So you know when you see quote float around and you get curious as to the rest of the speech? Well, I've been seeing one attributed to Angela Davis - the great scholar, activist, (long-term) vegan, and one of my personal inspirations. So I had to track down where the wrote or said this.
The quote is:
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You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.
And you have to do it all the time.
These are two brilliant sentences and something Davis would say. Except she didn't. I didn't know this until I wanted to find out the exact context of the quote.
Looking for sources
I've been scouring sources. The most "credible" ones take me to a talk she gave at Southern Illinois University Carbondale on 13 February 2014 for US Black History Month and one citation even gives a time stamp, which would be impressive were it correct. I managed to find the YouTube and the talk is brilliant. I recommend it.
People in all manners of publications - from Ph.D dissertations and graduate theses, to Harvard papers to fancy pants feminist publications you've got to jump through hoops to get, to whatever else - have all been using this quote and using others' citations of it.
And they're all wrong.
Angela Davis never says it.
In the Southern Illinois University Carbondale talk, she says something close. I listened to the whole talk. She simply doesn't say it.
If you know her work, the sentiment is correct. She believes in imagining a different world - it's a particular dialectic - utopian - but no need to get fancy. Those words strung together as those two sentences... Davis never uttered them.
What Davis said at the end of that talk is no less brilliant than the two misquoted lines. She says (starting at 53:03):
I don't want to leave you with the sense of the endless repetition of history i don't want you to leave this lecture frustrated about our inability to bring about change and so from the very history of slavery slavery neo-slavery the reconfigured slavery of the prison industrial conflicts we learn that resistance is not only possible but it's the only legitimate response to these systems and apparatuses of unfree and so just as we affirm connections between slavery and the prison industrial complex we emphasize the link between anti-slavery abolitionism and anti-prison abolitionism and see prison evolution takes up not only issues of mass incarceration and the way that race and gender structure the prison industrial complex but it also addresses the unresolved issues of jobs and education and healthcare that have been looming over our society since the punitive abolition of slavery in other words we are called upon to continue the struggle for racial power economic factors for gender freedoms.
We live with the inheritances of slavery.
All of us live with the inheritance inheritances absolutely.
[garbled recording because of sound interference, but AD mentions those who fought among other things for labour rights]
and I think today it is incumbent upon us to understand the interconnections and intersections and bring all of our social justice issues together so if we stand up against racism and heteropatriarchy we must also challenge attacks on immigrants. The movement to defend the rights of immigrants is one of the most important civil rights.
We must also advocate for the rights of disabled people
[clapping and indistinguishable] war and torture and militarism
[more clapping and somewhat indistinguishable, but Davis mentions fighting against hom*ophobia and transphobia]
We must stand for LGBTQ rights. We must recognise how important it is to contest the violent infringement of the environment by capitalist corporations and struggle for a better world for us all.
We can distill the above in the original mis-quote, sure. But then we’d miss the rest and it’s the rest that makes it even more powerful.
Editors are life
I despair at the inattention of writers. A casual post, a banner, all that’s immaterial. But in any half-serious writing words and the context in which those words are written or spoken are important.
I don't care about people posting the quote online. After all, it is inspirational! Its message is clear. I've seen AD speak enough times and read enough of her work, I believe she would say something like this.
But for the love of words, publications need to return to paying editors a good living. And if you’re writing independently, get that trusted friend to read and check you. You might not be able to pay them. Maybe make or buy them dinner(s). I don't know. There's so much good material out there. Why make it up?
Photo (mine) of the great Angela Davis from 8 March 2019 at Southbank Centre, London.
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