Interview With Angela Davis | The Two Nations Of Black America | FRONTLINE (2024)

DAVIS: Actually we've had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a blackbourgeoisie for many more decades.... if we look at one of our great leaders,W.E.B. Du Bois, he was associated with a very minuscule black bourgeoisie inthe 19th century so this is not something that is substantively new althoughthe numbers of black people who now count themselves among the blackbourgeoisie certainly does make an enormous difference.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US hasalways been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extentthat the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think isdifferent today is the lack of political connection between the black middleclass and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished thanever before.

INTERVIEWER: Isn't that inevitable though? Hasn't every immigrant group,as it becomes part of the American mainstream, left behind its roots in acertain way?

DAVIS: That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we arefacing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color beingthrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasingnumbers of people who are incarcerated. This is new. This is not the typicalpath toward freedom that immigrants have traditionally discovered in the US.

And I guess what I would say is that we can't think narrowly aboutmovements for black liberation and we can't necessarily see this class divisionas simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developedfor liberation. But rather we have to look at the structural changes that havealso accompanied the gains of the civil rights movement. We have to look atfor example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system oftransitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations --that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities wherethe tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third worldin order to discover cheap labor. I would suggest is that in the latter 1990sit is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within thecontext of the globalization of capital.

INTERVIEWER: One of the things that struck me as I've gone back andrevisited this history --is that Martin Luther King starts this movement foreconomic justice just before he's assassinated. The Black Panther party isjust getting off the ground here in California and in a way there seems likethere was a march towards merging these issues of class and race in the late60s that somehow got derailed.

DAVIS: Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King,precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civilrights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with thetrade union movement. It's I think quite significant that he was in Memphis toparticipate in a demonstration by sanitation workers who had gone out onstrike. Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself hasevolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of blackpeople who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.

INTERVIEWER: We also see an increasingly weaker labor movement.

DAVIS: Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result ofthe overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalizationof capital. So yeah, you're absolutely right, but I'm thinking about somedevelopments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claimmore support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a reallyimportant role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement. For example,right here in the Bay Area one of the first major activist moments was therefusal on the part of the longshoremen's union to unload ships thatwerecoming in from South Africa and the ILWU then took the leadership here inthe Bay Area, particularly as a result of the black caucus within the ILWU,they took the leadership in creating an anti-apartheid movement that spread toall of the campuses, UC Berkeley, Stanford.

INTERVIEWER: At least from my vantage point, back then it seemed we wereattacking structures and institutions and after a certain point it began tofeel like it wasn't possible. Our leaders were assassinated, one of the thingsI was reading today was -- 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 BlackPanthers were killed by other Panthers just within -- internecine warfare. Itjust began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we werefacing. How do we reawaken that sense that one person can really make thatdifference again now? And kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac andSnoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.

DAVIS: It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics thatyoung people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good,although it's not going to solve the problems. I guess I would say first ofall that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles andthese goals in a relatively static way. The fact is important gains were madeand those gains are still visible today. For example, the number ofAfrican-American studies programs that are on college campuses today. Thoseinstitutional changes are inconceivable outside of that development within --related to the Black Panther party and other organizations. Young people beganto take those struggles onto the campuses

INTERVIEWER: The last line in the essay Skip Gates has in The Futureof the Race is-- "only sometimes do I feel guilty that I was one of thelucky ones. Only sometimes do I ask myself why." I wonder whether you everfeel guilty for having been one of those who have survived?

DAVIS: Well, I think about it. But I don't know whether I feel guilty.I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certainmeasure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to takeadvantage of the opportunities. The door is opened only so far. If some of uscan squeeze through the crack of that door, thenwe owe it to those who have made those demands that the door be opened touse the knowledge or the skills that we acquire not only for ourselves but inthe service of the community as well. This is something that I guess I decideda long time ago.

INTERVIEWER: But still there were those who were arrested around the sametime you are were still in prison? You got out -- you got off in some waysbecause you had become such a cause celebre that there were others who didn'thave.

DAVIS: I mean that's true but I am actually addressing your questionabout guilt, and I'm trying to suggest that maybe there are other ways to dealwith it than with guilt. So rather than feeling guilty is what I have done isto continue the work. As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial wasover, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organizationcalled the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted thatit be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All PoliticalPrisoners.

