A review by korrick
The Meaning of Freedom by Angela Y. Davis

5.0

According to neoliberalist explanations, the fact that these young black men are behind bars has little to do with race or racism and everything to do with their own private family upbringing and their inability to take moral responsibility for their actions.

That is something that the United States has basically offered to the world: a way of managing social problems by refusing to confront them. Instead of solving issues, the system puts people behind bars.

It's been a while since I was last hit over the head with a work of nonfiction to such a degree that it felt like pure blasphemy to even consider giving it anything other than five stars. And, contrary to appearances, it's not just cause I'm the type to hear a thinker like Davis and be more than tempted to just start singing in her choir, no questions asked. See, going into this book, I knew that this was the tome where I'd truly have to reckon with Davis' prison abolition stance, a topic that made my mind go 'but, but, but' any time I encountered it in the wild. Sure, the average rating is astronomical, but that has also been the case for many books I've read this year that proved to be more bloated sentiment than brilliant undertaking. There's also the fact that this edition did prove to not be the best edited (although the excoriating one star review lays it on to an absurd degree). However, if you live in the US and are reckoning with the country's definition of freedom beginning at the ability to die on the street and ending at the limits of gender, sexuality, and existing while not white, I don't see how you could get away with not reading this text. It doesn't cover every controversial topic pertaining to prison, and I'm sure there's many a queer young person who's just dying to screech about 'pedophiles' waiting in the TikTok wings. However, Davis' rhetorical power and evidence of lifelong commitment work in tandem to work utter miracles in one's definitions of right and wrong, and at the end of this, I can honestly say that I am now a believer in the future she strives towards.

There is a dangerous individualism that is not unrelated to the possessive individualism of capitalism. And it is bound to transform the collective victories we win.

I would gladly relinquish the celebration of the first black woman National Security Adviser, now the first black woman Secretary of State, 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.

There's a lot to be said for going insane in the time of late capitalism. For the rest of us, there's what has worked before, what is currently breaking, and what kind of work it's going to take to transform the previous two into a vehicle for where we want to go. Davis has taught at UCLA, been incarcerated as one of the top ten most wanted in the USA, and doesn't fuck with electoral politics, so the fact that this homeland of mine hasn't blown her head off yet is evidence more of its incompetency than anything else. It's also an impressive enough list of credentials that I'll believe she's on the right side of most things until I see otherwise, so the fact that I came out of this committing to the need for prison abolition was quite the opposite of a forgone conclusion. Given, however, how folks who consider themselves pretty darn intelligent continue to lose their panties over [b:In Defense of Looting|50999303|In Defense of Looting A Riotous History of Uncivil Action|Vicky Osterweil|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1590674289l/50999303._SY75_.jpg|75846187], I'm not about to recommend this work to anyone who doesn't have at least one work of Davis', or Shakur's, or Galeano's, or Klein's, or some other writer who dares to call the beast (or at least part of it) what it is. Cause you see, if someone comes up to me and goes "But Aubrey, I have to take advantage of hundreds of years of oppression to get my own slice of the cake, else you're being illegal and, even worse, hurting my feelings," I'm going to introduce them to my KKK side of the family and ask them how far do they think these relatives of mine will allow them to run when the mask inevitably drops. For what Davis proves is how the neoliberal displacement of blame from legalized rapaciousness onto the backs of those thrown in jails and thrown out of their country's stability and thrown out of protection from being hunted for sport is all a practice run for when, in times of tribulation, you, the chosen diversity, will be handed your thirty coins of several in return for looking away when the rest of your kind are fed to the slaughter. Not a fan? Well. You may want to stick around, then, and pay attention to what Davis offers as an alternative.

Immigrant populations often travel along the same routes that have been carved out by migrating corporations. They simply retrace them in reverse.

Rather than characterize "immigration" as the source of the current crisis, it is more accurate to say that it is the homelessness of global capital that is responsible for so many of the problems people are experiencing throughout the world.

I attended an all staff meeting today, where the head administrator handed out city-emblazoned thermoses to make up for not granting us access to 9/80 schedules (supposedly guaranteed by our union-supported memorandum of understanding) and time off on Juneteenth. It's the sort of event where, like most things in life, the requirement for everyone to be professional has an inverse relationship with an individual's bureaucratic power, so I took what measures I could to maintain an even keel in temper while keeping my critical faculties intact. It also helped that, all throughout various institutional leader's pathos-laden waffling and blustering obfuscation, I could think about my upcoming meeting with a mutual aid organization that promises to lean in more than a little to sort of convictions Davis was espousing here. You see, I've reached the point in my life where I've committed to a freedom of existence that may throw me in the path of more hard knocks, but is that much less likely to drive myself into alcoholism or any of those other capitalism sanctioned methods of self-medication commonly known as addictions. It took me a tad longer to realize this, but with Davis' help, I've come to see that, so long as other folks aren't free, so long as human sacrifices are made and wielded as a necessary cost to my increased privileges, my freedom to be human, however hard won it may have been under my own individual initiative, is irrevocably compromised, and can be 'taken away' as easily as it was originally 'given'. Other folks may be comfortable in trading in their freedom for a joke so that the scaaaaawy stranger predator doesn't get them, but I've seen the face of those who would gladly sell me on the carving block across from me at the hiring table, and let me tell you, jail wouldn't fix them. For what would fix what every business program, every financial literacy book, every legal loophole and social network and Linkedin Learning teaches as good praxis? No. If I want my freedom, I must claim it alongside all other human beings, and no amount of state sanctioned social death of millions of my fellow citizens is going to change that.

I]f we rely on the prison system to solve the problem of homophobia, we are relying on a system that is complicit in the process that has rendered homophobia socially acceptable.

If the repressive institution is only abolished negatively, without replacing it with institutions promoting substantive freedoms, then that repression will persist, as the legacy of enslavement persists today.