We have hardly attained a post-racist society, Angela Y. Davis argued in a 2008 speech in which she denounced the legacy of structural racism. It is part of her latest book, in which she fully explores “The Meaning of Freedom.”

Davis offer profound insights into how the appearance of democracy and equality are undermined by the racist bias of many institutions, perhaps most profoundly by the prison-industrial complex. Her insights are both troubling and liberating, because through the dispelling of the myth of a neoliberal society that is egalitarian we can begin to work toward attaining a truly dynamic freedom.

Chaper Ten

from The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues by Angela Davis, published by City Lights.

Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism

On March 21, 1960, South African police killed sixty-nine peaceful demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville. I am honored to have been invited to deliver the Vice-Chancellor’s Oration on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which honors the Sharpeville martyrs. I am particularly honored to be here in Australia in the aftermath of the first apology by a head of state to the indigenous people of this country, and I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land.

On February 1, 1960, less than two months before the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, in the U.S. city of Greensboro, North Carolina, black students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Traditionally, black people were only served if they remained standing. This sit-in became a catalyst for an important moment in the U.S. civil rights movement. I vividly remember that day, for as a black person in the United States, I had grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1950s was known as the most racially segregated city in our country. I had stood up many times at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in my city, experiencing the humiliation of being treated as not sufficiently human to be able to sit down and eat a sandwich.

As a child I had first discovered South African apartheid when I learned that Birmingham, Alabama, my hometown, was known as the Johannesburg of the South. Indeed, the regime of white supremacy that influenced every aspect of our lives relied, as did South African apartheid, on the notion that social order required absolute racial separation and hierarchical structuring of racial encounters whenever they occurred.

A pivotal requirement of my childhood education was to learn the language of racism, rendered explicit through the signs posted above water fountains, on toilets, inside buses, on dressing rooms. Learning to read and write thus involved the acquisition of an extensive familiarity with the protocols of racism during the pre–civil rights era. This was, in part, enabled by the fact that my elementary and high schools were a part of what was called the Negro School System. The home my parents purchased was located on the border of a neighborhood zoned for black people. Local laws prohibited us from crossing the street in front of our house, for we might be legally charged with trespassing into the white zone.

I mention these details because the U.S. civil rights movement, which took shape in the mid-1950s, contested these and other aspects of legalized racial segregation. As we demanded legal equality with respect to public transportation, housing, education, and the vote, we claimed the rights of citizenship, as they were capable of being provided by the law. The attainment of these rights of citizenship also involved a sustained struggle against lynching, which, since the end of the Civil War, had served as a brutal symbolic affirmation of white supremacy.

As the ideas of racial equality produced in and through the civil rights movement gradually acquired hegemony in the nation, they congealed into firm notions of what counted as victories over racial subjugation, and in the process produced their own meanings of racism. As important as these victories have proved to be, the inflexibility of the resulting definitions of racism has created, both in legal and popular discourses, enduring deceptions regarding the nature of racism. Definitions of racism informed by particular historical conditions became trans- or ahistorical ways of conceptualizing racial discrimination and subjugation. The persistence of these meanings beyond the particular historical conditions that produced them has hampered the evolution of a new vocabulary and new discourse that might allow us to identify new modes of racism in what is known as the post–civil rights era.

That the International Human Rights Community has recognized some of these new modes of racism was indicated in the title of the 2001 Durban, South Africa, World Conference Against Racism, Racist Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances. Regrettably, media coverage of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, which occurred at the end of the conference, resulted in sparse media attention to the aftermath of the World Conference. More public conversations about the conference might have helped to popularize more capacious meanings of racism.

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