As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that haddeveloped around my case to create another organization, which we called theNational Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. And, what? in Juneit will have been 25 years since my trial was over. I'm still working for thefreedom of political prisoners, Mumia Abu Jamal, the Puerto Rican politicalprisoners, such as Dinci Pargan, for example, Leonard Pelletier. I'm involvedin the work around prison rights in general. I think the importance of doingactivist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consideryourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be apart of an ongoing historical movement. Then I don't think it's necessary tofeel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going tohelp more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system,and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was ableto acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move usforward.

INTERVIEWER: One of the problems, as we came into the 70s is it seemed asthough we were fighting institutions and structures that were so big that therejust seemed to be nothing that one person could do about them... How do werecapture that sense of a kind of power of being bold enough to take on thosestructures again?

DAVIS: I don't know whether the movement crashed as a result of theoverwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I thinkrepression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also thewinning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of themovement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals anddeveloping new strategies.

But I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that weremade by the civil rights movement, the black power movement. I don't think wedo that enough.. Institutional transformations happened directly as a resultof the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their livesto.

INTERVIEWER: Such as?

DAVIS: I'm thinking about the desegregation of the south, for example,and the fact that some black women decided to boycott the bus system and thiswas actually done and eventually those laws were transformed or changed.

INTERVIEWER: The other thing that happened of course is that the struggleisn't so much taking place on college campuses any more, it's taking place incorporate board rooms or within the corporate structure and those of us who arethere are both -- it's a weird thing happening. On one hand we're morereticent about taking on the racist things that we see happening within thatenvironment, but the other thing that's happening is we're becoming moreAfrocentric at the same time. It's almost like, we kind of feel like if weshow up wearing our kente cloth that that's it, we've done our struggle. Whatis that about? Where does that come from?

DAVIS: I think it arises out of a tendency often to conflate culturalblackness with anti-racism. I think this is another case where there arelessons to be learned during the period of the 60s when organizations like theBlack Panther Party were coming into being, there were other culturalnationalist organizations such as US Organization, such as the organizationthat Amiri Baraka developed and of course Amiri OK, there was the black artsmovement which was extremely important, but there was also Baraka's politicalorganization in Newark that took a cultural nationalist position that assumedthat if we were able to connect with the culture of our African ancestors thatsomehow or another these vast problems surrounding us, racism in education, inthe school, racism in the economy, in health care, etc would disappear. Theywere very interesting conflicts and debates between groups like the BlackPanther party and the cultural nationalist groups in the 60s.

INTERVIEWER: What were those debates? What was the nature of that debatebetween the Black Panther and say a group like US?

DAVIS: The debate often focused on what young black people wanting toassociate themselves with a movement for liberation should do, whether theyshould become active in campaigns against police violence, for example, orwhether they should focus their energy on wearing African clothes and changingtheir name and developing rituals. One of the names members of the BlackPanther Party used to call those who focused on Africa and African rituals wassort of pork chop nationalists. There were some of us who argued that yes, weneed to develop a cultural consciousness of our connection with Africaparticularly since racist structures had relied upon the sort of culturalgenocide going back to the period of slavery so that many of us were arguingthat we could affirm our connection with our African ancestors in politicalways as well, following for example Dr. Du Bois' vision of pan-Africanism whichwas an anti-imperialist notion of pan-Africanism rather than the pan-Africanismthat projected a very idealized, romantic image of Africa, a fictional notionof Africa and assumed that all we needed to do was to become African, so tospeak, rather than become involved in organized anti-imperialist struggles. SoI think that the debate around pan-Africanism at the beginning, in theaftermath of world war I, for example, that Dr. Du Bois participated in, tookon a different character but recapitulated some of the very same kinds ofconcepts and issues in the 1960s.

INTERVIEWER: So what does it say to you that here we are in 1997 and thepan-Africanist/cultural nationalist agenda is the one that the commercial side,that Wall Street has fastened onto--that side seems to have been triumphant andthat the anti-imperialist movement is, not in retreat, but certainly not beingheard from as much.

