Lily’s Reviews > Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement > Status Update

The personal is political. What happens in our public lives is reflected in our private. There’s alot of injustice in the worlds and a lot of exploitation. We have to be brave to stand up against injustice. Because there’s a lot occurring to keep us subdued and passive and unable to change the injustices occurring in the world.

“Prisons are racism incarnate. As Michelle Alexander point out, they constitute the new Jim Crow. But also much more, as the lynchpins of the prison-industrial complex, they represent the increasing profitability of punishment. They represent the increasing global strategy of dealing with populations of people of colour and immigrant populations from the countries of the global south….”

It’s important to look at things from an intersectional lens, or when assessing something to look at it from different or all-encompassing angles. For ex. The treatment of incarcerated women reveals a lot about the overarching system Vs. Just looking at it from the treatment of incarcerated men, but also women of colour in prison, men of colour in prison and intersections of gender and sexuality.

Author encourages people “to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as normal.” Because prisons are considered normal and it takes a lot to persuade people to think otherwise.

Davis speaks about the importance of dialogue, of continued conversation and a robust vocabulary in defining racism and racist violence otherwise changes such as abolishing slavery can be misconstrued as resolving racism entirely without acknowledging that such changes haven’t rectified “cultural and structural elements of slavery [which] are still with us.”

“Now the attack on Assata incorporates the logic of the very terrorism with which they have falsely charged her. What might they expect to accomplish, other than causing new generations of activists to recoil in fear? The FBI is attempting to persuade people, it seems to me, who are the grandchildren of Assata’s generation - and mine as well - to turn away from struggles to end police violence…”

“So I’d like to point out that individual memories are not nearly as long as the memories of institutions, and especially repressive institutions. The FBI is still haunted by the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. And the CIA and the ICE are institutions that have active and vivid memories of the mass organized struggles to end racism, to end war, to overthrow capitalism.”