Up and running again...

It's been a while. I've been spending a lot of time over here. But enough about me. I just saw Angela Y. Davis give a talk on feminism and race in light of it being International Women's Day today. She is a marvelous speaker with big and bold ideas. Among her many gems of the evening:

Angela Davis on Black History Month (paraphrased): we tend to celebrate the 'first African-Americans to [insert achievement here].' However, we need to stop and reflect whether that really matters: consider the first African-American woman to be selected as Security Advisor to the President, later becoming the first African-American woman to be made Secretary of State.

However, wouldn't we all prefer that the Secretary of State were a white male who provided the necessary guidance to keep us from needlessly oppressing the people of Iraq?

Davis continues, castigating Alberto Gonzales for condoning and arguing on behalf of torture. She conluded this segment by remarking that apparently, people of color have finally earned the 'right' to participate in the subjugation of others.

Other highlights include:

• How do we view images? Specicially, when we saw the hooded figure in the pictures in Abu Gharib, how many of us actually tried to imagine ourselves as that person, scared to death, separated from our entire network of family, friends, and self-empowerment?


• Why the death penalty is truly a racist institution. It's not simply because the race of the victim and/or the accused factors in as to who gets sentenced to death and ultimately executed. But rather, with the advent of the state-run penitentary in the 1800s, the death penalty was by and large abolished, with only one crime for which white people could be put to death. However, slave law listed seventy-seven crimes for which slaves could be executed. It is, thus, an inherently racist institution in early application, and remains so to this day. (She noted that this means that white people who are executed are still victims of this racist institution.)


• The Law--not the end-all. Davis spoke about how The Law is very important to be sure, but is not sufficient in and of itself to maintain a free and just society. It cannot, for example, apprehend difference. It does not factor in that people who are privileged differently than others have more resources in avoiding being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (see Bush, George W.) than others. Nor does it attempt to address the social ills that seem to contribute to people breaking the law in the first place.

On a final note (warning: I'm a huge music nerd and I'm about to ramble), I got one of her books tonight, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. This book is cool because it "examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens" (Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday), and this is a really, really interesting topic. But as an added bonus, the latter portion of the book consists entirely of transcriptions of all the blues songs recorded by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, as well as all the blues songs recorded by Bessie Smith. This is awesome because such a collection essentially doesn't otherwise exist, and blues lyrics speak volumes about culture and race and politics and history, etc. Anyway. You were warned.

The bottom line: Go see Angela Davis if you get the chance. Don't let the right-wing spew of lies keep you away.