DAVIS: It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalistmovement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of themovement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification ofblackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it'sconnection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious. Asfar as the tradition of struggle and tradition of anti-imperialist,anti-capitalist struggle I think that is one that has to be fought for andrecrafted continuously. It's not going to happen on its own, it's not going tobe taken up by the capitalist corporations and presented as something that isboth profitable and something that is pleasurable to masses of people.

INTERVIEWER: In a way I find it interesting that Kwanzaa -- you knowKarenga's ideas which apparently seem to have been financed by the FBI, atleast in part, are the ones that now most black folks would say they would holdto and not the ideals of the Panther Party which were about survival, at leastin some part an economic survival.

DAVIS: To a certain extent I think both traditions have survived. Thecultural nationalist tradition has been commodified and therefore it has beenworked into the whole institution of capitalism in a way that the traditions ofstruggling against police violence have not, but those traditions are stillvery much alive. As a matter of fact I think that the response to the OJSimpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the manycampaigns to defend black communities against police violence. It just sohappened that a figure like OJ Simpson was the one who benefited from thosesensibilities, but I think it's important to affirm the fact that sensibilitycontinues to exist and a kind of desire for black movements continues to existeven, I think, among middle class black people.

This accounts, I think, for the success of the Million Man March becauseblack people tend to think of themselves as a people in struggle. This hasbeen our history within this country and there's a kind of nostalgia for thosemoments where the struggle becomes dramatic and visible and powerful, althoughthe Million Man March wasn't such a moment, I would argue, because there wereno political demands that addressed the major problems that black communitiesare confronting yet there were the images of struggle, there were the images ofmasses of people that I think affected and brought pleasure to and moved somany black people. Now perhaps we can use that. Perhaps we can rely on thatas we try to build movements that will address the impoverishment of masses ofblack people, the prison/industrial complex. I have to maintain some hope thatthat's possible. But at the same time I think it is important to acknowledgethe extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imaginedstruggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example onthe one hand and images like the Million Man March.

INTERVIEWER: You were critical of the Million Man March before? What wasthe substance of your criticism?

DAVIS: We developed this criticism on a number of accounts. First ofall, the failure to integrate gender into the vision of what the blackcommunity needed, the exclusion of women from the march itself although finallyI think someone said it's OK for black women to come, they don't have to stayat home with the babies as they were urged to before. But my criticism wasalso based on the conservative politics of the Million Man March, theconservative politics, the tendency to rely on voluntarism, the way in whichthe politics of the march coexisted quite harmoniously with the politics of aNewt Gingrich, for example the focus on family values that again linked themarch to some of the most conservative developments in US society today, theassault on women's reproductive rights, etc. If this march of a million blackmen had raised issues such as the assault on the welfare system, the assault onwomen's reproductive rights, if there had been a sense of how to address thisvast issue of violence against women, rather than assuming that a patriarchalfamily structure in which black men would --

INTERVIEWER: Atone.

DAVIS: Atone but also assume their role as the patriarchs in the family,cause that's what the atonement was all about. The black men were not reallybeing the fathers that they needed to be, not really taking on the burden ofthe family in the way they needed to do it. I found that extremely problematicbecause I think it's important for us to recognize that although historicallyblack communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race andwith respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarilytranslate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions onissues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize theintersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions andattitudes.

INTERVIEWER: Now that the Million Man March is over, do you still feel itwas not a correct thing to have done?

DAVIS: Those of us who criticized the Million Man March -- werenot arguing that it shouldn't happen. We were arguing that debates around theissues taken up by the march needed to be allowed particularly within blackcommunities. I guess what I would criticize today is the tendency to conflatethat dramatic moment with a movement.

The nostalgia within black communities for this mass movement whichinvolves vast numbers of black people coming together is something that canoften lead us in unproductive directions. Because in the past thedemonstrations that we think about -- the 1963 march on Washington, forexample, that march wasn't this moment that was organized against the backdropof nothing else. It was a demonstrating of the organizing that had been goingon for years and years and to assume that one can call a march on Washingtonand have that be a movement in the 1990s is I think a tremendous mistake. Iwould say perhaps the importance of the Million Man March was that itstimulated a great deal of discussion. Perhaps it brought to people'sattention the fact that we need to begin to regenerate an approach towardsgrassroots organizing that will help us in the direction of a mass movement.

