163 Quotes by Angela Y. Davis

Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy – a process that reached its peak during the 1980s – and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era.

That’s true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Expediency governed the slaveholders’ posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles. When.

Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was – 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within – internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing.