Angela Y. Davis QUOTES

1 " I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept. "

2 " We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers. "

― Angela Y. Davis

3 " The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results. "

― Angela Y. Davis , Freedom is a constant struggle

4 " In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts. "

― Angela Y. Davis

5 " [Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism. "

― Angela Y. Davis , Are Prisons Obsolete?

6 " Pregressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation "

― Angela Y. Davis

7 " In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. "

― Angela Y. Davis

8 " If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions. "

― Angela Y. Davis , Freedom is a constant struggle

9 " Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible. "

― Angela Y. Davis

10 " A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future? "

― Angela Y. Davis

11 " What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. "

― Angela Y. Davis

12 " Wc What this country needs is more unemployed politicians. "

― Angela Y. Davis

13 " We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death. "

― Angela Y. Davis

14 " We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society. "

― Angela Y. Davis

15 " Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages. "

― Angela Y. Davis

16 " What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women. "

― Angela Y. Davis

17 " Walls turned sideways are bridges. "

― Angela Y. Davis

18 " Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on. "

― Angela Y. Davis , Freedom is a constant struggle

19 " One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents "

― Angela Y. Davis

20 " The roots of sexism and homophobia are found in the same economic and political institutions that serve as the foundation of racism in this country and, more often than not, the same extremist circles that inflict violence on people of color are responsible for the eruptions of violence inspired by sexist and homophobic biases. Our political activism must clearly manifest our understanding of these connections. "

― Angela Y. Davis , Women, Culture, and Politics

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