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ANGELA DAVIS INTRODUCTION



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ANGELA DAVIS




INTRODUCTION

Angela Davis is an internationally respected scholar and political activist. She has been embroiled in controversy numerous times, clashing with both the government of the United States and individual critics. Due to her outspoken political activities and the relationships she has formed, Angela Davis was targeted by the US criminal justice system in 1970. This period further led to the growth in her anti-prison sentiment, making her an important figure in the abolitionist movement today. Angela Davis should be viewed as a primary source for information because her radical beliefs and critiques of racism, classism, and sexism in the United States are both revealing and important issues to bear in mind during most debates.



LIFE AND WORK

Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama on January 26, 1944. This was a period in American history when Jim Crow Laws were still enforced, and neighborhoods were rife with racial tension. Both of her parents were educated, her mother was an elementary school teacher and her father was first a teacher then a service station operator. Her parents introduced her to political activism, as her mother was a campaigner for the NAACP before the state shut it down. They managed to buy a home in an un-segregated neighborhood, where Angela spent most of her childhood. This neighborhood was often referred to as Dynamite Hill, because homes of black families were bombed so often by the Ku Klux Klan.


Angela Davis was unable to escape the racial tensions that were always present in her life. She was a very intelligent young girl, but due to segregation she was forced to enter decrepit elementary and middle schools. At age 14, she was accepted into a program run by the American Friends Service Committee, which placed black youths in integrated, northern schools. Through this program, she was able to attend Elizabeth Irwin High School, a radical school in New York City. She moved to New York with her mother, who wanted to obtain her MA from NYU. The school quickly introduced her to the ideas of communism and socialism, an education that would stay with her throughout her life. While attending this school, she also joined the Communist youth group, Advance.
When Davis graduated from high school, she attended Brandeis University on scholarship; only three African American students attended the school. She studied French, and spent a year in Paris. While she was there, she learned of the Birmingham Baptist Church bombing in September 1963. This event greatly affected her as she knew the four girls who were killed. When Davis returned from Paris, she became more interested in philosophy and audited a course offered by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s ideas have greatly influenced Angela Davis, particularly his belief that it is the duty of the individual to rebel against the system. After graduating from Brandeis University, she studied philosophy at Johann Wolfgang van Goethe University in Frankfurt. However, she soon wanted to join the civil rights movements that were arising in the United States, so she returned and studied under Marcuse at University of California at San Diego. After earning her master’s degree, Davis returned to Germany and obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy.
After receiving her Ph.D., Angela Davis became a lecturer of philosophy at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 1967, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the following year the American Communist party. However, when the Federal Bureau of Investigations notified her employers of her political activities, her contract was terminated. She was later rehired though, after the community amassed popular support for her.
On August 18, 1970, Angela Davis was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. She was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping and homicide; the government argued that she had aided in the attempted escape from Marin County Hall of Justice of Black Panther members. Angela Davis was on the run for several months, before finally being captured. Though she was later acquitted of the charges, Davis spent 18 months in prison.
Today, Angela Davis continues to be a very prominent social activist. She is a professor at University of California in Santa Cruz, and she is an outspoken proponent of the abolition of US prisons and the death penalty. Though Davis is no longer a member of the Communist party, she continues to maintain that capitalism is an unjust system, and democracy would be better achieved through a socialist system.

CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM




PRISONS AS RACIST INSTITUTIONS

Angela Davis is a very vocal critique of racism in the United States, which she argues not only continues but is actually institutionalized in the society. She points to prisons as the embodiment of this problem, and argues that the penal system is simply an extension of slavery. Angela Davis believes that racism, classism, and sexism continue to be significant societal problems, with the prison system being used to both isolate those affected by the problems and to exact a profit from their free labor (a situation referred to as the prison industrial complex). Essentially, Angela Davis believes that many of the problems facing American society today, such as crime and poverty, are intricately related to issues of race and capitalism. This makes her an important source of information for many debates on social problems.



Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, racism continued to be a prevalent sentiment, even among those who had supported the end of slavery. Very few whites were able to view blacks as intelligent beings, much less as their equals. As a result, racism became institutionalized in governmental practices. Especially in the South, segregation became the rule of law. In other ways too, such as voting restrictions, ruling whites sought to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans. Lynchings occurred throughout the South, and served as powerful reminders to blacks that even though they were legally free, there were not equals.
Angela Davis argues that during this period, prisons emerged as a way to return freed slaves to bondage. While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned slavery in most situations, it maintained that involuntary servitude was legal if an individual had been convicted of a crime. Thus, with the abolition of slavery, prisons became important sources of free labor to plantations and other businesses that had previously relied on slaves. A convict-lease system was quickly developed, and states enacted Black Codes that criminalized many activities for African Americans, such as being unemployed. These Codes, coupled with the prevalent racist beliefs that blacks were more prone to criminality, led to extremely high incarceration rates for African Americans. Once in prison, Angela Davis points out that the newly freed slaves were rented out to bosses, and sometimes forced to work on the same plantation they had worked as slaves. Thus, prisons became a method to control black labor, as the prison populations were overwhelmingly African American.
Unfortunately, the increased incarceration rates, according to Davis, further fueled the racist beliefs about African American criminality. These beliefs continue to affect social justice policy today. In fact, Angela Davis points out that “police departments in major urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to maximize the number of African-Americans and Latinos arrested – even in the absence of probable cause” (Are Prisons 31). The continued use of racial-profiling policies, Davis argues, proves that color continues to be imputed to criminality.
And though the convict-lease system has been abolished, its use deeply affected the criminal justice system and has shaped much of its infrastructure. Today, the policies of the convict-lease system, such as exploitation, “have reemerged in the patterns of privatization, and, more generally, in the wide-ranging corporatization of punishment that has produced a prison industrial complex” (Are Prisons 37). Davis explains that prisons are significant sources of profits, to be made by the companies that supply the prisons with food, the phone call providers, the corporations who run prisons for profit, etc. And because there is profit to be made, these corporations have a vested interest in encouraging the growth of the prison population. And this, Davis argues, is the reason that prison populations continue to increase despite the drop in the crime rate.
And to this day, the minorities are disproportionately overrepresented in the prison population. Angela Davis argues that this occurs because the government uses prisons as a way to house and isolate the “undesirable” sectors of the society, such as minorities and the poor. She states that the American population accepts the racist targeting of minorities because they have been brainwashed by the government and media. She points out that black men are often treated as criminals in the media and sources of entertainment. Over time, images such as the ‘criminal black man’ effects a person’s perception, and they learn to view black men as a criminal group. These leads to the acceptance of the racial profiling of black men.
Ultimately, Angela Davis forcefully argues that racism continues to be a significant problem in the United States. This racism is especially obvious in the criminal justice system, where minorities are often targeted and then imprisoned for profit. Reading her books and articles will provide you with significant analysis about the harm racism continues to cause our society, as well as about possible alternatives to achieve a more just system.

ECONOMIC RACISM

Another mode of institutionalized racism that Angela Davis discusses is in the economic sphere. She points out that African Americans are severely overrepresented in the poverty rates. For example, the Children’s Defense Fund has found that black children are far more likely to be born into poverty than they were five years ago. They are also twice as likely as Caucasian children to die in the first year of their lives, and they are three times as likely as white children to be placed in class designed for mentally handicapped students (Women 74). Angela Davis points out that many conservative political scientists have blamed African Americans for their poverty. These political scientists argue that the rise in single mother homes has led to increased poverty. However, Davis claims that this analysis is both flawed and detrimental.


Angela Davis first points out that the birthrate for single African American teenage women has actually decreased since the 1970s, thus the conservatives claim seems not to hold true. Davis goes on to further argue that political scientists use the African American family as a scapegoat for the ineffective policies of the federal government. The Reagan administration vocally attacked the African American family unit as the reason for persistent poverty, which allowed him to simultaneously advocate lower social spending. He argued that the welfare system helped perpetuate the problems in many African American families, such as lower marriage rates, and so claimed that decreasing welfare programs would strengthen families and decrease poverty.
Unfortunately however, this plan was not successful. Angela Davis argues that the true causes of the initial poverty were racism, job outsourcing, and lack of social protections. Davis turns to census data to prove that increases in the unemployment rate result in both higher poverty rates and higher rates of one-parent homes. Thus, she believes that the welfare programs that enable families to find jobs are essential in order to eradicate poverty. However, when the Reagan administration cut social spending, many families were left with no mechanisms of support, and so fell deeper into the cycle of poverty.



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