Angela Davis

Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of individualism. Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history.

White women did not respond to these appeals en masse until the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was founded in 1930 under the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames.

Moreover, those white women who permitted their children to witness the murders of Black people were indoctrinating them into the racist ways of the South.

As the basis of the license to rape Black women during slavery was the slaveholders’ economic power, so the class structure of capitalist society also harbors an incentive to rape.

When working-class men accept the invitation to rape extended by the ideology of male supremacy, they are accepting a bribe, an illusory compensation for their powerlessness.

The proliferation of sexual violence is the brutal face of a generalized intensification of the sexism which necessarily accompanies this economic assault.

Following a pattern established by racism, the attack on women mirrors the deteriorating situation of workers of color and the rising influence of racism in the judicial system, the educational institutions and in the government’s posture of studied neglect toward Black people and other people of color.

. The struggle against racism must be an ongoing theme of the anti-rape movement, which must not only defend women of color, but the many victims of the racist manipulation of the rape charge as well.

As the violent face of sexism, the threat of rape will continue to exist as long as the overall oppression of women remains an essential crutch for capitalism.