Angela Davis once wrote, “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’” Throughout her work, Davis has carried this idea into her approach to race, class, gender, and incarceration, arguing that real change requires confronting the systems that allow inequality to persist rather than simply managing their consequences.
America likes to call itself the land of the free. Yet freedom becomes a difficult concept to defend when the conditions under which people live are anything but equal. Having rights on paper does not necessarily mean having the freedom to exercise them in practice. Systems of racism, poverty, and economic inequality determine how far those rights can actually be exercised. Angela Davis has spent much of her life exploring this contradiction. She rejected the idea that freedom could simply mean equality on paper while the surrounding system continued to encourage and produce inequality.
For Davis, this meant looking beyond individual acts of injustice and toward what we now understand as intersectionality: the way different systems of oppression overlap and reinforce one another. Racism could not be separated from class, just as sexism could not be understood without considering race and economic power. From Black liberation and Marxism to feminism and prison abolition, Davis’s politics have consistently returned to the same underlying question: if people are legally declared free but remain constrained by the conditions they are forced to live under, how meaningful is that freedom at all?
Angela Davis’s politics did not develop in isolation from the world around her. She grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, living in an area that became known as “Dynamite Hill” because of the repeated bombings of Black homes by white supremacists. Racism was never simply an idea for Davis to encounter later in books; it was something she and her peers encountered every day, something that was enforced through violence and built into the society around her.
Yet, understanding racism alone never felt enough for her to explain the inequality she saw. As Davis became more politically educated, Marxism offered her a way to look beyond individual prejudice. She questioned the economic structures that allowed inequality to reproduce itself. She came to understand that capitalism, race, and class could not be treated as separate issues when each helped shape who possessed wealth, security, and political power.
This understanding followed Davis into academia. While studying philosophy, she encountered Marxist thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and eventually became a member of the Communist Party USA. She refused to hide her politics even as the Red Scare further engrained anti-communism into American society. Her Communist Party membership put a target behind her back, and, in 1969, the University of California Regents moved to fire her from her teaching position at UCLA. Although a court overturned that dismissal, the conflict made one thing increasingly clear: Davis was now experiencing what happened when someone challenged the systems of power she had been studying.
Davis’s conflict with the American state soon went far beyond the walls of a university. In 1970, guns legally purchased by Davis were used by seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California. The attempt to free three imprisoned Black men ended in a shootout that left four people dead. Although Davis herself wasn’t present, she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy because of her connection to the weapons and Jackson. She fled California and was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before being arrested in New York and held in jail for over a year while awaiting trial. What followed turned Davis from an already controversial activist into an international symbol. The slogan “Free Angela” started to spread across protests around the world, with her supporters arguing that her prosecution could not be separated from the State’s wider hostility toward Black radical and communist movements.
Davis was eventually acquitted by an all-white jury, but this did not end her confrontations with the prison system. Instead, her own imprisonment led her to question why incarceration was so unequal across racial and economic lines, even though prisons were supposedly institutions of an impartial justice system. These experiences led Davis to a much larger political question: how can the prison system help combat crime if it doesn’t solve the social conditions that produce it?
Davis’s answer to this question ended up developing into one of the most controversial, yet compelling, parts of her politics: prison abolition. Abolition is often wrongly interpreted as removing prisons and allowing crime to go unpunished, but this interpretation ignores the conditions that Davis is asking people to confront: poverty, inequality, among others.
The modern-day justice system does not attempt to eliminate the conditions that produce crime, but instead relies on imprisonment to manage their consequences. Society waits for crime to occur and then responds with punishment, while ignoring many of the conditions that contribute to it. Poverty, lack of access to education and healthcare, unemployment, and racial inequality do not disappear when someone is placed behind bars. Prisons can remove an individual from society, but they cannot remove the conditions that helped put them there.
Nonetheless, incarceration remains an easier response than confronting the systems that continuously reproduce these conditions. For Davis, this reliance on imprisonment is connected to what she calls the prison-industrial complex, a system in which incarceration becomes tied to political and economic interests rather than functioning purely as a response to crime.
To Davis, the inefficacy and cruelty of the prison-industrial complex explain the need for its abolition. In her theory, abolition is about building something in prisons’ place rather than simply tearing them down.If a society genuinely wants to reduce crime, then preventing the conditions that allow violence and desperation to grow should matter just as much as deciding how to punish people afterward. Investment in education, healthcare, housing, rehabilitation, and economic security becomes much more important in reducing crime, and therefore part of abolition itself. Davis forces us to question why punishment has become so much easier to imagine than prevention, and why prisons are treated as an inevitable part of society rather than a political choice that can be challenged. A system cannot claim to protect freedom while continuously reproducing the conditions that take it away.
Angela Davis’s legacy lies not only in the movements she participated in, but in the questions she refused to stop asking, even when it was dangerous to do so. Her politics challenge us to look beyond the freedoms we are told we possess and understand the conditions that determine who can actually experience them. Whether through racism, economic inequality, gender, or incarceration, Davis understood oppression not as a collection of isolated injustices, but as systems that depend on and reinforce one another. This is what makes her work remain so relevant today. Freedom cannot simply be promised; it has to exist within the material conditions of people’s lives. Perhaps the question is not whether we are free, but who our current definition of freedom leaves behind.
Hi everyone! My name is Defne and I'm a Bess student at Bocconi. I'm interested in culture and politics, especially how they combine and shape our daily lives. Additionally, I have a passion for writing in order to connect academic research with journalism. I hope to be able to pursue this professionally in the future.
