Angela Davis Meaning Of Freedom Sparknotes

The Meaning of Freedom
Angela Davis goes throughout her life striving to find the path of “freedom.” Her autobiography ventures to explore the political aspects of her life and her experiences through them. She is able to connect the characteristics of the prison-industrial complex with slavery and her affairs to the carceral state. In The Meaning of Freedom, she gives speeches and talks about her ideas on such topics. Her lifelong dedication to the elimination of the prison complex and the concept of imprisonment being the first option to solving problems has been highly influenced by her own experiences in that system and having dealt with others in it as well. In terms of the prison industrial complex, Angela Davis urges the idea that slavery,

in today’s day and age, has yet to be completely abolished.
The prison-industrial complex relies on the stigmas behind race, class, and gender that are deeply embedded in today’s society. The government uses such tactics to justify their use of imprisonment as a way to solve political, social, and economic problems. Prisons have become an economic system – a sort of business – in which the government highly benefits from, turning into an ongoing cycle of incarceration with no source of rehabilitation. In The Meaning of Freedom, Angela Davis says there are “more than five million people either incarcerated, on parole, or on probation” (25). She goes on to state that black people have a higher chance of going to jail than a white person, and those numbers increase as the economic background is considered. The criminal justice system plays a role in sending these types of people into prison by taking their “housing, health care, education, and welfare, and then punishing them when they participate in underground economics” (62). A hierarchy has been set up in which the lower class have no means to get out of their situation or survive; therefore, they have no other choice than to live a life of crime. The circumstances they have been put under lead to failure, as “to make it, a black person was going to have to run five times as fast as a white person in order to get the same thing… but some of us ran eight times as fast” (131). Young black men are the targeted demographic as those ending up in prison, stemming from the idea of the violent black body. We have been conditioned to fear this image and it perpetuates the racial bias of society. Prisons, themselves, create a structure of incapacitating people. Davis says, prisons
“house hundreds and thousands of people together, or separately in isolation selves, deprive them of contact with their families, deprive him of education, and then assume that this is going to help rehabilitate them and help them be a healthy part of society” (149).
More so than not, this continues the cycle, for they know nothing more that that life of crime, thus sending them right back to prison. While Davis is in no way stating criminals shouldn’t be punished for their actions, it has never been about closing prisons down; it’s about transforming the ideology and changing the structure in which crime is dealt with.
Angela Davis’s own personal experiences have helped shape her standpoint on the system as a whole. Even prior to her incarceration, views and opinions began to form; life in a predominantly white neighborhood and school, as well as going abroad, opened her eyes to the world of subliminal racism that lurked the world. As she developed her thesis on the prison system, others wanted her help. She was subpoenaed to appear in court to testify on Hekima’s behalf, a Black man convicted of first-degree murder of a white man. His plan was to bring Angela Davis as an “expert on socioeconomic function of racism” to back up his own “political defense,” in which he wanted to “point the finger at the real criminal: a society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under” (An Autobiography, p. 248). He recognized how society is structured toward the inevitable failure of the Black race. Due to her connection to the Marin County Courthouse shootout, she experienced time in jail and gained perspective on the system herself. They continually tried to put her in isolation from the main population to “protect her,” but it was really a method to break her down and subject her to methods of slavery. She endured horrible conditions: given clothes that were too small for her, rats roamed around the cells, freezing temperatures, and hostile matrons. Even inside the prison, class and racial bias was still evident:
“More than half the jail population had never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee” (61).
While being evacuated due to a bomb threat in the prison, the matrons showed their blatant racism through the way the prisoners were handcuffed: “me with boths arms manacles behind me, the Black woman chained to the Chicana woman, and the white woman with both hands free” (298). Davis uses the knowledge she obtained from being in prison as a way to guide her through the world today and expose the system for what it truly is.
The institution of slavery still plays a huge role in today’s society, for it has not been completely diminished from the U.S.

