This interview with Angela Davis was originally published in the Vol. 10. no. 1 1999 issue of the Hastings Women's Law Journal, and is from Siobhan's book-in-progress Dancing Shadows: Interviews with Men and Women Sex Workers of Color.

Siobhan Brooks: What was your experience during your incarceration with sex workers? How did you observe them being treated?
Angela Davis: One of things I recall very clearly from my incarceration in New York twenty-seven years ago was that large numbers of sex workers were continually arrested. During my six weeks at the New York Women's House of Detention, I was struck by the fact that judges were much more likely to release white prostitutes on their own recognizance than Black or Puerto Rican prostitutes. Nearly ninety percent of the prisoners in this jail---some of whom were awaiting trial like myself and some of whom were serving sentences---were women of color. The women talked a great deal about the various ways racism was manifested in the criminal justice system. They talked about the way race determined who went to jail and who stayed in jail and who did not. During the short time I was there, I saw a significant number of white women come in on charges of prostitution. Most of the time they would be released within a matter of hours.
Because of the problems many women faced in attempting to raise bail, we decided to work with women in the 'free world' who were organizing a women's bail fund. The women on the outside set up the structure and raised the money and we organized women inside. Those who joined the campaign agreed to continue working with the bail fund on the outside once their bail was paid by funds raised by the organization. Quite a number of sex workers became involved in this campaign.

SB: What kind of abuse did you witness towards sex workers of color?
AD: I don't recall that sex workers were singled out, but I witnessed a great deal of verbal abuse directed toward all of the women prisoners. Prisoners, particularly women prisoners, were and still are treated as if they have no rights. They are infantilized---for instance, they are referred to as "girls." Not only in my personal experience Dancing as a prisoner, but also in the work I have done as a teacher in the San Francisco County Jail---where Rhodessa Jones produces collaborative theater presentations---I have witnessed a great deal of verbal abuse directed toward women prisoners. Often guards and other jail personnel are entirely unaware that they are inferiorizing the prisoners.

SB: In one of your essays in Women, Race, & Class, you mentioned prostitutes trying to form a union in the early part of the century. I know that you are supportive of sex workers trying to organize their work environment. I wanted to hear in your own words what your overall view of the sex industry is?
AD: I can begin by saying that I think the sex industry should be decriminalized. In countries like the Netherlands, where the sex industry has been decriminalized, there are, as a result, fewer pressures on the criminal justice system as far as women are concerned. The continued criminalization of the sex industry is in part responsible for the expanding numbers of women entering jails and prisons. This phenomenon of exponential expansion of incarcerated populations is a part of the emergent prison industrial complex. Not only are jail and prison populations increasing at an incredible rate, capitalist corporations now have a greater stake in the punishment industry. More prisons are being constructed, more companies are using prison labor, more prisons are privatized. At the same time more women are going to prison, more spaces are being created for women and, as a result, ever-greater numbers of women will be going to prison in the future.
In my opinion, the continued criminalization of prostitution and the sex industry in general will feed into the further development of this prison industrial complex. The dismantling of the welfare system under the so-called welfare reform law will probably lead to a further expansion of the sex industry as well as the underground drug economy. The criminalization of the sex industry will therefore help to draw more and more women into the prison industrial complex. There is a racist dimension to this process, since a disproportionate number of these women will be women of color.

SB: Do you think in the near future prostitution will be decriminalized here?
AD: This is something we need to fight for. In the age of HIV and AIDS, it makes no sense to continue to construct social circumstances that increasingly put women at risk. The work that C.O.Y.O.T.E. has done over the years has been extremely important. In this respect, Margo St. James is a pioneer. I have read about the work that you have done at the Lusty Lady in organizing with SEIU, Local 790. Hopefully, the work you are doing will become a statewide and national trend. Certainly if unions such as yours continue to organize and if the women's movement and other progressive movements take up the demand for decriminalilzation, there will be some hope.

SB: Do you recall what kind of discussion was going on around the time of the feminist movement in the 70s regarding sex workers?
AD: During the earliest period of the women's liberation movement, the most dramatic issues were sexual violence and reproductive rights---in other words rape and abortion. Issues relating to the sex industry were raised in the context of the discussions around sexual violence. For example, there was the debate regarding the Minneapolis statute outlawing pornography, which tended to divide many feminists into opposing camps for and against pornography.
That polaization was a rather unfortunate development. But at the same time these debates led to very interesting questions about what counts as pornography, which opened up new ways of thinking and talking about sex and erotic practices. The definition of pornography as assaultive, objectifying and violative of women's autonomy and self-determination was strategically important, because it allowed for a distinction between what was exploitative and violative on the one hand, and what was an expression of agency on the other. These discussions laid the ground-work for moving feminist discourse on the sex industry outside of the vexed framework of morality.

