Angela Davis, Resistance and the Past

Something that keeps coming up in a lot of the readings for this course is the need to recognize and pay attention to how the oppressed recount their past, and that of their ancestors. The quote, “history is written by the victors”, is done to death but nevertheless true. There is no objective account of the past, it cannot be because whoever writes history, writes it from a specific perspective, a specific agenda. Those with more power can mold history to fit their narratives, and they do it fairly often, which is why it is important to distinguish between those that write history and those that remember it.

Reading ‘The Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’ by Angela Davis was an uncomfortable experience. Since the time I took World since 1453 in my freshman year to Decolonization in my junior year, in every discussion on slavery, colonization, patriarchy and their impact on women, we have always acknowledged that throughout history, black women have faced twice the oppression and violence that black men have. They have suffered under slavery and colonization by the white man, and then the added burden of patriarchal violence at the hands of the black man.

So within this context, I found it hard to digest that the work enslaved black women did in the domestic sphere could be looked on as a form of resistance. How could accepting oppression under one man be an act of resistance against another man? Something even Audre Lorde talks of in her article, 'There is no Hierarchy of Oppression'. To me this feels like an attempt to romanticize the past, to write into history a form of resistance that did not actually exist. However, I have realized that before making such an arrogant statement, or criticizing this argument, I should step back and acknowledge that in this moment I am a spectator to a past that does not belong to me.

This does not apply to Angela Davis though, and perhaps that is where I can make my peace with her argument. Angela Davis much like Saidya Hartman, is a descendent of slavery, her past is directly linked to that of the African American slaves, her involvement in the civil rights movement was a reaction to the inter-generational oppression faced by black people. Much like Saidiya Hartman, she cannot help but reach back into the past to make sense of her present. So, I believe that when she looks back to her past lived through her female ancestors, she can make the argument that certain acts of theirs were acts of resistance even if they do not seem that way to me and more importantly even if at that time those black women did not view them as conscious acts of resistance. Angela Davis through her involvement in the struggle for black liberation perhaps gets the right to look back into her past and empower her female ancestors by terming the additional labor they performed as a form of resistance. She can understand better and more directly what it meant to exist as a black female slave and make sense of that experience in a way that does not dis-empower the very existence of the inmates of the past. 

 “Survival, moreover, was the prerequisite of all higher levels of struggle.” Considering the condition under which the enslaved existed, the absolute control the white man had over their lives, to expect or demand any form of resistance from them is cruel and unfair. But to be a descendent of theirs and to look back into the past and see this condition of absolute powerlessness, as you struggle to carve out a future for yourself in a still deeply oppressive and biased world, I can understand the need to hearken back to the past and remember a history in which even the mere unconscious act of surviving was an act of resistance. 

I don't mean to say that this remembrance of the past is manufactured, but rather that perhaps it can only be remembered this way with hindsight.