Recommendations from our site
“Angela Davis is a political activist. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama and experienced racial injustice from a very young age. She has developed a life and career, both as an activist and a scholar, writing about racial and class injustice. She is also, famously, a commentator on prison abolition and the injustices of the criminal justice system, so particularly appropriate for this moment. She has a really wide range of interests and we could have chosen any one of her works, but one of the reasons why we chose this book specifically is because, as you see from the title, Women, Race and Class, it’s a really comprehensive analysis of those three core philosophical concepts. The book is primarily a historical analysis of the injustices faced by black women, starting with slavery and moving through history to more contemporary issues—for example around women’s reproductive rights. It’s a really important book because it looks closely at how these three ideas of gender, race and class overlap and how one-dimensional analyses of these concepts tends to cover up the injustices faced by black women. Black women tend to be at the centre of a lot of these injustices and it’s really important, particularly now, to look at how these concepts overlap and, through how they’re conceived, tend to reinforce and perpetuate those inequalities. That’s one of the reasons why we thought this was a particularly important book.” Read more...
“Angela Davis is a political activist. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama and experienced racial injustice from a very young age. She has developed a life and career, both as an activist and a scholar, writing about racial and class injustice. She is also, famously, a commentator on prison abolition and the injustices of the criminal justice system, so particularly appropriate for this moment. She has a really wide range of interests and we could have chosen any one of her works, but one of the reasons why we chose this book specifically is because, as you see from the title, Women, Race and Class, it’s a really comprehensive analysis of those three core philosophical concepts. The book is primarily a historical analysis of the injustices faced by black women, starting with slavery and moving through history to more contemporary issues—for example around women’s reproductive rights. It’s a really important book because it looks closely at how these three ideas of gender, race and class overlap and how one-dimensional analyses of these concepts tends to cover up the injustices faced by black women. Black women tend to be at the centre of a lot of these injustices and it’s really important, particularly now, to look at how these concepts overlap and, through how they’re conceived, tend to reinforce and perpetuate those inequalities. That’s one of the reasons why we thought this was a particularly important book.” Read more...
