☆ review & reflect☆
29 JAN 2025
| WOMEN, CULTURE & POLITICS by Angela Davis |
a reflection
Many, many, many thoughts floated across my brain waves while reading this book; many questions and discoveries and validations sparked as a result of reading mama Angela’s written voice. She touched on lots of topics that are important to my very operation as a femme presenting Black person born, raised, and living in America, specifically through the lense of being born from African immigrant parents.
From reproductive justice, the Black woman’s movement as experienced through the scope of the Reagan administration (juxtaposed against my current experience of life amidst a second Cheeto term… yikes…), sexual violence against Black women, Black women’s health, Black women’s connection to women’s liberation movements across the globe, capitalism, education, art and healing. She wrote about these many things affecting the very intricate fabric that is the Black woman’s experience on this earth.
This book took me back to a monumental moment when I was in college, the time I read Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall. This piece is brilliant, particularly in the way that it dives deep into the importance of intersectionality within the women’s movement. Where mainstream, white feminism primarily caters towards the cis-gendered, able-bodied, wealthy or educated white woman; intersectional feminism centers Black women, women of color, nonbinary people, LGBTQIA+ identifying people, people with disabilities, women in poverty, uneducated women, and ultimately anyone under the sun who identifies with the economic, political, sexual, and personal liberation of all people. We hate white feminism 🤮️ and truthfully, I barely like using the word feminism all together... but I digress. Topic for a different day.
What I loved about Women, Culture & Politics specifically is the way that these topics tied directly into the on-the-ground work that mama Angela has done in her lifetime. I absolutely loved reading about her many global and national experiences, the many things she learned in relation to these topics she is so passionate about. It’s interesting the ways that this piece of writing by a 45-year-old Angela Davis in 1989 is extremely relative to the life I am living now, as a 24-year-old first generation Black woman in America. So many juxtapositions, similarities, and nuances were noticed while I read, but I wanna take a second to touch on some key takeaways in this likkle rambling of thoughts.
One of my favorite parts of reading this book was the first hand accounts of some of Angela Davis’ global engagements. She spoke about her experiences at conferences, forums, and speaking engagements in various parts of the world. In the summer of 1985, she attended an international assembly in Nairobi, Kenya called Forum ‘85; sponsored by non-governmental groups and organized by the Kenyan Ministry of Culture and Social Services. She also wrote about an experience in which she traveled to Cairo, Egypt to research the lives of Arab women in seeking to understand their liberation struggle as it relates to that of the Black woman in America. In this particular part of the book, she made way for an idea that I think is really important in addressing the oppression of women and non-men outside of the western world; women’s issues do not revolve solely around sexuality.
In short, she was sent to Cairo to write a piece on sexual violence against Egyptian women as it relates to their struggle for liberation. Specifically, she was sent to research female genital mutilation and women’s rights in relation to Sharia law. When she arrived and began conversing with women, many of whom were higher class academics and leaders (which opens up another topic for a different day… because in my opinion; wealthy and/or educated women are NEVER an accurate representation of the struggles of women in any culture, anywhere across the globe, but AGAIN! I digress) she found that her speaking towards Egyptian women’s sexuality as if it were the apex of the women’s freedom movement in Arab culture was extremely distasteful.
An excerpt from the book:
In the west, we tend to see the struggles of folks across the globe as an extension of what we know to be true of their lives, their struggles, and their existence based on our very biased viewpoints; which 9 times out of 10 is inaccurate and nothing more than an agent of the very same white supremacist ideology that we are actively fighting so hard against. Who are we to say we know and understand what women across the world need in order to achieve liberation based on our American perspectives? Why do we always seem to think we know the correct answers? Why do we speak so passionately, so “academically”, about the lives and experiences of those who do not come from where we come from?
Truthfully, I admire Angela Davis for her ability to be able to recognize her own biases and write about them in an objective way; in a way that shows her willingness to show up, learn, and change. I pray and hope that I am able to achieve this level of transparency within myself in this lifetime, God knows I’m working on it. In my experience within the spaces of community organizing that I have both been part of and witness to, people tend to try to show up perfect every time. I’m not sure if it comes from a space of ego, from a space of trying to “prove”, or from a space of not wanting to be wrong; because honestly I find myself falling into the same habit often. I do believe that in most cases, it doesn’t come from a place of malicious intent. Maybe it’s a mix of anxiety, insecurity, ego, pride, lived experience, emotion, or a whole bunch of other things that I don’t necessarily want to spend time diving into.
All in all; I think the real truth is that no human is perfect, and the best that we can do is learn, try, and welcome change!
We all have a set of unique experiences that shape our experience as human beings, and in order to truly make change we want to see in this world, it’s necessary to exist in a state of analysis and learning. First within ourselves, and then within the world around us. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we think the way we think? Why do we react the way we react? Why do we speak the way we speak? And in asking these questions, above all else, it’s necessary to give ourselves grace while continuously pushing ourselves beyond the limit of our own experience.
It is my hope in this new year of life to really welcome this spirit of analysis and learning. Not from a place of seeking SOMETHING at the perceived end of it, more-so from a place of wanting to control what it is that I know I can control: my innerworld, the one that exists in my mind, in my body, and in my spirt. The innerworld that needs my focus, willingness, and dedication to bring about change in my external world.
The world is burning, Mother Nature is angry, people are dying, whole ethnicities are being genocided, children are starving, every single day: across the globe and within my own neighborhood, within my own city. In a world where everything is on fire, why not spend the time and the resources I have to exist in a state of perpetual learning? Taking the time to analyze myself allows me the space and foundation to go out and analyze the greater world, all in an effort to learn LIFE, to soak up and experience all I can in this lifetime because I never know when it will be over.
I am grateful that this book landed in my lap the way it did and at the time that it did, shoutout to Jackson Street Booksellers and their extremely tiny Black author section, you did me good this time, and for that I am thankful. The history learned, the lessons discovered, and the fire that’s been lit under me is extremely necessary in this part of my life. And if you made it to the end of these random ramblings, I hope this inspires you to dig deeper into the works of Angela Davis and other Black women writers, teachers, and elders of our time. May the world we hope to create for our children and our children’s children be an extension of the work that was done before us and a result of the work we set out to do.
stay blessed
nyarok
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