Listen to the passion of beloved American social justice activist and scholar Angela Davis as she shares her experiences in Occupied Palestine. In a fantastic speech on “Incarceration, Justice and Health” at the annual meeting of American Public Health Association at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, she draws the audience in with the shared commonality of all mankind:
Davis: I’m telling you when I was there I was shocked. I was really shocked. I didn’t expect to be shocked, I thought I already knew, I really thought I knew because I have been doing this work for I don’t know how many decades so I thought I knew what I would encounter in Occupied Palestine but I didn’t know.
And when I saw the signs, the signs didn’t say white and colored like they did when I was growing up, but they say ‘Authorized Persons’, or ‘Authorized vehicles’ and I said to myself, ‘I didn’t know that highways could be segregated.’ Because even living in the most segregated city in the South during the height of Jim Crow we could, maybe we couldn’t stop and get out of the car ..
[audience laughs]
But we could still drive! But there are signs on highways that say ‘authorized vehicles only’ and that means if you have a Palestinian license plate (and you see there’s a different kind of literacy you acquire there).. you learn and you know what license plates are Palestinian and which ones aren’t. If you have a Palestinians license plate you can’t drive or certain streets you can’t walk down. So I urge you to find out more about what is happening in that part of the world and also to remember that not long ago some young Palestinians boarded some of those segregated buses that transport people from one illegal settlement to another and they knew they would be arrested because Palestinians are not allowed to board those buses and guess what they called themselves?
Audience: Freedom Riders
Davis: Freedom Riders yes! Freedom Riders
[audience claps]
And therefore they were acknowledging the part, the influence of the Black freedom struggle on their freedom struggle today and I think as people would have it in this country Black or Latino or Native American or Asian American or Arab American or White or whatever we have a responsibility to support that struggle.
……Justice is always indivisible and injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.
(Hat tip Karen Platt)
heads up, there’s a lot about bds in this video that was not transcribed here. i urge everyone to watch it and hear her passion and the rest of her message in this segment. note how she closes her address in the closing session with what is going on in palestine.
the prominence of palestine in american discourse is gaining momentum.
Ms. Davis’ point about the roads should be an eye opener to those who think Israel does not practice apartheid.
Thanks Annie. Amazing to hear that talk, including so much unvarnished truth about the Occupation, at a large meeting of American health professionals. In this regard I think the APHA is light-years ahead of the AMA and other health professional groups thanks to the leadership of Dr. Alan Meyers and others. In one of the photos on this APHA blog you can see Dalit Baum in the audience- great to see coalition building going on to such good effect.
“Justice is always indivisible and injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. ….
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…. and eventually we need socialism for us all.”
Annie,
you left out Angela Davis’ last words about “socialism for us all”.
I always suspected that these anti-Israel fanatics were communists.
I always suspected that these anti-Israel fanatics were communists.
cat’s kinda out of the bag on Davis’s political leanings klaus:
http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=aydavis
wiki: She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.