First Book Club Meeting Recap: “Freedom is a Constant Struggle” by Angela Y. Davis

In the midst of Israel's siege on Gaza, abolitionist struggle against state and intimate violence here at home, and movement-building within and beyond our Decarcerate Community, we gathered together for the inaugural meeting of our bi-monthly Bail Fund Book Club.  On January 13, we collectively soaked up the wisdom of Angela Davis, working together to create a shared knowledge base on abolition and movement-building, connect the dots between struggles against state violence and oppression “then and now,” and think together about Davis’ 2015 collection Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. This first meeting of our bi-monthly Bail Fund Book Club welcomed a spirited group of folks, in-person at the Forbes Library in Northampton, virtually via zoom, and in conversation on our Discord channel.

Here is a selection of our discussion questions about the book, prepared by volunteer Elizabeth Smith:

1) Reform, as Davis says here, is integral to the prison industrial complex (PIC) as an institution; as she says, “The history of the very institution of the prison is a history of reform. Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison, it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons.” How is the concept of ‘reform’ instrumental to carceral ideology/the prison as an institution? How can the understandings of ‘reform’ gleaned from this perspective inform our own abolitionist demands and strategies?

2) Making, drawing out, and illuminating connections between white supremacist capitalist repressive ideologies, regimes, and apparatuses is a core focus of Davis’ analysis here. What are some of the most salient connections between police, prisons, the military, and other economic/political/social institutions both within the US and abroad that she discusses? How can understanding these connections inform our organizing? What connections does she draw out between the Black liberation and Black radical tradition in the US and anti-colonial struggles abroad (Palestine in particular), and how can these inform and strengthen anti-carceral strategies?

3) Relatedly, Davis speaks repeatedly about the importance of recognizing and acting based on what she calls the “intersectionality of struggles” – a framework that draws out and organizes from the interconnected, mutually reinforcing nature of multiple oppressions (gender, race, class, immigration status, sexuality, disability, caste, and more). How does thinking about intersectionality in this way shift how we could think about anti-carceral movement work, and ourselves in relation to it?

4) In Davis’ analysis, she points out that a feminist approach to understanding prisons insists that what those on the margins experience can illuminate the workings of the entire system; speaking specifically about trans and gender non-conforming prisoners, she notes that “a feminist approach would insist both on what we can learn from, and what we can transform, with respect to trans and GNC prisoners, but also it insists on what this knowledge and activism tells us about the nature of punishment writ large.” What can we learn about carcerality and the PIC through this framework? How could this shift our thinking and advocacy for prisoners facing multiple intersecting oppressions?

5) Davis resurfaces and asks us to consider the iconic feminist slogan “the personal is political” (“Feminist approaches urge us to develop understandings of social relations, whose connections are often only intuited… Everyone is familiar with the slogan “the personal is political” – not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives, are very much informed by ideology.”). How can we productively apply this understanding to carcerality and the prison industrial complex?

6) Towards the end, the book encourages us to think more expansively about what a “successful” movement looks like or achieves, about our collective goals and the many ways a diversity of activist tactics can further them. She also prods us to think in the long-term and resist what she terms “a media process, a mediated process of becoming stale news”, citing the Occupy movement as an example: “We cannot assume that now simply because the tents are no longer up that the struggle of the 99% has been dismantled… the Occupy movement made it possible for us to talk about capitalism in an open, public way that had not been possible since the 1930s. …We need to celebrate this renew possibility and recognize that we still inhabit a political space created by the Occupy movement.” How does thinking in the long term, past our own lifetimes, and taking seriously this kind of collective opening of possibility as a substantive activist victory shift how we think about our own work towards liberation (cultural, spiritual, political, economic, etc)?