Thinking globally in 150 pages

[bloodygranuaile]

 This month's selection for the politics book club was Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, a short collection of interviews and speeches published by Haymarket earlier in the year.

 

The speeches are generally very good, and must have been a wonderful experience to attend. But speeches are by their nature not usually super in-depth (if they are, it's a lecture rather than a speech); when they are good, they have a few really important, powerful insights or bits of advice that the audience can take away with them, and speeches from activist luminaries can often contain some pretty important wisdom from the elders. These are good speeches and contain many important insights and bits of advice. But it's a short book full of short works, and I kept running into a minor but persistent issue where this was just not the book I wanted to be reading. Davis references a whole number of different politics- and social-justice-related things in passing or in short form that I would like to know more about, and she even recommends a bunch of other works. So my problem with Freedom Is a Constant Struggle basically ended up being that: It's not actually a book examining what went on in Ferguson. It's not a history of the occupation of Palestine. It's not a history of the Black Panther Party. It's not an explication of black feminist theory, or a primer on intersectional theory, or an analysis of prison abolition proposing models for alternative forms of accountability and community justice. It's not Marissa Alexander's The New Jim Crow, or Davis' own Women, Race, and Class. It's really not a factual exploration of any specific historical or political topic at all, while simultaneously it kept reminding me that there are lots of factual explorations of all sorts of interesting and important specific topics out there that I have not read and am woefully undereducated about. (I did start a book club for the express purpose of reading those kinds of books, but the club elected to read this instead.) On several occasions, Davis mentions the importance of drawing connections between different movements and highlighting how all liberation struggles are connected, but there's little room for her to expound upon that much beyond affirming it as an important principle.

 

And it is, indeed, an extremely important principle, and one that the left has as longstanding and regrettable habit of failing at, and which the rise of the nonprofit industrial complex as the main vehicle for social justice action over the past several decades has probably contributed to by siloing "worthy causes" into their separate nonprofits and PACs. The fact that people keep being bad at it probably means that it is well worth having Angela Davis pop up at campuses etc. to remind us about it and try to inspire people to reorient their thinking a little bit. It's also important to one's education to realize what one does not know, and in that respect, the book really delivers: By touching on so many issues and the connections between them -- the role of large corporations and the profit motive in the militarization of the police and expansion of the security state, the problems with carceral feminism, the limits of civil rights and electoral politics, globalized local activism and digital information-sharing, queer and trans struggles and the deconstruction of gender, the unfulfilled demands of the Black Panther Party -- the book does a stellar job of highlighting just how many important things you've probably been mis- or under-educated about. (The book is less than 150 pages long but has a 12-page index; that's how many subjects are briefly crammed into it.) One of the speeches was given at a university in Turkey, and references a bunch of Turkish historical figures that I've never heard of, but who sound like they were probably pretty interesting.

 

The one substantial criticism I have of this book that is actually about the book and not my own bad mood is that the interviewer is pretty mediocre, with the result that, while each speech is a work of art, the interviews are decidedly OK. Angela Davis is an icon of liberation struggles. Editor dude is not.

 

It really is an important book in terms of how to approach political education and movement-building, so I am probably giving it short shrift. It will be especially useful to readers who have mostly taken a more siloed, issue-by-issue approach to their political education thus far, or who may have become disillusioned and cranky with the behaviors of TPTB and are feeling powerless about it. There are worse things than taking "What would Angela Davis say?" as a guideline in your activism.