emsenn

Angela Davis

2 min read

Angela Yvonne Davis (born 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, and academic. A member of the Communist Party USA and associated with the Black Panther Party, Davis was the target of an FBI manhunt in 1970 and spent sixteen months in jail before her acquittal in 1972. Her scholarship and organizing have focused on the connections between racism, capitalism, and the carceral state.

Core ideas

  • Prison abolition: Davis argues that prisons do not reduce harm but reproduce it — concentrating poverty, racism, and state violence into institutions that generate further damage. In Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), she contends that prisons have become so normalized that alternatives appear unthinkable, and that this normalization is itself a political achievement of the carceral state. Her abolitionist work connects directly to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s analysis of organized abandonment and organized violence.
  • Intersectionality of race, class, and gender in carceral systems: Davis’s analysis insists that the prison system cannot be understood through race alone, class alone, or gender alone. Mass incarceration targets Black and brown communities, working-class people, and women in ways that compound and reinforce each other. The carceral state is a site where racial capitalism operates through gendered and classed mechanisms simultaneously.
  • Black feminist politics: in Women, Race & Class (1981), Davis traced the history of American feminism and its repeated failures to address the conditions of Black women, arguing that a feminism unable to confront race and class reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to oppose.

Notable works

  • Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
  • Women, Race & Class (1981)
  • Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)
  • Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005)

Graph View

Backlinks