By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
I’ve been active for a very, very long time. My next birthday, a couple of months from now, I’ll be turning 80. I became an activist as a very young child in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the country at that time. … I don’t know whether I ever experienced a moment when vast numbers of people were so politically engaged, vast numbers of people were so concerned about the future of our planet.
Not concerned about the climate; concerned about war, concerned about ending racism. That’s very different. This is a period unlike any other in the history of this country. People like to think about the ’60s as the revolutionary period, but I think this is the revolutionary period.
– Angela Davis
Internationally acclaimed political activist and women’s rights warrior Angela Davis was in Sacramento this week speaking on solutions for ending domestic violence in the Black community. October was Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Davis and other leaders discussed how resources and funding historically haven’t been aimed at addressing impacts in and on the Black community. Davis, a former Black Panther and UC Santa Cruz professor, has authored numerous books including “Women, Race and Class,” “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement,” and “Abolition. Feminism. Now.” Davis was also the subject of a recent special exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, “Seize the Time.”
She sat down with The OBSERVER to discuss the root causes of domestic violence, the banning of her books and misogyny in today’s music. Davis also spoke about the hope she feels in seeing a younger generation of activists step up. The following is an excerpt from that interview.
Q. When talking about root causes of domestic violence, people often mention that abusers are simply acting out the violence that enslaved Blacks were subject to and taught by white slave owners. What are your thoughts on that?
A. I would say that it’s not simply a question of Black men acting out what slave masters did generations ago. It is about the way our society is permeated with violence. Violence is considered the solution for virtually everything. I don’t think that we do well by always separating forms of violence and assuming that this form of violence is OK.
Because it is linked to war. And war is a context in which violence isn’t necessary. What form of violence is police violence and police need to use violence in order to, you know, solve the problem? So protecting members of society, that allows us to argue for a form of violence that has an impact on other forms of violence. Well, we can’t clearly get rid of all forms of violence simultaneously, we have to be aware of the intersectional relationships and the connections. And the fact that violence is legitimated in the largest society.
Q. No one likes to have the mirror held up to themselves. When do we say yes, these historic things existed, but we have to change what we do and what we accept, in terms of domestic violence and Black on Black crime, etc.?
A. It is impossible to emerge unscathed from a world in which violence is represented as the way to solve problems. That’s not going to change until people take it upon themselves to do the kind of organizing the changing of the way we think. And that’s also about organizing. Education, of course, is an element there, but there have to be ways in which we say, “no more” and I think Black women have always been involved in these efforts to eradicate violence. When I think about Ida B. Wells and the work that she she did against lynching and the connection between the sexual assault of Black women and the use of rape as an excuse to lynch Black men, it’s not one thing, it’s a whole range of efforts to create a different kind of consciousness. That is the only thing that will allow violence to become obsolete in our world.
Q. There’s been a lot of conversation about the normalization of domestic violence and violence against women. How do you feel about some of the music that’s been popularized and what’s being seen on social media and reality TV shows, these things that young people are looking at now that normalize toxic relationships?
A. That’s always the danger – normalizing that which harms us – but there have to be those who stand up and say “no” and even within the sphere of music. While you may have those who sing or rap about the right to inflict violence on people gendered as female, but also as other genders within relationships, there are those who say “no” from the very beginning. With all of the patriarchal lyrics, there have always been those who responded, maybe not as loudly, but they have responded.