SB: How do you think your own feminist views have changed over the years?
AD: I think they've changed a great deal. For one, I didn't really consider myself a "feminist" during the sixties and seventies, even though I was very much involved in work around women's issues. With the emergence of the women's liberation movement in during the late sixties, many women of color, myself included, tended to distance ourselves from white middle-class feminists. Many of us felt as if we were being asked to choose either race or gender and we wanted to address both at the same time. We felt marginalized in our movements for racial equality and likewise marginalized in movements for gender equality. If white, middle-class feminist movements tended to be racist, then many anti-racist efforts tended to be masculinist.
I have come to the conclusion that feminism is not a monolithic movement or way of thinking. There are different feminisms and it is incumbent on the women and men who call themselves feminists to clarify the politics of their particular brands of feminism. I choose to define feminism within a framework of radical, socialist politics that links struggles against male dominance with anti-racist, anti-homophobic practices. This means that we can also think about our past in different ways as well.
When I wrote the book, Women, Race, & Class, I did not consider myself a feminist. But now I realize that in this book I was attempting to explore marginalized Black feminist historical traditions. My latest book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, continues that search for working-class feminist traditions in the work of Black women blues singers. When I looked at Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, I discovered that one of the most important feminist themes of their work was sexuality. Blues songs---as well as Billie Holiday's transformation of popular songs using blues and jazz---evoke sex in very interesting ways and often use graphic sexual metaphors. Middle-class Black people historically have often disasociated themselves from the blues precisely because of the way they deal with sex.
In Blues Legacies, I conclude that sexuality was especially important to Black people who had just emerged from the experience of slavery. In the aftermath of slavery, emancipated Black people were not really free. Even though slavery was abolished, there was no economic freedom and no political freedom. But Black people could exercise agency and autonomy in sexual matters. They could make their own decisions regarding their sexual partners. They could decide who to have sex with on the basis of their own desire---and not according to the slave masters' need to reproduce the slave population. This was one of the most tangible expressions of freedom for a people who were still not free. In my book I read women's blues songs in a way that allows me to link sexuality with liberation.

SB: That's a great project because all across the board Black feminism is not acknowledged the way that it should be. How do you view political activism and feminism among young people?
AD: I do not assume like many people of my generation that young people today are politically apathetic. Young people are involved in a great deal of important grassroots activism. They are involved in serious campaigns against the dismantling of affirmative action, they are challenging the prison industrial complex, they are involved in the AIDS movement and they are doing innovative organizing like your work as a union organizer in the sex industry. The main problem, I believe, is the lack of visibility of this work and the lack of national networks. As a result many people assume that the work is not being done.
I try to warn against comparisons of young people today with their movement ancestors, so to speak, and against the nostalgia that defines the sixties as the revolutionary era and the nineties as an era of political passivity. The circumstances we face today are far more complicated than they were thirty years ago. I really don't envy young activist who today cannot focus on one issue in the way sixties activism focused either on race or on gender or on class. Young people today have to learn how to hold all these things in tension and to recognize their intersectionalities.
During the sixties, if you became an anti-racist activist, all you had to do was to figure out how to challenge racism. You knew who the enemy was. Now, of course, we realize that the enemy is not that clear cut. Since we have learned to politicize domestic violence, we can say that the male activist who batters his partner stands simultaneously on both sides of the battle lines. These are some of the complicated relationships young people must understand today. I deeply respect the work of young activist and I try to encourage young people to look among themselves for models as opposed to assuming that they can find them in the past.
I often say that respect for your elders is good, but you have to combine the right amount of respect with a few doses of disrespect in order to extricate yourselves from the historical past. An important part of the work of creating new forms of struggle resides in challenging the previous forms. People of my generation challenged the elders---the Martin Luther Kings for example---in order to carve out new paths. This, I think, is what needs to happen today.

SB: How did you envision the political future of the 80s and 90s after you were released from prison?
AD: There was a great deal of repression in the 70s when I went to jail and when political prisoners from the Black Panther Party and other organizations abounded in the jails and prisons. The FBI and local police forces attempted to wipe out organizations like the BPP. Students were the targets of repression---at Kent State, for example. The 70s were a period during which the state was determined to wipe out radical resistance. And they were successful to a certain extent. But on the other hand, there were those who continued to do the work. Even during the Reagan era, there were important and massive displays of political resistance.
Perhaps the present is always the most difficult to understand, but it seems that this is the most difficult time of all. Now that increasing numbers of women and people of color are in positions of power, we have to recognize that we can no longer assume that Black or Latino people or women of any racial background will be progressive by virtue of their race or gender. In face many, like Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly here in California, have become spokespeople for the most politically backward and conservative positions.
This means that we need to think differently about our political strategies. We can't strive for the kind of unity upon which people tended to rely in the past. We have to dispense with old ideas about Black unity or women's unity. The kind of unity we need, I think, is unity forged around political projects as opposed to unity based simplistically on race or gender. My own hope for the future is not an abstract hope but is grounded in the notion that we have to confront the tasks before us. If we don't do the work, we will be confronting a future far direr and far more dangerous than the present.

SB: That's a very frightening future. I think that what I find interesting about what some people are calling the sex workers' movement is that it encompasses groups of people from different races, classes, and genders. I think that's a good blueprint as to how we can ally ourselves with different activists on the left and create something broader.

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