Davis, Angela

Angela Davis (b. 1944) is recognized as one of the most influential African American sociologists and political activists to examine the interlocking relations among race, sex, and class. Her work stands among early feminist social theory that successfully moves Marxist frames beyond their economic dimensions. Most significantly, Davis's work expands Marxian categories of class inequality to include an articulation of racism and sexism as inherent features of unchecked, immoral, white supremacist capitalism. Moving beyond an examination of society from the standpoint of the proletariat, Davis posits the proletariat as simultaneously located in complex webs of racial and gender relations, and thus examines society from a multidimensional standpoint, paying significant attention to the situations of black, working-class women and men. Davis's work aims to illustrate and explain how racial and sexual oppression are interlocking and inherent features of U.S. capitalism.

The elemental component of capitalism is ownership of private property. Capitalism transforms material things in the natural world into social and economic commodities to be bought, sold, and owned by individuals. In Davis's examination of American capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism are interrelated insofar as they share the fundamental similarity of being based on domination of one group over another. The success of capitalism as the ruling economic system depends on the subordination of entire groups of persons according to race, nationality, class, and gender. Thus, all forms of social oppression must be examined and recognized as inherent products of unequal socio-economic relations in which the working class is exploited and objectified for the continuity of bourgeois domination and authority. Moreover, according to Davis, the global economy has extended and strengthened bourgeois rule and authority. Capitalism exploits workers, particularly men and women of color, in the international community. Capitalism is a root cause of all domestic and international social injustice, including racism, sexism, heterosexism, and violence. To eliminate injustice in the United States and throughout the world, capitalism must be dissolved.

Davis gives considerable theoretical attention to understanding and explaining two interrelated injustices: sexual violence against women, particularly black women, and racism and sexism within the criminal justice system. She links them both to capitalism and traces them back to oppressive practices within the capitalist system of slavery and Jim Crow. Davis argues that contemporary efforts to eliminate sexual violence must begin with an understanding of rape as one element within a complex web of sexual oppression that is connected to race and class oppression. Davis argues that during slavery, the function of rape was to control and subordinate black women. While both black men and black women suffered physical violence and humiliation as slaves, black women had the additional fear of rape by white masters. Under slavery, white men raped black women as an exercise of power and patriarchal rule. But by portraying black women as sexually immoral, white capitalists were able to legitimate their violence. While one function of rape was to control the black female body, another function was to emasculate black men. But again, white capitalists used racist stereotypes of black men as sexual predators and rapists, thereby legitimizing violence against them. Rape, then, functioned to control black women through fear and, simultaneously, to control black men through emasculation. Rape, as Davis put it, was a weapon, part of the “brutal paraphernalia” of white capitalist slavery.

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