downas

it would take a long biography to analyze the political trajectory of Angela Davis's entire public career on the u.s. left to where she is today...but we don't need all that rn. let's just look at where she is now, in the 21st century.

on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign

Angela Davis was quoted as saying Obama's 2008 election was a “victory, not of an individual, but of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.” she said this in 2012; even if she had somehow missed Black radical criticism of Obama before 2008 (doubt it) she'd had nearly an entire presidency to examine just what was so “radical” about this dude. and that's the take she was giving audiences? really?

on hillary clinton

fast forward to 2016. Angela Davis says she's voting against donald trump (radlib speak for 'voting for hillary clinton'). she even suggests it's 'narcissistic' not to do so. thankfully, there are many of us who care more about what's possible than what's 'narcissistic'.

on Afropessimism

in 2018, Angela Davis attempted to critique Afropessimism, with gayatri spivak acting as an enabler. here's a transcript of her comments, with a key sentence bolded:

I want to use this opportunity to say something about the way in which the notion of ‘anti-blackness’ has travelled. I know this concept does do important work, but I’m very careful about the implications of this category that black people constitute the most important group that is subject to racism. Sometimes ‘anti-blackness’ is used as an implicit criticism of the category ‘people of colour’ and to point to ‘anti-blackness’ in communities of people of colour. Of course there is racism everywhere. And black people are not immune to either anti-black racism or racist-inspired ideological assaults against other people of colour. So it is important to be careful regarding assumptions that black people are always the primary targets of racism. Discussions of anti-blackness often centre on pain and injury, which although not unimportant, can create barriers to developing solidarity, to developing the kind of empathy we were talking about. And if, from where I stand, the importance of black people’s histories in the Americas resides precisely in the fact that there has been an ongoing freedom struggle for many centuries, the centrality of black struggles is much more about freedom than it is about blackness.

aren't the “barriers to developing solidarity” the actual practices of antiblackness, rather than Black politics which highlight and critique those practices? in discussing politcal relations between Black and non-Black people, shouldn't we be more concerned about “empathy”–or a lack of it–on the part of the oppressor group, non-Black people? one need not be an Afropessimist to realize this 'critique' is terrible. (it's also one that's been addressed repeatedly, at length, by a range of Black liberationists.) what's really being attacked here is any politics which refuses to decenter Black people and Black liberation, even when the pressure to do so comes from leftists, radicals, and revolutionaries.

2020: take a wild guess

that's right: she went up for joe biden. if you missed this in her comments on Obama, what really makes her a radlib isn't just that she supported the democratic party, but that she attempted to convince leftists and radicals that doing so was in line with their politics. her comments on the selection of Kamala Harris as vice presidential candidate make this clear: she is critical of Harris, but nevertheless says “it’s a feminist approach to be able to work with those contradictions. And so, in that context, I can say that I’m very excited.”

she makes bank saying things like this, btw

feel free to enter 'angela davis speaking fees' into a search engine of your choice for more on this point.

#StopCopCity

and now we come to the present. last month, the city of atlanta–a local extension of an illegitimate, slavery-enriched, invader-colonizing government–gave Davis an award and announced the institution of a local 'Angela Davis Day'. here, we can sidestep entirely analysis of the fallout–how the crowd responded, how Davis responded immediately, what she said later, and so on. instead, anyone who's read to the end of this might ask themselves why the atlanta city government feels that honoring Angela Davis is something it can even attempt to do. do you believe this honor would be extended to veterans of the Black Liberation Army? citizens of the Republic of New Afrika? any Black person anywhere who takes up arms against everything the united states of amerika stands for–and does so with pride?