Angela Davis on Palestine, G4S, and the Prison Industrial Complex

With Israel's aggression against Gaza currently demanding our daily attention, here is a YouTube video of Angela Davis speaking in Great Britain last year about Palestine, G4S (a hyper-security enterprise operating now in 120 countries), and how both relate to the treatment of undocumented immigrants and the prison industrial complex. It starts out slow, but hang in there. I promise you that you won't be sorry.

The department and university where I teach are bringing Angela Davis to our campus to speak this fall and I, for one, am very excited at the prospect. She is one of my heroes for a range of reasons, has been for a long time, and continues to raise the bar for me as the years go by. I give you Angela Davis.

A Narrative About A Narrative

Time is an interesting thing. First of all, of course, it's one more of those social constructions. I mean, it didn't exactly come as part of the life-on-Earth starter kit. There was most certainly, I would imagine, a period early on when humans just lived in the moment. Indigenous people living traditionally still do, from what I understand. But as for us, we wear watches and calibrate gestation and are interminable consumers of calendars which all become obsolete annually. We wear time like spandex, allowing it to constrain us and demand of us lest it leave us, somehow, inexplicably, behind.

The fact is, though, that frustrating as all this often is, it is quite interesting sometimes to consider our and other people's lives in the temporal context, juxtaposing them to see where they meet or influence each other. For example, in 1970, when Angela Davis was arrested in New York City, I was in San Francisco, stretching my wings as a radical and absolutely unaware of her. How could I have been unaware of her?

In any case (unbeknownst to me), she was on the cover of Life magazine that summer and now, a copy of that cover hangs on my home office wall between a photo of the Angola 3 and a painting of a woman Zapatista. She's one of my heroes. And today, I'm reviewing her presentation of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself, brought out this year -- forty years after her arrest -- by City Lights, the highly respected San Francisco publishing house. It's a veritable kaleidoscope of magical coincidences, is it not? But I'm not finished yet.

See, this exact date in 1838 was the day Frederick Douglass broke through to freedom, escaping his bonds on his second try, at the age of twenty or so (he couldn't know for certain). Asked what it felt like to be free that day, Douglass wrote to a friend, "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions. Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil."

And so, I approach this task -- a simple review of the book -- with just such a lack of confidence that I can possibly communicate what I think of a book with so many reference points for me.

How Change Happens

I'm sorry I've been quiet. I spent two days at an African American Studies conference last week. Besides having my regular duties to perform. But the reason I didn't post was that I was pretty heavily distracted by a series of incidents and events that, to be honest with you, rocked my world somewhat.

I'm not at liberty to discuss it here, but suffice it to say I made the front page of two newspapers last week even though I was dodging reporters like a gandy dancer. My job has been more than a little threatened. My anonymity as a blogger is shot to hell. It's far, far from over and, in the middle of it all, a student of mine sent this video to the members of the sociology club I advise. Even though it's an hour long, I'm going to post it here because it's just that good.

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The poster featured above is by Ricardo Levins Morales and is available from the Northland Poster Collective.