“I have always been a communist,” said radical progressive activist Angela Davis, proudly declaring her allegiance to the radical Left during her remarks at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) last Wednesday night. The audience, comprised of students and community members, reacted to this statement by erupting into rapturous applause. This is the reality on our nation’s college campuses. The forum was sponsored by CSULA’s Pan-African Studies Department, Department of Television, Film and Media, and Cross Cultural Center. In her introduction, Davis praised Pan-African studies for being, “the intellectual arm of the revolution.” Her remarks touched on everything from her dissatisfaction with the addition of Harriet Tubman to the $20 bill, to prisons, to Palestine.
The bulk of Davis’s speech focused on her radical ideas to abolish the prison system. She argued that a prison is not designed to keep communities safe but that instead, “it is designed to silence and warehouse those who have been rendered superfluous by a capitalist system that cares more about profit than about human beings, and this is a system that is saturated with racism.” Davis also critiqued the system for upholding traditional gender norms saying:
“We begin to understand for example that the prison industrial complex is not only about racism and it’s not only about mass incarceration and it’s not only about profit, but it’s also about reproducing an apparatus of gender, when we consider that prisons are designed to be either men’s prisons or women’s prisons.”
All this led her to the conclusion that prisons and policing systems should be destroyed, declaring, “We have to abolish prisons and policing as we know them today.” Within the presentation, Davis emphatically denounced capitalism by saying things such as, “capitalism is racial capitalism” and “capitalism is always inflicted with heteropatriarchy.” Most surprisingly, Davis actually critiqued the addition of Harriet Tubman to the twenty dollar bill, explaining, “To simply replace [Andrew Jackson] with abolitionist Harriet Tubman is to ignore the role that capitalism played in sustaining slavery.” In fact, she even went so far as to challenge the very existence of money itself:
“This assimilation as it stands does not permit us to consider other possibilities instead of further legitimating the role of money by allowing Harriet Tubman’s image to be affixed on the twenty dollar bill. Why should we not imagine the possibility of abolishing the centrality of money altogether.”
It should be noted that, while it’s not clear what CSULA paid to secure Davis’ presence at the forum, her speaking fee is
listed between $10,001 and $20,000. For someone who wants to get rid of money, she sure asks for a lot of it. During the speech Davis took bizarre stances on a wide variety of additional issues, praising black rights movements for embracing solidarity with Palestine and insinuating that racism is the cause of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Davis’ remarks were inarguably more radical than anything in Ben Shapiro’s YAF-sponsored lecture at CSULA, yet Shapiro was censored by the university while Davis was celebrated. As we’ve reported extensively, CSULA president William Covino attempted to cancel Ben Shapiro’s speech in February,
arguing that Shaprio’s ideas would be best expressed “as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity.” If President Covino really wanted events at the university to have balanced perspectives, he wouldn’t have let a communist speak unchallenged. Clearly CSULA only cares about diversity when it affects liberals.
