On Nov. 20, internationally renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis sat down for a conversation with celebrated philosopher Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. for the final event of the Fall 2024 Global Justice theme within the 2024-2025 William J. Cooper Series at Swarthmore College. More coverage from The Phoenix on the event will follow in the coming weeks. After the conversation between Davis and Outlaw, Davis sat down for an interview with The Phoenix. Below is an edited transcript.
Daniel Perrin: You’ve written a lot about the impact of Brandeis [University] and other universities in your realization of the activist-academic role. In this moment where we’re seeing the sterilization of higher education across the board, does higher education and, more specifically, the liberal arts’ commitment to deep thought that you gravitated towards earlier in your life, still hold the tools for liberation? And, if those tools have been weakened, what are the steps towards enhancing those tools again?
Angela Davis: I think there are a lot of tools. We’re on a college campus, so we’re focusing very specifically on the ways in which experiences on this campus can contribute fundamentally to education. But, those tools would be different if I were speaking, for example, to a union, or if I were trying to learn from the workers who are members of a union. I’m an honorary member of the [longshore workers’ union] because I once said that had I not become a college professor, I think I probably would have gone into longshore work, so they decided to give me an honorary membership.
I think that one develops tools based on where one happens to be and where one is going. Even people who see themselves as being inside of the structure of oppression can contribute to the development of new tools in ways that they might not have imagined. It’s like jazz: you improvise based on who you’re playing with and what you’re trying to get across at the moment.
DP: You’ve had a complicated role in electoral politics over the years: running for vice president with the Communist Party, then leaving the party, and, in recent elections, making an argument for voting for Democratic candidates, albeit qualified. What would you say to a campus of young people who are grappling with both the importance and shortcomings of electoral politics as a form of change-making?
AD: I was a member of the Communist Party for many years. I treasure the lessons I learned during that period, including from running for office, which was not really about running for office. It was about broadening the electoral terrain. It was about challenging the narrow two-party framework of electoral politics. It was about calling for a different relationship between electoral politics and activism.
I did not endorse [Vice President] Harris. I made the argument that the work that we do during electoral periods is not that of finding the best person to represent our interests in whatever office they’re going to occupy, but of broadening the terrain for progress so that ordinary people can engage in the kinds of activism that put pressure on whoever is in office. The question is: who will be more subject to that kind of pressure? That’s very different from endorsing, and I clarify this because a lot of people ask, “Why did you endorse her?”
That is how I see electoral politics. Unfortunately, in this country, [an election] is the one period when everyone becomes political, and when we project all of our desires and interests. Then someone is elected, and it dies. When [former President Barack] Obama was elected, people were so excited. I was excited. That was the very first time I voted for a member of the Democratic Party, as a matter of fact. But, we didn’t put any pressure on him. We didn’t demonstrate when he said he was going to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, and then he didn’t. There were never any massive demonstrations against that position. We have to be able to support and, at the same time, challenge the people who are out front as political candidates.
DP: From both a practical and an ideological perspective, how do you balance the expanding working class support that we saw for a figure like [President-elect Donald] Trump with the danger that he poses to the causes that we care about? Is there an opportunity in the current moment for working class politics to be a united front?
AD: I think we’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake, and I include myself in that “we,” in not focusing enough attention on working-class issues. I try my best, but I haven’t done it collectively and consistently. The Communist Party still does, but the Communist Party is a really tiny formation now, so it’s not going to make a major difference. But I think that we should learn from this experience and think deeply about Marxist examination. Marx is important because capitalism is still here, and I don’t think that there’s anyone who has developed as important an analysis of the functioning of the capitalist system. I wish Marx were taught more on campuses like this. Not only Marx, but those who are looking closely at ways in which global capitalism is responsible for and in conjunction with racism. Global capitalism is about racial capitalism. What I will say is that we have been critical of the assumption that the working class is white, the working class is men, and so forth. The kind of intersectional perspective that has come from feminism supplants that, but oftentimes, it drops the working class from the new formation. I think that’s a major problem.
DP: Activists all over are facing incredible barriers to organizing, with the restriction of protest that we’ve seen on college campuses and beyond, and a Trump administration that threatens to use the federal executive branch to crack down on dissent even further. As someone who has fought the system in many ways, what do you notice about this era of change-making compared to those in the past? And what do you suggest?
AD: First of all, things happen much more rapidly. That has to do with social media. It has to do with a number of technological developments. As a matter of fact, as someone who’s been doing work around abolition for most of my life, I never expected abolition to become a discourse available to large numbers of people. I’m not saying that there are lots of abolitionists out there, but I’m saying that twenty years ago we said the word abolition, and it didn’t resonate, and now everybody knows it.
That [rapidity] is a challenge that I think your generation is going to have to figure out. I’m waiting for people to figure out how to use social media. You can’t get rid of it because it’s here. It’s a framework. But, I’m waiting for people to figure out how we effectively utilize it, rather than having it use us. That’s a major issue for this time, and I think that has to be a part of the whole process of organizing, because it can play an incredible role to allow access to communicate with people across oceans instantaneously. I always think about the internationalism we used to talk about in the ’60s, when we couldn’t even make long distance phone calls because it was so expensive. These are questions that have to be taken on by young people.
DP: You mentioned in the talk the importance of nuanced thinking, and how colleges can be formative to that skill. So, what have you changed your mind about in your career, and what kind of media do you look for that ends up being formative to your thought process?
AD: Well, you never really know at the time. For example, I was not really open to feminism when it developed in relation to what we used to call “white bourgeois feminism,” and I could never have imagined how powerfully my own thinking would change as a result of feminist methodology. We talk about intersectionality, but that’s just a shortcut that many people don’t even realize is a shortcut. It’s about thinking things together that are normally thought about separately and apart. I think that for me, feminist methodology has been absolutely critical, and I never would have imagined that early on. I think I wrote this in the most recent foreword to my autobiography, that it was my experience in jail that opened me up to a kind of feminism that we now call “intersectional feminism” or “Black feminism,” but that certainly was not something that I expected.
DP: Any final advice for Swarthmore students?
AD: I think people should study and do what they love studying and doing. I never tell people that they should do this or do that. You have to find ways to discover what you’re passionate about, and then use that to make contributions to the larger struggles with justice, change, and hopefully revolution.
DP: Thank you very much.
