Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Key Terms

Abolition

In the American context, abolition, a term Davis first uses in the first interview, has come to have a very narrow meaning—the movement to end slavery. When Davis talks about getting rid of prisons, the death penalty, or the police, she uses the word’s meaning—the act of eradicating something—and draws on the word’s historical connection with enslavement. Contemporary abolition movements seek to continue the work begun by the people who agitated for the abolition of slavery by abolishing those institutions or structures that strip people of freedom by other means.

Freedom

There are multiple definitions of freedom, including the state of being free, a kind of ease or familiarity, or the lack of restrictions, but one of them is particularly important to the argument Davis presents in the book. For Davis, the absence of constraint is at the core of freedom’s most expansive meaning—and it is this sense of freedom that she adopts as the aim of freedom movements. Throughout Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, she identifies particular attributes of freedom from constraint, including food security, safe housing, employment, education, and health care. The main point Davis stresses, however, is that freedom must be defined expansively and shared equally around the globe.

Capitalism

An economic system, capitalism, a term Davis first uses in the first interview, allows private individuals or organizations to control and profit from a society’s means of production. A market, regulated to varying degrees by governments and social institutions, determines what products will be produced, what prices will be charged for them, and how they will be distributed. Capitalism is often said to encourage competition and innovation. Critics note, however, that capitalism tends to create fundamental inequalities, as it pits people against one another and locates public goods in private hands.

Marxism

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was an activist, philosopher, and political economist, who wrote, along with his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), The Communist Manifesto (1848) as well as Das Kapital, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), a thorough critique of capitalism. Marx stressed the importance of creating structures that would enable humans to flourish, a process that he argued meant understanding how economic forces alienated people from their world and even themselves. Marx’s emphasis on understanding structural relationships, as seen in his labor theory of value, is useful when reading Davis, who identifies as a Marxist. This means not only that Davis embraces a political vision that rejects capitalism, but also that her mode of analysis follows Marx in considering the material structures underpinning human society.

Intersectionality

First coined by Black feminist activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, intersectionality refers to a method of social analysis that brings together multiple different ways of understanding identity—race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability—at the same time. Rather than considering gender alone, an intersectional analysis would consider how gender and class or gender and race work together to create (or define) a situation. Intersectional analysis originated from the work of Black feminists like Davis, and it has become an important method of approaching social analysis.

Militarization

The adoption of hardware and tactics associated with armies by domestic police forces is commonly described as militarization, which Davis first discusses in the second interview. According to Davis, militarization breaks down distinctions between war and peace, attack and protection. Police departments armed with technology more appropriate to a battlefield than a neighborhood are more likely to view those they are tasked to protect as enemy combatants. The same is true of a school that is patrolled by armed officers who screen pupils with technology created to identify terrorists or other agents of violence. For Davis, militarization is a practice linked to ideologies that oppose freedom.

Neoliberalism

The core values of the neoliberal political model are free-market capitalism, a decrease in governmental regulation or oversight, and a general withdrawal of government responsibility for providing social services. Neoliberalism, which emerged in the late 1970s as an important way of understanding the relationship between the state and the market, draws its key concepts from 19th-century liberal philosophy, particularly regarding its emphasis on liberty and consent. Davis, who introduces the term in her first interview, is especially critical of the individualism that neoliberalism encourages.

Prison-Industrial Complex

A phrase adapted from the term military-industrial complex (in which a country supports continued militarization through policymaking and national spending), the prison-industrial complex refers to the various businesses involved in housing, transporting, surveilling, or serving prisons and the people incarcerated in them. The phrase, which Davis focuses on especially in her first speech, specifically refers to the fact that these services, formerly the responsibility of governments, have been privatized or transferred to for-profit companies.

Systemic Racism

Racism is often understood in individual terms, taken to indicate personal prejudice against those who belong to a specific race. But many scholars, including Davis, think it is more important to consider how racism might be embedded deep within a system, generating outcomes that are unequal by design. Systemic racism thus refers to the ways that social, corporate, and political systems create or perpetuate hierarchies that relegate people of color to the bottom. This inequity is created both by direct action—such as lending money to some but not others—and by indirect outcomes—such as lack of access to property, meaning that a family might not be able to accrue generational wealth. The uneven conditions that systemic racism creates guarantee that white people can win again and again, often at the expense of people of color. This embeddedness then generates beliefs about merit and fairness, superiority and inferiority, that helps maintain white people’s economic and social dominance.

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