There was a tendency of the middle class men who I think participated inthat march to passionately identify with the brother on the street withouttaking up the kinds of political issues that are required to move blackpeoplewho are in poverty in a progressive direction.

INTERVIEWER: Of course the brothers on the street are identifying with thegangster rappers or at least the younger brothers on the street are, which is awhole other level of symbolic identity.

DAVIS: And not only the brothers on the street but the middle classbrothers are also identifying with the gangster rappers because of theextent to which this music circulates. It becomes possible for the -- notonly the young middle class men, but it becomes possible for young middle classwhite men and young men of other racial communities to identify with themisogyny of gangster rap.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it's not just misogyny. Now it's kind of movedjust a straight crass materialism. The latest ones are just -- they just nameoff name brands. That's the progression of it. How have we reached a pointwhere in 1997 that the ethic of being black means that you don't go to schoolto learn. That learning is equated with whiteness and that somehow that isbad?

DAVIS: Well, whether it's the approach that all young black kidsare encouraged to take or decide to take. Because you do have this risingmiddle class and you do have the young brothers and sisters who are movingtoward the corporate arena and who are encouraged to do this arena from thetime that they are very young. I think this is one of those moments where wealso have to talk about the deterioration of the institutions.

I can't really blame a lot of young sisters and brothers who believethat education has anything to offer them. Because as a matter of fact, it hasnothing to offer them. Suppose they do get a high school diploma that ismeaningful. What kind of job is awaiting them. The jobs that used to beavailable to working class people are not there as a result of thede-industrialization of this economy.

Therefore, often young black people are looking towards the alternativeeconomies. They are looking towards the drug economy.... the economies thatare going to -- that apparently will produce some kind of material gain forthem. You can't criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wantingto live decently. While I think that it is true that there is a great deal tobe done with respect to the ideas that circulate among young people withinarenas such as hip hop. At the same time, we can't forget about thedeterioration of the institutions and the structural influence on young people.

INTERVIEWER: Bring us back to globalization of capital. How do you mobilize around an issue like globalization of capital?

DAVIS: Well, you mobilize around globalization of capital in local ways.Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say wewant an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going tohappen as a result of just assuming that stance. I think in black communitiestoday we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing. For example, welook at the assault on immigrants. Both legal immigrants and undocumentedimmigrants. Where does the black community stand with respect to thatissue?

I think it is important to recognize that there is a connection betweenthe predicament of poor black people and the predicament of immigrants whocome to this country in search of a better life. The de industrialization ofthe US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areaswhere labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies createson the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrateto the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it createsconditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, thedrug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends theminto the prison industrial complex.

So we have to figure out how to formulate issues that are going tobring those of us together who are affected in one way or another by theglobalization of capital...When we consider how much a young black person wantsto, or is willing to pay for a pair of Nike's, right? -- and then think aboutthe conditions under which tose shoes are made in Indonesia or wherever, uh, atthe same time that that young sister or brother will be treated on the labormarket here as indispensible and perhaps as someone to be cast away into theprison system. So there are reasons for coming together if we can figure outsome specific kinds of strategies and tactics that will allow it. I think thisis the real challenge for this era, which means we have to get away from anarrow conception of blackness. We can't talk about the black community.It's no longer a hom*ogeneous community; it was never a hom*ogeneous community.At one point, it did make sense to talk about the black community because wewere struggling against the profound impact of racism on people's lives invarious ways. We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but itdoesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today thanit ever was.

INTERVIEWER: Does the fact that black folks are now a heterogeneouscommunity absolve us from the obligation to keep reaching back -- everybody toreach back, each one -- reach one?

DAVIS: I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, whichpeople have -- particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middleclass because as Dr. King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed outof the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore,they do have some responsibility.

But whether people would be willing to assume that responsibility or notis something that is up to them. We cannot assume that people by virtue of thefact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressivepolitical struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies thatassume that black unity -- black political unity is possible.

INTERVIEWER: What's the coalition?

DAVIS: Political coalition. Politically based coalitions. I think wehave to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. Ithink we have to, as I said before, seek to create coalitional strategies thatgo beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicanocommunities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.