WHY I PICKED IT: Stumbled onto it in a book store in Seattle
ELAPSED TIME: 3 weeks
RATING: Very Good
This book of essays by Activist (with a capital A) Angela Davis is very very good. Angela has been an advocate for civil rights in the United States for much of her life. There is so much here that is gripping and thought provoking:
a) King was the spokesperson for the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he was 26 years old. Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela were in their 20s when they started to drive change. Where are this generation's leaders and activists?
b) What is the purpose of prison - To rehabilitate or a punitive response to a crime? Which goal supports society's interests? The latter is more expensive and results in significantly higher recidivism rates. Not to mention expose our racism and make us forget our humanity.
c) She would "gladly relinquish the celebration of the first black woman National Security Adviser, now the first black woman Secretary of State (Condoleeza Rice), in exchange for a white male Secretary of State who might provide guidance on how to halt the U.S. global drive for empire, the racist war on terror, and the military aggression against the Iraqi people." I would have as well.
d) As of 2007, there were approximately 2,200,000 people incarcerated in the USA. Over the course of that year that number was over 13,000,000.
e) In the State of Florida, 950,000 ex- and current- felons do not have the right to vote. In the 2002 election, George W. Bush won Florida (and thus the US election) by 537 votes. Since most of those 950,000 are people of colour, and given that most people of colour vote Democrat, the election would have had a very different outcome if those disenfranchised voters would have a right to vote.
f) A socialist matched white and black applicants for a job. Some candidates had a felony conviction, others did not. White candidates with a felony conviction were called for interviews at the same rate as black candidates without one. In essence, black men are essentially born with the social stigma equivalent to a felony conviction.
g) When we hold Martin Luther King up on a pedestal, we trivialize the work of the thousands and thousands of people who imagined and worked towards a changed world... Including people like Bayard Rustin (who was black, openly gay and introduced MLK to the Ghandian concept of non-violent resistance).
h) Pat Parker's poem "Where do you go to become a non-citizen?"
i) As of 2008, 1% of all adult Americans are imprisoned on any given day.
j) A portion of Bishop Gene Robinson's prayer for US President Barack Obama:
- Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
- Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
- Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
- Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
- Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.
- Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.
