Introduction to Angela Davis
February 28th, 2008
The Angela Y. Davis Reader edited by Joy James is a fascinating collection of articles by the famous former Black Panther and former Communist. The articles are organized into five sections on prisons, race & gender, culture, interviews, and an appendix on her trial. They put forward a variety of arguments on many topics, including a defense of black feminism, prison abolitionism, and cultural analysis. There are many strengths in her writings, as well as a few weaknesses (primarily in her analysis of the so-called “socialist” states), but I found the links she shows between different forms of oppression and past forms of oppression particularly compelling.
Davis makes a persuasive argument linking contemporary prisons, especially prison labor, to the convict lease system and slavery before it. She correctly points out that the thirteenth amendment, which abolished slavery, left open a loophole allowing the enslavement of criminals. This loophole was exploited by southern governments to re-enslave many blacks through the convict lease system. Blacks were criminalized in order to take advantage of the 13” amendment's loophole and justify re-enslaving them. The same trend continues today with prison labor and the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are disproportionately people of color, while largely white-owned corporations make money off their imprisonment through the construction of prisons and the use of cheap prison labor. Like slavery and the convict lease system, this also harms the wages of workers outside prison, since we have to compete with lower-cost forced labor.
In her article on JoAnn Little, and others on sexual assault, she does an excellent job showing the links between gender, class, and race with respect to rape. Much as male capitalists exploit workers labor, they also exploit female workers sexually. While raping women of a lower social status was largely ignored or considered acceptable, when a man rapes a woman who “belongs” to another man of an equal or higher status he is violating that man’s “property” in his woman. Thus cases of black men raping white women are harshly punished, while the reverse is true if a white man rapes a black woman (especially if the man is of a higher social class).