Angela Davis Knows “It’s Time For Younger Generations To Take The Lead”

By K. High


Angela Davis is prepared to pass the torch, and you’re the recipient.


In the past few months, the social justice leader has visited select college campuses group in attempt to speak with who she believes are a few of the most powerful people in our country: young people. On Tuesday, April 2, she visited Syracuse University, where she previously contained the title of Distinguished Visiting Professor. Nevertheless this time, she appeared because the keynote speaker for the Delta Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity’s annual Truth Be Told series, an event contained for students in which experts and professionals reveal the truths about their respective industry. Eager to connect with the younger audience in attendance, Davis’s words were exactly what these emerging leaders needed to hear


Davis has dedicated her life to social justice. Growing up while in the Civil Rights Era in Birmingham, Alabama, her parents inspired her to think critically about the  racism embedded into the world around her — the disproportionate incarceration of Black people in particular. Prison reform became her life’s work, and, right after eventually earning a PhD in philosophy, she went on to be a public leader in the fight for change.  For decades, she’s been really interested in her mission of the revealing and organizing around the truths of the Black experience in America.


Right now, as a distinguished author, educator, and activist, she still travels the nation speaking about the issues of racism, the condition of the prisoners In America, and LGBTQ rights. Before she stepped on the stage at Syracuse University, she chatted with MTV News about what younger generations of activists should know about the work ahead of them.


1. Younger Generations Must Lead the Way


“Radical change has routinely come from young people. And colleges and universities are places where — with all of their defects and all of their problems, and all of their racism, and everything else — there really are venues where folks are allowed to engage in processes of thinking and imagining. So I think that it is quite organic for students wish to transform the world. Plus it appears to me that this is the place where you're supposed to be procuring knowledge and developing ways of thinking, and knowledge to me is only significant in for now as it makes a difference in the world. So students should be in the forefront of radical struggles. Students have habitually played major roles in revolution. Those of us who come from a different generation of activists have to recognize that it's time for the younger generations to take the lead and show us the way.”


2. The Struggle For Freedom Is Ongoing and Evolving


“I don't know whether one can dictate the parameters and limits of freedom. Because I visualize our consciousness of freedom as developing, as we struggle for freedom. Freedom might look like one particular set of conditions at one moment in history, however then later it becomes more complicated.


“I often talk about the fact that If I first became an activist, we were are fighting for freedom for the Black man. And that is how we conceptualize freedom, that was the vocabulary that we used. Nevertheless although so several of these who were involved in the struggle were females, we didn't realize we weren't even writing ourselves into that narrative of freedom. So then we brought gender into the picture, which creates a whole new set of conditions. And I think that is what we do as we move along.


“Now we recognize issues like sexuality, and the non-binary structure of gender, all of this is relatively new. And then I think eventually, we’re going to have to look at the capitalist industrial production of food and its impact on animals, and [the environment] is going to be a piece of the way we conceptualize freedom. I think that what is exhilarating about committing oneself to the struggle for freedom, is that as one moves along, and as one wins victories, one learns more about the opportunities that can be held in the category of freedom.”


3. Security Doesn’t Have to Depend on Violence


“We have to develop new modes of collective security. Unfortunately, as soon as we think about security, we immediately go to the police. I think, this is a critical period because we're starting to recognize that those ideological impulses are what gets us in trouble so much. Just as we’re calling for a re-conceptualization of what security means in the larger society, so that we don't have to depend on violence, it seems crazy that we rely on these systems of violence for our security against violence, since that security continually produces and reproduces the violence. Some days we get caught up in those differences without having ways to navigate them.”


4. Fear Doesn’t Have to Stop Us From Acting


“It's OK to have a certain sort of fear because we don't aspire to just totally neglect the problems and those things that might cause pain and fear. Yet I like the point that Audre Lorde made, about fear not having to immobilize us. Fear doesn't have to stop us. We can be afraid, and we can still act.


“What is so astonishing about Black history is that although there has been unspeakable violence, although there have been insurmountable barriers, Black people have persevered, and have not only persevered, yet have learned how to make aesthetics and pleasure in the midst of experiencing that fear. So I think that once we teach young people about the past, we don't focus only on all the violence and pain and suffering, we give attention to the aesthetics that was produced, the art that came out of that. Black people have created art that is the only real contribution this nation has made to the world; that’s known all over the place.”


5. Know Your Purpose, And Progress


“To be a revolutionary is also to learn how to experience collective love, and to learn how to remake relations with your comrades so that they foreshadow what it is that we're attempting to strive for. And that demonstrates that we have to take care of each other, and develop ways of guaranteeing that we can’t take care of each other. Although it doesn't have to come to the point where the person becomes suicidal.


“I think this is just starting to be worked on. Those of us who may have essential contributions, sort of begin to age out. I still feel like I'm a revolutionary, yet I also know what I don't know. And I also know that young people know best how to engage with all of those short-term changes, and who have begun to deal with things like new forms of leadership. What was so fantastic about Black Lives Matter, aside from the fact that we've noticed ways to continue the struggle against police violence behind the individual cases, we know it has something to do with getting rid of the apparatus itself. Nevertheless the new motions of leadership that females can lead, that queer ladies can lead, queer black girls can lead ... And can talk about a leadership that doesn't rely on masculine paradigms. I love Martin Luther King, [Jr.] And Malcolm [X], although we're behind that right now. And it's young people who know best where we're going.”