Angela Davis
Watch the full speech by Angela Davis at the Women’s March on Washington. “Over the next months and years, we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice, to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations,” Davis said. “Those who still defend the supremacy of white, male heteropatriarchy had better watch out. The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance.”
ANGELA DAVIS: So, at this very challenging moment in our history, let us remind ourselves that we, the hundreds of thousands, the millions of women, trans people, men and youth who are here at the Women’s March, we represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, heteropatriarchy from rising again.
We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. We know that we gather this afternoon on indigenous land. And we follow the lead of the first peoples, who, despite massive genocidal violence, have never relinquished the struggle for land, water, culture, their people. We especially salute today the Standing Rock Sioux.
The freedom struggles troubles of black people, that have shaped the very nature of this country’s history, cannot be deleted with the sweep of a hand. We cannot be made to forget that black lives do matter. This is a country anchored in slavery and settler colonialism, which means, for better or for worse, the very history of the United States is a history of immigration and enslavement. Spreading xenophobia, hurling accusations of murder and rape and building walls will not erase history. No human being is illegal.
The struggle to save the planet, to stop climate change, to guarantee the accessibility of water, from the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux to Flint, Michigan, to the West Bank and Gaza, the struggle to save our flora and fauna, to save the air, this is ground zero of the struggle for social justice.
This is a women’s march, and this women’s march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence, an inclusive—an inclusive and intersectional feminism—an inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.
Yes, we salute the Fight for 15. We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance—resistance to the billionaire mortgage profiteers and gentrfiers; resistance to the healthcare privateers; resistance to the attacks on Muslims, on immigrants; resistance to the attacks on disabled people; resistance to state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison-industrial complex; resistance to institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color.
Women’s rights are human rights all over the planet. And that is why we say freedom and justice for Palestine. We celebrate the impending release of Chelsea Manning and Oscar López Rivera. But we also say free Leonard Peltier. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free Assata Shakur.
Over the next months and years, we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice, to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white, male heteropatriarchy had better watch out. The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance—resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music. This is just the beginning. And in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. Thank you.
