163 Quotes by Angela Y. Davis

Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.

Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.

The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.

Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit. At the time of its emergence, Black women were frequently asked to choose whether the Black movement or the women’s movement was most important. The response was that this was the wrong question.

[Trans women] have to fight to be included within the category “woman” in a way that is not dissimilar from the earlier struggles of Black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth.

As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.

For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.