
UAB Alys Stephens Center
I took notes and this is pretty close to what she said. I left out some parts as I was taking notes, but this is the gist of it and any confusions or things that don't make sense are ENTIRELY MY FAULT. Angela Davis's lecture was fantastic.
The best leadership strategies will be self-critical of their effects. One should ask, does it maintain structures of inequality?
She talked about the Civil Rights Movement and people without civil rights, specifically she said prisoners. There are 2.2 million prisoners in the US at any given time. She said that Civil Rights can’t solve structural inequalities.
She was in South Africa last week and spoke at a conference called “Conversations on Leadership.” She said that South Africa has a prison problem too and that the prison problem is a global problem.
She read a quote from Condaleeza Rice:
They told you that if you ran twice as hard, you’d get half as much. And there were some people who would run 4 times as hard so they could have just as much, but then there were those few who were willing to run 8 times as hard so they could get ahead.
Davis said that Rice uses this story to justify her success as resulting from hard work, whereas Davis sees this story as a testament to oppression. Davis and Rice share the same narrative: both were born in pre-Civil Rights Birmingham, AL, and both knew the four little girls who were murdered in the 16th St church bombing. Both lived through the overt racism of an apartheid system in the south and both challenged that system. But Davis says the difference is in their conceptions of leadership.
Rice saw herself as an individual trying to get ahead of the pack. Her individual story serves as an example of triumph over adversity, the triumph of democracy, etc.
But what about everybody else? What about those who wouldn’t or couldn’t run 8 times as hard?
Davis has overcome adversity. She could use her personal triumphs as examples of individual efforts to overcome adversity. But, for example, the fact that she was finally vindicated and won her court case when she was imprisoned was an indication of the power of organized masses of people NOT a triumph of justice.
She said that racism is more entrenched now than before the Civil Rights movement, as it is so much harder to identify. She said that a Black person is two times more likely to go to prison than to college.
She talked about the word “diversity” and how the use of the word by Bush et al, and others is bizarre. She said that it is possible to talk about diversity without justice and equality. We need to be more critical and nuanced when we use these terms. Diversity erases the specificity of social justice movements. We should ask, does this diversity promote justice and equality, or does it promote structures of inequality and injustice?
Leadership needs to be more careful about its vocabulary.
Diversity is a simple descriptive. We need to always ask, who stands to benefit from diversity? Because diversity that promotes torture, war, and mass imprisonment is possible. We are losing the vocabulary to tie diversity to justice and to racism, sexism, homophobia, and immigration. Where do the illegal immigrants stand in this idea of diversity?
Racism mutates. The racism that structures slavery isn’t the same racism that currently structures education, for example, but they are connected. We are living with the vestiges of slavery today.
We are encouraged to think of ourselves first and foremost as individuals. Leadership needs to acknowledge the collective character of the problems we confront and, therefore, the collective character of the solutions. The Internet should have made us more connected, but we have lost the ability to emotionally process our connections. The word “diversity” provencializes our relationship to the world. The challenge of leadership is to envision change within a global framework. Diversity can be powerful if we make it powerful.
Mass imprisonment plays a pivotal role in the global war on terror. It is a key feature in the defense of “democracy.” Secret prisons in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Guantanamo. Bush et al have justified modes of torture, and have ruled that the Geneva conventions do not apply to people suspected of terrorism. And the weapon of the prison is used to safeguard democracy. But, Iraq is further from democracy now than it ever was. It is limiting to use the existence of elections as the hallmark of democracy. In the early history of the US, only about 6% of the population had the right to vote, yet we called ourselves a democracy. Throughout most of the history of the US, women, indigenous people, and people of color could not vote.
The penitentiary system in the US was invented in the early 1800s. She suggests we read de Touqueville’s works Democracy in America and The US Penitentiary System and its Application in France. This new penitentiary system provided negative verification of the existence of democracy. Punishment was exacted by deprivation of rights and liberties. But prison as punishment is only possible within a democratic society, where rights and liberties are acknowledged. Where rights and liberties don’t exist, taking these things away does nothing. Slaves didn’t go to prison, they were punished corporally. Prisons were supposed to supplant corporal or capital punishment. Deprivation of rights and liberties is called civil death, and the prison system is a space of civil death, but at the same time, prisoners were supposed to become penitent (penitentiary) to prepare themselves for society.
The proof of participation of Black people in democracy is that there are so many that have received due process and are in prison. This is a legacy of slavery. Prison is the negative side of democratic freedom in the same way that slavery provided evidence of freedom. Prisoners provide evidence of freedom in a democratic society.
In Alabama: 26 % of the population is Black, 70 % is White. But of the prisoners currently serving time in Alabama, 60,000 are Black and 12,000 are White.
We respect hierarchies and tend not to look up or down. We tend to think of prisoners as a glob of murderers and rapists. Over a period of one year, there will be in the US 13 million prisoners. The majority of these people have not been convicted of a violent crime. Leadership can emerge from within the prison system.
In order to abolish prisons, we will need to address the issues that the prison purports to deal with but cannot, in lasting ways. We will need to expand our educational systems, creating entirely new systems.
Prison is a dumping ground for all of the problems in this society that we don’t want to deal with. The prison system causes us to think of every one of the 2.2 million prisoners as the same person.
