‘In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.’ Angela Y. Davis

Anti-racism has become a tremendously widespread expression since 2020 and Angela Davis is often quoted in connection with it

The expression ‘anti-racist’ has been circulating since before the Second World War. It only really took off though, and became a popular concept, a little over fifty years ago and this was largely due to one person. It was an American Marxist and advocate of Black Power called Angela Davis who, together with other black militants, turbocharged the idea of anti-racism and helped to elevate it into being something to which all right-thinking people should aspire. There is however an irony about this, because hearing Angela Davis promoting anti-racism is rather like hearing a butcher extolling the virtues of veganism or a burglar defending the law of property.

     Angela Davis was born in 1944. She studied at Frankfurt University, where she met, and came under the influence of, Herbert Marcuse. By the time that she returned to the United States, Davis was a convinced Marxist. It was at this time that she became very active politically and showed her real feelings about the idea of anti-racism. In the early 1960s a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was active in fighting segregation by peaceful means. Both black people and white together to this end, but Angela Davis and other black militants did not approve of this and worked towards ejecting white people from the SNCC, making it an entirely black organisation.

    It was her alleged involvement in a murder with racial overtones though which catapulted Davis to worldwide notoriety.  In 1970, three young black men, known as the Soledad brothers, were on trial in California. Angela Davis was closely associated with the brother of one of them. Guns were smuggled into the courtroom and an escape attempt made. During the course of this, the white judge was murdered. The weapons used had been purchased by Angela Davis and she was tried for murder, although acquitted. This caused Davis to adopt a lifelong stance on the idea of imprisonment, especially as it affected black people. She became a leading advocate of the modern idea that the number of black people in prison is an index of racism in policing and the judicial system, rather than a consequence of criminality. Holding such a view makes her opinions as they related to the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe rather ironic.     

     At one point, Davis was about to visit the Soviet Union when it was under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev. At the time, many Jews wished to leave the country, as they did not feel able to practice their religion freely. Some wanted to travel to the United States, others to Israel. Those who made too much fuss about not being able to travel freely were known as ‘refuseniks’ and they were apt to end up in prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. Alan Dershowitz, a very high-profile lawyer in the United States, contacted Angela Davis’ secretary and asked that when next Davis was in Russia, she could raise the question of these political prisoners.

     Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’ secretary

     informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list and none

     were political prisoners. ‘They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of

     socialism.’ Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they

     belonged

     It was clear that despite her passionately voiced opposition to racism, Angela Davis was not at all troubled by that form of racism known as anti-Semitism. Indeed, her more recent advocacy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel has led to some people suggesting that she has long displayed this particular form of racism herself.

     It was not only Jews whom Angela Davis wished to see imprisoned, it was also white people with whose political views she strongly disagreed. In 1972, Czech exile Jiří Pelikán addressed an open letter to her, asking for her to help in freeing political prisoners in Czechoslovakia. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a speech he gave in 1975, Davis’s reply was, ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison’.

     During the 1970s, Angela Davis also became a great supporter of East Germany as well as the Soviet Union. After she had been to Moscow to receive the Lenin Peace Prize, Angela Davis began to visit countries behind the Iron Curtain regularly. She was photographed shaking the hand of former East German leader Erich Honecker, from whom she received a medal. This is the same man who was, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, indicted for the manslaughter of 68 people killed trying to escape to the West. While in East Germany, Davis visited the Berlin Wall and praised both it and those who guarded it, saying,

     We mourn the deaths of the border guards who sacrificed their lives for

    the protection of their socialist homeland…When we return to the USA, we

     shall undertake to tell our people the truth about the true function of this

     border.

For Angela Davis, the fall of the Berlin Wall was not a triumph, but a disaster.

     In recent years, it has been felt to be a little indelicate to mention how enthusiastic Angela Davis once was about keeping Jews locked up in Russia and the importance of the Berlin Wall in protecting socialism. It is obvious to most that her past views fall very firmly on the wrong side of history. It is though her hypocrisy in championing anti-racism which causes some to raise their eyebrows now when they see her quotation about the subject all over the internet. Since the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the rise in importance at that time of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Davis opinion on the supposed importance of anti-racism has turned up everywhere.

     For the last sixty years, Angela Davis has shown a dedication to the interests of two groups, namely African Americans and socialists. A desire for racial harmony though has been singularly lacking from sight. In the 1960s, she was instrumental in driving white people from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and turning it into a front for Black Power. A few years later she bought and owned the guns used in a deadly confrontation between black people and white. Her views on Jews have been the object of remark, with some people feeling that they amount to racism. She was fervently opposed to the imprisonment of black people but not white people who opposed socialism. The views of such a person when it comes to anti-racism do perhaps need to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.