An introduction of Professor Angela Davis at the #metoo – moving forward conference in Reykjavík, 17 September 2019

Dear guests,

Professor Angela Davis needs no introduction.

If you have thought at all about injustice or the structures of power that shape our world, there is little doubt that you have encountered her work. Still, let me say a few words about her extraordinary career, spanning decades of scholarship and activism.

Former California Governor, and later U.S. President Ronald Reagan, once vowed that Angela Davis would never again teach at the University of California, due to her affiliations with the Communist Party USA. Today, she is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In her work, Angela Davis not only draws from her academic background and decades of activism, critical thinking and structural analysis. She is also motivated by lived experiences:

• as an African-American woman raised in the, then, most segregated city of the South: Birmingham, Alabama
• as a radical barred from employment due to her political beliefs; and
• as one of the millionsof African American people to spend time in US prison at any given time.    

Davis’s early scholarship, including the famous Women, Race and Class, was described by Joy James, editor of the Angela Davis Reader, as “presenting a corrective to feminist theory that erased racist violence, and antiracist theory that masked sexist violence.” 

Prior to her arrest in 1970, she was considered so dangerous that the FBI had her placed on the Bureau’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. And upon her arrest, President Richard Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis”.

After a year and a half of imprisonment and trial, the political prisoner Angela Davis was found not guilty of the charges of conspiracy, kidnapping and murder. The verdict followed a massive public campaign, which involved the committee of Black People in Defence of Angela Davis, hundreds of grassroots communities across the US and in other countries, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Rolling Stones, just to name a few. In an interview with Morgunbladid last weekend, Davis reminds us that she has this national and international solidarity to thank for her liberation. The message being:  that by joining forces, the impossible can become possible.

Redefining the US criminal justice system as a “prison-industrial-complex,” Angela Davis urges us to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons.

What would it look like? How would our political debates on social issues change? And, if I may add, what would it mean for #metoo if we separated it, not only from criminal justice in itself, but also from the language of criminal justice? Language so pervasive in our culture that we can barely talk about sexual harassment and violence without referring to it.

Dear guests,

From state-sponsored sexism in prisons to the persistent sexism in leftist grassroots organisations, from the racial realties of the segregated South to the racial tensions in feminist movements, from grassroots activism to the academic ivory tower, you might say that Angela Davis has seen it all.

A militant intellectual, she is the author of ten books, and a veteran of six decades of activism and critical resistance. Now speaking in Reykjavík for the first time.

Please welcome Professor Angela Davis.