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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle collects several speeches and interviews that the Black activist, philosopher, and feminist Angela Y. Davis gave between 2013 and 2015. This was a pivotal moment for Black Americans. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States in 2008 led many to believe that the nation’s long struggle with racial prejudice had been relegated to the past. Their belief was that Obama’s election had ushered the nation into a new post-racial era. But, as Davis argues, a marked increase in police killings of Black people revealed that declaring racism over was wildly premature. Indeed, those who made these hasty announcements, Davis says, failed to recognize some basic facts about Black Americans, who all too often live within the prison   system. Davis urges her audiences to recognize the ways oppression is still alive not just for Black Americans but for historically marginalized groups around the world, and to take up the struggle for freedom through collective action.

Read about the fascinating life of Angela Y. Davis.

While there are a wide range of texts in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, both in terms of the topics and the audiences they address, several key themes appear regularly. Throughout these texts, Davis argues the importance of understanding freedom struggles as fundamentally international, befitting a volume that situates Davis in London, Turkey, and Missouri, among other places. Davis also stresses the role of international mentors, such as the South African activist and president Nelson Mandela, in her evolution as a thinker and activist. The fight to end apartheid in South Africa drew inspiration from the civil rights movement, and, in turn, it also nurtures Palestinians seeking to end Israeli occupation, Davis underscores. In almost all of the selections, Davis urges her audiences to recognize and support the Palestinian fight for freedom by learning about their political situation and by embracing the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement. This is especially true for Black Americans, Davis states, since Palestinians have been made immigrants and strangers in their own land, a dispossession that should resonate for people whose ancestors had been enslaved.

Read about Main Idea #1: the importance of an intersectional and international approach for freedom.

Indeed, as Davis stresses, enslavement is not fully in the past, and its ghosts still haunt U.S. culture, politics, and society. Davis’s main focus falls on contemporary practices, specifically mass incarceration, police brutality, and—most importantly—systemic racism. Davis argues that although racism is often believed to be a problem with individuals, whether victims or perpetrators, this belief is a mistake. While racist individuals do commit heinous crimes, as the 2015 massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston demonstrates, the more pernicious forms of racism are embedded within systems, generating inequities that seem on the surface to be the result of impartial or fair processes. Davis and other Black activists argue, however, that racist assumptions are baked into legal, economic, and social systems, making sure that white Americans end up with the biggest share. When a system habitually ends up validating one group over another, there is something wrong with the system, Davis posits, and it needs to be abandoned.

Read more about mass incarceration, police brutality, and systematic racism being new forms of slavery (Main Idea #2).

Davis asserts Black Americans have been systemically stripped of their dignity and rights through mass incarceration fueled through stereotypes, many inherited from the 19th century. She states that by being denied decent education, housing, and access to jobs, Black people are often prevented from enjoying freedoms long before they end up behind bars, and that when a militarized police force patrols a person’s neighborhood and school, there is no room for error. This is a lesson that too many Black people, killed by the police, have learned, Davis argues. While the United States houses 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people, many of whom are Black or people of color, it is impossible to celebrate the “end” of slavery, Davis maintains. The only way to remedy this situation is to define freedom in such a way that it enables humans to flourish by redistributing society’s resources to the many rather than keeping them with the few. Put a different way, for Davis, ending the conditions of enslavement depends on the dismantling of neoliberal capitalism.

Read a brief context essay about history’s role in the constant struggle for freedom.

What Davis wants is radical change, the repudiation of the status quo that prevents the expansion of freedom. She urges her audiences to reject moderation and compromise, to see minor changes or economic gifts as bribes to protect the power of the wealthy few. Rather than suggesting that everyone must lift themselves up individually, Davis celebrates the power of the collective. Instead of celebrating the heroic individual, Davis advises that we should reject neoliberal political systems and capitalistic economic systems that prioritize individual achievement and private property.

Read explanations of important quotes from Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.

Davis offers few specific ideas about what communal models she would enact, an absence that seems to be by design. Several times in the book, she indicates that the new movement will be built by people whose ideas of the future are still taking shape. In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Davis writes to help bring some version of that future into existence, offering encouragement and ideas but leaving room for new activists to take the lead.

Read about about Davis’s belief that radical political change is necessary to advange the cause of freedom (Main Idea #3).

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