The ideologies morphed into a different type of racism that is still connected to that from the 18th and 19th centuries, which is set up into the contemporary carceral state and prison-industrial complex in the terms of black criminality, black inferiority, domination of black people, and white supremacy. In Angela Davis’s lectures on liberation, she states the conditions of freedom include: physical or violent resistance, resistance of the mind, and recognition of alienation (Narrative of Frederick Douglass, p. 58, 64). In order to maintain the institution of slavery, “black people were forced to live in conditions not fit for animals,” in which “white slave-owners were determined to mould black people into the image of the subhuman being which they had contrived in order to justify their actions” (50 - 51). The slaves were under the condition of alienation, reducing them to “the status of property; This was how the save was defined: something to be owned” (53). This produces the idea that his existence is subjected down to property, capital, and money. Under the conditions of slavery, they were stripped of their rights, treated repressively, forced into free labor, and treated as an object. The abolishment of slavery, enacted by the 13th amendment, was supposed to rid such treatment, yet the prison-industrial complex still holds onto that legacy; as Davis puts it, it is “reincarnated through new institutions, new practices, and new ideologies” (The Meaning of Freedom, 140). The prison system sustains sediments of slavery as it deals with the ownership over the prisoner, controlling their every move. Prisoners are “not able to participate in the political arena or in civil life,” stripping their right to vote and depriving them of human rights (140). Prisoners are forced into free labor: fighting fires, building materials and supplies for

the military. Even ex-convicts, despite their rehabilitation, it is still difficult for them to get jobs and improve their lives. Relative to the free slaves, the ‘40 acres of land and a mule’ rumor reflects “an understanding among former slaves that slavery could not be truly abolished until people were provided with the economic means for the subsistence” (115). They needed a way to access education, their political rights, and means of surviving in a post slavery world, which they worked over hundreds of years toward. Between the cracks of the prison-industrial system covertly lies the institution of slavery.
In the present society, the prison-industrial system embedded with the sediments of slavery is still prevalent, just in different ways. In The Meaning of Freedom, Angela Davis states,
“Because racism hides in the structures of our society, in the educational system, the prison system, the healthcare system, etc., it can do more damage than ever without provoking the kind of resistance that led to the end of racial segregation” (79).
Refugees and immigrants are treated as the public enemy, much like the slaves and communists back in the day. The racialization of undocumented immigrants leads to the justification of the INS detention centers. Again, they are put under horrible conditions and are seen as subhuman. As someone who has experienced being treated as a public enemy, Davis explains, “If we can understand how people could be led to fear communism in such a visceral way, it might help us to apprehend the ideological character of the fear of the black criminal today” (42). There are millions of drug convictions over the years, most of which involve poor people of color, but the truth is that the pharmaceutical market pushes this outcome due to there being no legal path to obtain drugs. Davis says, “Some people find themselves in prison for using psychotropic drugs while others are congratulated. Class and race mark this difference” (66). If we use marijuana as an example, there are people out there serving years in prison over weed charges, while in some states where it’s legal now, people making a business out of it and has become a trendy topic. Race and class heavily sway opinions and actions that lead to the framework of the carceral state.
The prison-industrial complex created an environment in which there is no path to recovery – no way of bettering themselves. The U.S. has done a great job at managing their problems by refusing to confront them. Some ways to start the efforts of changing this mentality and structure includes the following: “better schools that don’t feel like prison, mental health care for people who cannot afford expensive clinics, and drug programs” (69 - 70). For students, it is about not treating them like prisoners, so it does not become an easy transition from school to juvie to prison. Those with mental issues or drug addictions that are already in prison could have easily avoided that path given the right resources. It takes time and effort to change these fixed views, but there are ways. Angela Davis has proven through her own experiences that this is possible. While it may be unimaginable to completely erase the racist and classist mindset so ingrained into many people’s minds, it is important to take it one step at a time.