2008 Woodie Awards
Davis and hooks: A mirror into White history
Michael Griffin
Issue date: 2/4/08 Section: Opinions
Born eight years apart in equally destitute, racist regions of the country, City College Professor bell hooks and University of California, Santa Cruz Professor Angela Davis came of age in a time of turbulence and imparted onto American politics a lasting legacy of political activism.
Shaped by events of the '60s and '70s, intellectual radicalization seems in retrospect to have been a foregone conclusion for these two gifted women. Such events as the Ku Klux Klan killing four children in the terrorist bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama (Davis's hometown), the murder of Malcolm X, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, Chicago police beating and clubbing peaceful demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the National Guard murdering four students at Kent State University all played out against the backdrop of a virtual police state waging both violence and death at home and abroad.
What seemed all too apparent to Davis and hooks, and to other thoughtful people of the time (who were commonly labeled "radical" or "revolutionary," which is quite telling given their thoughts merely reflected the logical product of a racist, sexist, capitalist society), was blindly seen as "subversion" or "lack of patriotism" or "un-American behavior" by establishment institutions. Counselors to Presidents of the era, most notably Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and other establishment figures warned of an "excess of democracy," were troubled by "democratic fervor," and sought "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy." The seeds of totalitarianism were indeed flowering.
Enter Davis and hooks. They had watched their government enforce Jim Crow laws, persecute political minorities and monitor and disrupt the peaceful activities of King, Jr., perhaps leading to or even participating in his death. They had watched their government slaughter over two million Vietnamese citizens for, as it turns out, nothing, and assassinate the chapter leader of a United States political party all in the name of preventing the non-existent threat of communism from taking over the world.
Shaped by events of the '60s and '70s, intellectual radicalization seems in retrospect to have been a foregone conclusion for these two gifted women. Such events as the Ku Klux Klan killing four children in the terrorist bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama (Davis's hometown), the murder of Malcolm X, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, Chicago police beating and clubbing peaceful demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the National Guard murdering four students at Kent State University all played out against the backdrop of a virtual police state waging both violence and death at home and abroad.
What seemed all too apparent to Davis and hooks, and to other thoughtful people of the time (who were commonly labeled "radical" or "revolutionary," which is quite telling given their thoughts merely reflected the logical product of a racist, sexist, capitalist society), was blindly seen as "subversion" or "lack of patriotism" or "un-American behavior" by establishment institutions. Counselors to Presidents of the era, most notably Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, and other establishment figures warned of an "excess of democracy," were troubled by "democratic fervor," and sought "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy." The seeds of totalitarianism were indeed flowering.
Enter Davis and hooks. They had watched their government enforce Jim Crow laws, persecute political minorities and monitor and disrupt the peaceful activities of King, Jr., perhaps leading to or even participating in his death. They had watched their government slaughter over two million Vietnamese citizens for, as it turns out, nothing, and assassinate the chapter leader of a United States political party all in the name of preventing the non-existent threat of communism from taking over the world.
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