Freedom and Resistance: The Critical Theory of Angela Davis
Iliana Cuellar
California State University, Los Angeles
icuella2@calstatela.edu
This paper is a draft. Please do not cite without permission from author.
It is rare to see women philosophers taught regularly in non-feminist philosophy
classes. It is not due to lack of work since there are considerable amounts of women
philosophers in every tradition and branch. I attribute it to a willful ignorance in which the
only valid reason for the exclusion would be if professors are not familiar with their work,
in which case, I have a follow up question; why not? By all means wade through Plato,
Hume, Descartes, and even our professor’s work, but why is it not equally as important to
wade through Arendt, Beauvoir, Butler, Lloyd, Kristeva? Although the number of women in
philosophy is rising, the amount of women of color is still considerably small. Neoliberal
concepts of multiculturalism and diversity might address the problem through selective
hires for the sake of “not looking bad” and to make their programs “look good.” We risk
tokenization in our fields and question whether our work is actually valued in academe. It
makes sense for many women of color intellectuals to then be involved locally in their
communities and grassroots organizing. On the opposite spectrum, our academic affiliation
can be looked down on in our activist circles. Some accuse us of spending too much time in
our books, classrooms, reading papers at conferences and not enough time organizing and
engaging in direct action. Many know of Angela Davis’ activism, but we forget that she is
philosopher. After leaving the Institute for Social Research to participate in Black liberation
struggles in the U.S., she continued to study under Herbert Marcuse at the University of San
Diego. She is seldom mentioned in discussions and university classes, and almost always
excluded from anthologies and readers, on Critical Theory and the ISR. Very few people
read her work as a part of the Critical Theory tradition as well, but it is important to
recognize her contribution to this school of thought.
What distinguishes her critical theory from many of the other Frankfurt school
theorists is a philosophy informed around issues that affect her as an African American
woman and the larger Black community in the U.S. We can point at the Eurocentric,
androcentric nature of philosophy for her exclusion, but I believe the incongruence mostly
lies in the need for urgent and immediate action that is indigestible to institutional
philosophy and the university as very tools used for social control. Emancipation, Civil
Rights Movement, Black liberation movement, and contemporary movements like
#BlackLivesMatter recognize that not only is it necessary to further the movement on the
page, but physical resistance is absolutely necessary. In this way, Davis most resembles the
aims of early critical theory—social criticism and social transformation—informed through
Karl Marx’ “Theses on Feuerbach” and his powerful statement, “The philosophers up to
now have interpreted the world, in various ways. The point is to change it.” The latter aim
of critical theory—social transformation—seemed to at one point become less significant
or at least limited only to the page. While Marcuse writes to Davis, “So you felt that the
philosophical idea, unless it was a lie must be translated into reality: that it contained a
moral imperative to leave the classroom, the campus, and to go and help the others, your
own people to whom you still belong-- in spite of (or perhaps because of) your success
within the white Establishment.”1 Adorno tells Angela, on her decision to move back to the
States to participate in the Black liberation struggle, that the “desire to work directly in the
1
Herbert Marcuse. “Letter to Angela”
radical movements of that period was akin to a media studies scholar deciding to become a
radio technician.”2 Critical theorist respective aims as doing social philosophy striving for
social change were lost in translation.
I believe that in many women of color’s writing there lies a strong politic of
accessibility; a commitment to stray from educational alienation by making sure that
people can access their work. Audre Lorde sums up one aspect of a politic of accessibility
beautifully in “Age, Race, and Class” in which she states, “Of all the art forms, poetry is the
most economical…the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the
subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.”3 Accessibility politics takes into account the lack
of resources in the communities of the audiences we are trying to address. Their writing
addresses their communities, which usually systemically lack access to quality education
and feed into either the prison-industrial-complex via the school-to-prison-pipeline or
exploitative cheap labor. Critical theorists have argued that what is most accessible are
products of the culture industry reinforcing positivity. Art, books, philosophy are supposed
to counter one-dimensionality, positive thinking and be negative forces thus anything
readily accessible is suspect. Accessibility, however, does not necessarily entail conformity.
Making negative thinking and writing more accessible to poor communities, communities
of color, immigrant communities, or who we can term “active agents” (in lieu of the Marxist
concept of a “subject of history” since there exists plurality of subjects) is revolutionary.
The relationship between accessibility and negativity, positivity is nuanced. Easier to read
and follow does not mean that there isn’t an impenetrability and a struggle to not only
grasp but also implement theoretical work.
2
3
Davis, Y. Angela. “Marcuse’s Legacies”
Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,”
Her choice to demonstrate her critical theory centered on a philosophical concept of
freedom through the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, a former slave, rather than
hypotheticals and counterfactuals is demonstrative of her divorce from what Marcuse
terms “one-dimensional philosophy.” Of this decision she states, “The history of Black
literature provides, in my opinion, a much more illuminating account of the nature of
freedom, its extent and limits than all the philosophical discourses on this theme in the
history of Western society” and later she states, “Philosophy is suppose to perform the task
of generalizing aspects of experience, and not just for the sake of formulating
generalizations, of discovering formulas, as some of my colleagues in the discipline
believe.”4 The use of hypotheticals is infuriating when you are dealing with concepts that
are seen realized through people’s actual lives. While an upper middle class white
intellectual can sit around and ponder the concept of freedom whether a priori or material,
the contradictory nature of being Black and a non-Black person of color in the United States
asks for more immediate action that cannot be fully realized in the classroom as they
simultaneously try battling discrimination experienced through slurs, physical violence,
and lower wages.
