Thursday, March 28, 2024

Angela Davis on Why She Isn’t Endorsing Any Presidential Candidate

Angela Davis*Revolutionary activist Angela Davis has explained in a new interview with Democracy Now! that she’s not impressed with the current roster of candidates running for president, so she’s not endorsing a single one.

“I don’t endorse,” Davis told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. “I believe in independent politics. I still think that we need a new party, a party that is grounded in labor, a party that can speak to all of the issues around racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, what is happening in the world. We don’t yet have that party.”

Davis also condemned the “fascist appeal” of Donald Trump, and his failure to denounce the endorsement of David Duke, the white supremacist and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

“The Ku Klux Klan, of course, evokes the racist, terrorist, violent history of—associated with the era following slavery up to the present,” Davis said. “The extent to which Donald Trump was beating around the bush, seemingly in an effort not to alienate those who might support the Klan today, is an indication that he is helping.”

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Davis emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. For decades, she has been considered a freedom fighter and feminist icon, whose ideals and contributions have inspired many present-day Black Lives Matter activists.

“I think it’s really wonderful that Black Lives Matter activists are participating in this electoral period in this way, forcing candidates to speak on issues about which they might not speak,” Davis said.

Davis said she admires the way activists are calling out candidate Hillary Clinton for past comments she made referring to at-risk youth as “superpredators” and “demanding she acknowledge the repercussions of her support for the 1994 Crime Bill, which sent a disproportionate number of black men and women to jail,” per Huff Post.

“It seems to me that if she’s interested in the votes of not only African Americans and people of color, but of all people who are progressive and attempting to speak out against the racism of over incarceration, she would simply say, ‘I was wrong then,’ that ‘superpredator’ is a racially coded term,’” Davis said. “It’s so interesting that she tends to rely on a kind of universalism that prevents her from acknowledging the extent to which racism is so much a force and an influence in this country.”

Watch a full video clip below:

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