In this edition of Rally Reads we bring you the incredible Lucy Caldicott.
What is Rally Reads!? It’s a series of blog posts where we ask the people who’ve had the biggest impact on us to share the books, documentaries, articles or films that have had the biggest impact on their careers and their thinking. And to explain why.
Lucy is a campaigner and activist working to address issues of inequality, injustice and exclusion. Since May 2018, she has been a Councillor representing Stockwell ward in the London Borough of Lambeth and is joint Cabinet lead on Health and Adult Social Care. Between 2019-2021 she chaired the Children’s Services Scrutiny Committee. She ran as Labour’s candidate in Dudley South in the 2019 General Election.
Outside politics, Lucy has worked in leadership roles at a range of charities over the last twenty five years. She now runs ChangeOut, a consultancy set up to address issues of diversity, inclusion, and culture change in the social justice sector and beyond. She writes a weekly newsletter about equity, social justice, politics, and anything else that grabs her attention. Sign up here…
Phew. She’s also one of our favourite ever people. Over to Lucy…
The work I do as a politician requires me to make decisions that affect other people’s lives. I hold this responsibility, this power, very carefully, and it’s this responsibility which influences some of my reading choices and leads me to choose to read books which will open my mind to new perspectives. I seek out writers from all over the world, I read all kinds of genres: travel, politics, history, novels, but, if I look back over the books I’ve read, a common theme is difference.
One particular book stands out to me that was revelatory and had the biggest effect on my worldview: Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y Davis.
Davis is a veteran of human rights activism, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the era of racial segregation in the USA. She joined the Communist party in the 1960s, campaigning against the Vietnam War, and for civil rights. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list on false charges, leading her to be imprisoned for sixteen months, before acquittal in 1972.
Davis’ other campaigning focuses on prison reform. She draws our attention to what she calls the “prison-industrial complex”, the exploitative relationship between corporations and cheap labour derived from people in prison and the fact that lots of people make lots of money out of locking people, mostly black men, up.
The United States imprisons more people — both per capita and in absolute terms — than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran… As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Source.
Davis tracks United States history from the time of chattel slavery and movements for abolition in the nineteenth century through to the civil rights and feminism women movements in the 1960s. In doing so, she shines a clear and unwavering light on the racism and classism which infects so much of white women’s feminism. She was one of the early writers to apply an intersectional analysis to her scholarship on race, gender, and class.
It’s a collection of essays that was originally published in 1981, looking back over time, tracing the history of the movements for women’s suffrage and abolition in the nineteenth century and examining the influence of race and class on these movements and their relevance to today.
One fact that I first learned in this book, and which has stayed with me ever since, is how some white women in the women’s suffrage movement in the period after the US civil war era shamefully campaigned to hold back Black liberation. Their belief in the inferiority of Black men led them to argue against Black male suffrage before white women were able to vote. Astonishing. But this is an important backdrop to our understanding of the limitations of what is called “white feminism” today.
Women, Race, and Class is the book I’m most likely to recommend if someone asks me where they should start with educating themselves about racism and I still find myself referring to it regularly. While I’m doing recommendations, if podcasts are your thing, I also recommend Seeing White from Scene on Radio.
Here’s an interview with Angela Davis from June 2020, a month after George Floyd was murdered.
Writing this has reminded me that I’m looking forward to reading “Angela Davis: An Autobiography”. An updated edition for a new era is coming out next month
A huge thank you to Lucy for such a thought provoking post and high quality links.
Main photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash