Angela Davis's "Women, Race and Class"---Please read before you try to sell your candidate.

[McCamy Taylor]

Lots of outrage over identity politics---people voting based upon their self perceived identity within some particular demographic group. In a perfect world, we would all get out our calculators and figure out which candidate will give us the most buck for our vote. Dems would win every single time in that world. However, we live in a world in which we have been divided along religious, ethnic, racial, health, sexuality and age lines. Then there are differences between different sectors of the economy. Everyone potentially belongs to a dozen different groups. We "identify" with those which seem to have the most effect on our lives. And so, if you have made it through medical school and are now a neurosurgeon, you may not identify quite as much with other Blacks who are still living lives of undereducation, overprosecution and discrimination and poverty. You now identify with "doctors" a privileged group in our culture. If you were arrested for jay walking at age 18, saw the charges bumped up to resisting arrest and have since been denied an education because of your "jay walking" conviction and now make minimum wage---you very likely identify as Black. If you also happen to be a woman with a jay walking conviction and a kid you can not afford because they shut down Planned Parenthood and your condom broke, then you identify as Black and female. How do you vote when you identify with multiple groups? Which liberation do you focus on first, your liberation as an exploited member of the working class or your liberation as a woman or your liberation as an ethnic minority? No fair saying "race and gender do not count in a perfect world, focus only on socialist economic worker versus bosses politics." In this imperfect world, other workers seek to exploit you because of your race and gender. Other workers need to be persuaded to join you in solidarity before the socialist revolution can begin. So, how do you raise your own value within the system? How do you destroy the individual 'isms which keep all workers down? How do you make other workers stop seeing you as a _____ and a _____ and a ______ and start seeing your as their brother/sister in arms?


http://www.amazon.com/Women-Race-Class-Angela-Davis/dp/0394713516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443121654&sr=8-1&keywords=angela+davis+women+race+and+class

[m-lekktor]

1. Angela Davis wants to abolish prisons.

She calls it "the Prison Industrial Complex". I have her book "Are Prisons Obsolete?" but haven't read it yet. She's an interesting and smart person!

Abolish prisons, says Angela Davis:

Questions the efficacy, morality of incarceration
By Beth Potier
Gazette Staff

In a lecture at the Kennedy School of Government's ARCO Forum Friday (March 7), activist and intellectual Angela Davis advocated for the abolition of prisons, casting the issue in human rights terms and urging a broader vision of justice.

"My question is, Why are people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure?" she said.

Davis, an icon of the radical political activism of the late 1960s and early '70s, spoke of prisons not as a tourist but as a former resident. She spent more than a year in prison before she was acquitted, in 1972, of charges of murder and kidnapping related to the failed escape of a group of African-American prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers in California.

Now a professor in the history of consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Davis may have tamed her trademark Afro but her ideas remain on the radical edge of the political spectrum. In this talk, the 2003 Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture co-sponsored by the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, and the Institute of Politics, she dismissed prison reform - the most prominent form of prison activism - as not going far enough.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/03.13/09-davis.html