Making the Improbable Possible…

I’m happy to share that Truthout has just published a review of Angela Davis’ new book by my friend Jasmine Syedullah: Making the Improbable Possible in the Struggle for Freedom: Angela Davis’ New Book. Jasmine has been my rock, soul sister, and zany buddy since our freshman year at Brown University (where we co-ran a theatre and playwriting program for at-risk Providence youth), and I couldn’t think of a more perfect scholar and activist to review Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.

In reviewing Davis’ bold map for a radical movement of human liberation (rooted in black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism), Jasmine notes:

Her most recent work engages a series of timely questions. How do we talk about race in the United States after Obama? How do we distinguish terrorist acts from freedom fighters after 9/11? How do we talk about violence in the wake of the Charleston massacre and the state-sanctioned killings of Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Sandra Bland? After the grossly disproportionate, unrelenting and largely unacknowledged loss of so many Black and Brown lives to the altar of public safety, how do we find the words to name the racism that lives on in popular notions of the common good, in the universal language of human rights or in the protocols of due process? Can we even imagine the kind of insecurity that accumulates from our collective reliance on unwaged labor, torture, cages, walls and militarized borders to keep us safe?