Davis: ‘Demonstrations Are Rehearsals for Revolution’

In an interview in Vanity Fair, Marxist activist Angela Davis warned that the rioting currently ravaging the country is just the early stage of a larger “revolution” necessary to bring about social and economic change.

“Sometimes we assume the most important work is the dramatic work—the street demonstrations. I like the term that [Marxist cultural critic] John Berger used: ‘Demonstrations are ‘rehearsals for revolution,’” Davis told black filmmaker/social justice activist Ava DuVernay.

“The protests offered people an opportunity to join in this collective demand to bring about deep change, radical change,” Davis added. “Defund the police, abolish policing as we know it now. These are the same arguments that we’ve been making for such a long time about the prison system and the whole criminal justice system. It was as if all of these decades of work by so many people… came to fruition.”

The lifelong communist went on to defend the mobs of vandals who have torn down statues and monuments around the country: “Those statues are our reminders that the history of the United States of America is a history of racism, so it’s natural that people would try to bring down those symbols.”

Ava DuVernay acknowledged in a tweet that the editor of the interview was slavery reparations proponent and literary darling, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Angela Davis

101 Known Connections

Davis delivered the keynote address at an April 2009 event where the Chicago branch of the NAARPR  presented its highest honor, the Human Rights Award, to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Davis’s speech emphasized such themes as the evils of capitalism, the intransigent nature of American racism, and the injustices of the “prison-industrial complex.” Some noteworthy excerpts:

• “The ^[2008] election of [Barack] Obama was a millennium transformation, and we’re in a new historical conjunction in 2009.”
• “Many assume Obama is going to save capitalism, but a lot of us here have other ideas about changing the system.”
• “[T]here is [a] reason why we still have the prison industrial complex, and its called racism.”
• “Racism is directly responsible for the fact that the U.S. has become the great incarcerator and more people are incarcerated here than anywhere in the entire world. And there is a vast over-representation of Blacks in the system.”
• “As much as we are told today that racism has receded and that Obama’s election was the last major blow to the racial barrier, that simply isn’t true. We cannot pretend to talk about racism today like it was back the 1950s or 1960s.”
• “The question of race is so essential to the history of this country. And working against the prison-industrial complex and the death penalty will help us to understand the markings and history of U.S. slavery.”
• “Not another prison should be constructed in this country. Because the solution is not putting perpetrators behind bars. Sending people to jail does not help heal society’s problems.”

To learn more about Angela Davis, click here for the profile link.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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