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I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Angela Davis

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Angela Davis
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: January 29
Autobiographer
Feminist
Human Rights Activist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Politician
Teacher
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Angela Yvonne Davis
Angela Y. Davis
Prisons
Suggesting
Abolish
Prison
Function
Social

More quotes by Angela Davis

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I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.
Angela Davis
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I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.
Angela Davis
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I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
Angela Davis
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Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.
Angela Davis
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I’m a feminist so I believe in inhabiting contradictions. I believe in making contradictions productive, not in having to choose one side or the other side. As opposed to choosing either or, choosing both.
Angela Davis
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In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
Angela Davis
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I never saw myself as an individual who had any particular leadership powers.
Angela Davis
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We are never assured of justice without a fight.
Angela Davis
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That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.
Angela Davis
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Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
Angela Davis
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I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.
Angela Davis
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We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.
Angela Davis
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I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have - particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as [ Martin Luther] King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.
Angela Davis
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To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
Angela Davis
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I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.
Angela Davis
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We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.
Angela Davis
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I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world.
Angela Davis
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As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression.
Angela Davis
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We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn't happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Angela Davis
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I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Angela Davis