On October 30, 2008 at Cooper Union in New York City, Angela Davis
presented a lecture, "Abolition Democracy and Global Politics," sponsored
by the Barnard College Center for Research on Women. The event was held
in the final days before the 2008 election, and Davis underscores the
historic importance of Barack Obama's candidacy and the collective
struggles that made it possible. However, she reminds us that the
election does not represent the culmination or final victory of the civil
rights movement. Questions of race have remained conspicuously absent in
the discourse of the election, and in the United States, the affirmation
of civil rights for the purportedly universal rights-bearing citizen has
always entailed the violent exclusion of others who attain such rights
only through militant challenges to the status quo: enslaved persons,
women, indigenous peoples, felons and ex-felons, and undocumented
immigrants, among others. As Davis reiterates, civil rights must not be
understood as the condition of possibility for freedom, but rather, must
be recognized through the processes of their divestment in forms of civil
death.
"Obama's Collective Victory," a video comprised of excerpts from
Davis's lecture, as well as full-length video footage follow.
This is the full-length video of Angela Davis's lecture "Abolition Democracy and Global Politics," delivered on October 30, 2008 at The Great Hall, The Cooper Union.
