Activist Angela Davis Urges Examination of "New Racisms" at Vanderbilt Lecture

by Anna Thompson

Racism is not static. The racism we encountered in the civil rights era is not the same racism we encounter today. Now most people recognize it is not acceptable to explicitly support white supremacy, that is not to say they do not support it implicitly. The point I want to make is that just because the law no longer provides for the overt expression of racism does not mean that racism is not a major factor in our contemporary lives.

I remember in the 60’s I was visiting my family in Birmingham. At that time Birmingham was still the most segregated city in the South. Now I went to hear Dr. King who was expected to talk about civil rights, but instead he talked about Vietnam. The point of his lecture was that the struggle for civil rights is integrally related to the struggle to end war.

I mention this because there is an urgent context to the current situation. It seems that precisely those institutions which claim to be making the world safe for democracy are those institutions which are waging war and violence around the world.

Now this is black history month and I was recalling the way we celebrated it in the past when it was called "negro history week." At the elementary school I attended we were expected to do projects for this week. I remember pulling out all the Ebony and Jet magazines to see who I wanted to include. I mention this story because I might suggest that we want to think about who is important, and who we might want to include. People such as Mae Jensen, the first black women astronaut, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female congressperson. She is the reason we celebrate MLK day. Of course there is Thurogood Marshall, the first black supreme court justice.

I say all of this to note that there are some firsts that I have more difficulty celebrating. There was a time when we believed that a success for one was a success for the entire community. This is why we celebrated firsts. The purpose of black history month is not so much to recite history and figures and dates, but rather to reflect on the knowledge we have acquired, so that we all might know the meaning of freedom and democracy.

I am not suggesting that other groups cannot celebrate the likes of Condaleeza Rice, but I think the NAACP made a terrible mistake in its recent honoring of her. The progressive and radical inheritance of black history has not been claimed by all African Americans. As Dr King showed us so many years ago, the modes of domination are linked on the most obvious levels, but there are other connections.

I would like us to think about the connections in the past that have helped us contest anti-black racism. You see racism is not static. The racism we encountered in the civil rights era is not the same racism we encounter today. No longer are there explicit references to race in the law. I can remember a time when there were laws prohibiting any relations between blacks and whites except economic. Now most people recognize it is not acceptable to explicitly support white supremacy, that is not to say they do not support it implicitly. The point I want to make is that just because the law no longer provides for the overt expression of racism does not mean that racism is not a major factor in our contemporary lives.

The racism that resides in the material structure of our society may be even more dangerous than old fashioned racism. Race still determines who gets to go to prison and who doesn’t. Of the 2 million people currently in prison, 70% are people of color. The military, too, bears the mark of racism, and not in the sense that Colin Powell, another first, means when he calls the military the most democratic institution in this country.

I am talking about race structuring institution. So many men and women of color and poor people rely on the military as their only hope for an education. These are the obvious ways racism tends to hide in the structures of society. According to the law, everyone in prison has had due process. The problem is the law is unable to apprehend the difference that race makes and so conspires to send people of color to the worst places our society creates.

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As black people we have become accustomed to the status of the most oppressed. We need to do something about this. We might even go so far as to be offended if someone else claims that status from us. We need to include discussion of sexual orientation in our discussion of civil rights. The topic of gay marriage has created all this controversy, while failing to critique the institution of the family itself. African-American cultural traditions do not necessarily represent a nuclear family, which is based on male supremacy. Marriage is an economic arrangement in this culture, based on property relationships.

The terrain of racism is very different today. It is hugley infected by ideologies of the war against terror. We must look at how anti-arab, anti- muslim racism is being reconstructed by our culture. I want to reflect on Abu Ghraib, that infamous American torture prison camp. Why is it that we are able to forget the impact of those images. It seems to me those images are the visual example of these new racisms. These people are basically forgotten.

We live in an environment populated by images and oftentimes we cannot distinguish between the images and the social reality we inhabit. We assume the power of the visual expresses the truth of the image. Meanings are not self evident. There are interpretive frameworks. What were the dominant interpretations of the Abu Ghraib photos? It seems to me one of the dominant questions was does this depict torture? Was it systematic? The major discussion around these photos was to try to explain American democracy. The human content of these images was erased. We think of these people as faceless Iraqis who don’t have names. This reminds me of lynchings and the photos of lynchings. What we have is the materialization of an ideologically constructed enemy. Not to mention the pornography of the images and the role white women play in this construction.

Race and racism are mutable. The civil rights movement was great, it was important, but it can’t provide a permanent context in which we can refer to the present and the future. Globalization is a new context. I want us to think about the extent to which black folks have been invited to participate in these new racisms. That figure of the terrorist gets associated with historical racisms. I would like to urge us all not to accept the easy answer, but to think more deeply.

Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, argued the Geneva Convention is outdated. What we have learned from the Bush administration is that there are connections - connections between the soldiers who perpetrated abuses in Abu Ghraib and the roles they played in their previous lives as prison guards. Women undergo strip searches and cavity searches routinely in this country. This is about sexual assault. There is a connection between these everyday tortures and those spectacular tortures. We have someone like Gonzales, who is Bush attorney general, who was his counsel as governor of Texas, who suggested that every case of state sponsored murder go forward, including of the mentally retarded, in an administration that oversaw the most executions of an state in US history.

People do not want to be associated with the US anymore, with this drive for empire. Even those of us who are progressive still think the US is better. We are in for a rude awakening. In Europe the US is persona non grata. The death penalty is one of the reasons. People in Europe ask us how could we elect George W. Bush. If we replace the words "freedom and democracy" with "capitalism" then we can understand more clearly what the Bush administration is about.

We have been encouraged to forget about the gross violations of human rights that happen when democracy is "exported." This is really about the juggernaut of privatization. Across the golbe there are people standing up for a better future. Concerned people who are not afraid to dream about a better world. A non-exploitative world is possible, if we are linked by solidarity and mutuality and respect, in the spirit of so many people’s lives that we remember in black history month. They all worked and we all should work to reach the conditions of radical social transformation.

http://www.tnimc.org/feature/display/4466/index.php