SURJ IN CONVERSATION WITH ACTIVIST AND SCHOLAR, ANGELA DAVIS
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“I think we need, in our struggles against white supremacy, to combine an awareness of all of the structural changes that we want with an awareness of how people can actually change. ... Part of the reason why...so many white people voted for Trump in 2016 was because he effectively created simple answers to complicated sets of problems. We have to make complexity acceptable. We have to shun the kind of reductionism that so easily lends itself to scapegoating. We have to develop...popular education strategies that help to throw off all of these webs of ideology and can lead to a solid popular understanding of the damage that capitalism is doing to our planet.”
— Angela Davis
Image Description: A photo of Angela Davis smiling, wearing a yellow shirt in front of a book shelf.
Earlier this month, SURJ had a chance to chat with political activist, academic, and author Angela Davis. During the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Angela became a prominent counterculture activist working with the Communist Party USA, and was involved in the Black Panther Party.
Davis is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its History of Consciousness Department. Her research interests include: feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex.