Davis’ freedom is conceived through a theoretical system rooted in consciousness,
and addresses arguments concerning freedom throughout the history of philosophy that
are simplified dichotomies of subjective/objective, free-will/deterministic,
interior/exterior and conceives of an interconnected mind consciousness and physical
resistance constructing a continual process of liberation. Many philosophers have argued
that freedom lies a priori within the definition of man summed up in a statement such as
4
Davis, Angela. Lectures on Liberation. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 2010.
“man is free.” She addresses, Sartre’s essential notion of freedom in particular as a
contemptible notion of freedom. Davis’ raises the question, as a response to statements
such as “man is free,” whether Black men were not human or if there lie incongruence with
the essence of humanity and its appearance such that a non-free man could exist. The goal,
however, is not to figure out whether any of these are true or false but to challenge the very
dichotomies and call them into question. She states, “Most important here will be the
crucial transformation of the concept of freedom as a static, given principle into the concept
of liberation, the dynamic, active struggle for freedom.”
The first step in striving for freedom is the rejection of the present situation and
realization of an alternative. Self-consciousness, as Davis details, is a realization of ability to
not be subordinate or enslaved and the master’s greater dependence on the slave for
affirmation of selfhood or superiority. In her “Lectures on Liberation,” Davis points to
Frederick Douglass’ realization that he can be free in his exclaiming, “Let me be free...Why
am I a slave...It cannot be that I will live and die a slave.” This exclamation marks a starting
point in liberation or a continual struggle for freedom. It does not mean that the moment
marks Douglass’ freedom and he is now free but it’s more an inaugural statement to an
ontological commitment to liberation. The realization of ability to be free has a material
counterpart—a physical retaliation and what Davis’ calls resistance. She states, “…the
violent retaliation signifies much more than the physical act: it is refusal not only to submit
to the flogging, but refusal to accept the definitions of the slave master.” Of this theoretical
framework she states, “The road towards freedom, the path of liberation is marked by
resistance at every crossroad: mental resistance, physical resistance, resistance directed to
the concerted attempt to obstruct that path.” In the beginning of her lectures she poses the
question of whether freedom is fully subjective or objective, we can see that it is hard to
imagine one without the other and that freedom requires a mind consciousness with the
physical manifestation rejecting white-supremacist ideology.
Eugene V. Debs calls for unity with his statement, “While there is a lower class, I am
in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am
not free.” A collective process for freedom is also struggle against a freedom constructed by
culture industry as a tool of repression, which can create tensions and divisions among
people. Davis’ critical theory engages in praxis and also contains critiques of social
movements as a philosophy of activism. Davis’ details this in both Women, Race, and Class,
and her autobiography; she mentions issues of racism in women’s suffrage movement and
sexism in Black liberation struggles demonstrating the ways in which society can use
freedom in order to suppress different oppressed groups of people. Freedom is also
commodified. The illusion of freedom created by culture industry uses rhetoric of choice
and limits our capacity to think of liberation of all peoples. The idea of freedom centers on
free market values and the ability to choose from many options offered where the amount
of options you have really depends on capital. The feminist stance of pro-choice is an
example of a neoliberal construction of freedom: people have the choice to pick from many
different options of birth control and access to abortions of which the government should
have no say. Many scholars have argued that this is a simplistic argument and does not
account for the systemic racism and classism in “pro-choice” rhetoric because many poor
people and people of color could not access these resources without government funded
family planning programs. We can see how culture industry constructs freedom and in the
U.S. this merges through intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class.
We can then define the Marxist concept “subject of history” as more complex
especially in the United States. A radical movement cannot be defined through the
proletariat but as several mass movements across the globe towards a new social order.
Globalization and mass communication has made this necessary and possible. When the
same security company, G4S, is responsible for the borders along Gaza and the West Bank
as well as the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border, it becomes clear that Palestinian
liberation struggle is connected to justice for immigrants migrating from the Global South
usually fleeing countries still recovering from stale economies sucked dry by U.S.
imperialism.
The “subject of history” needs to shift to encompass the other forms of social control
such as white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy because even within the oppressed there
is further stratification. These divisions within a similarly oppressed group perpetuate
constructed ideas of freedom as stated before with the example of women and Black
suffrage. In the U.S., a documented immigrant is grateful to not be undocumented and the
undocumented immigrant is grateful to have fled the poverty or political unrest they faced
in their home country. Still, there lies a feeble division between these two people
constructed by larger society defined as legality versus illegality in which legality is
deemed free and illegality is criminalized and, although feeble, is a powerful weapon of
division. We need to start connecting to different movements locally and globally in acts of
solidarity and resistance.
Through her writing, speeches, demonstrations, and pedagogy, Angela Davis’ calls
for a social transformation beyond preexisting philosophical dichotomies of what is and
what is not resistant, what is and what is not free, but argues for synthesis and dynamic
liberation towards freedom. She strays from a given definition of freedom or the essence of
man to challenge the appearance in which unfree men exist. Unfreeness crosses over into
racialized, gendered, and sexualized lines. As Frederick Douglass realized that his
individual freedom did not abolish slavery and as he connected Black suffrage with
women’s suffrage, Davis urges us to realize that our own struggles for justice, rights, and
liberation are tied to that of global struggles, local struggles across age, race, class, gender,
sexuality, nationality, ability, and other intersections.