So Angela Davis is
a political activist who fights for civil
rights issues. One topic she got into was
what freedom was for people of color. For
Davis, the issues that we currently face originate
from slavery. And she believes a major problem
is that the prison system has reinstitutionalized
the oppression of people of color that originated
with slavery in the United States. The main
focus here is the racial bias that she believes
exists in the system. She points to the fact
that former enslaved people were often imprisoned
after the end of slavery due to negative attitudes
toward people to color. People of color were
not even given their full rights until the
1960s, meaning that the bias against people
of color in society was allowed to continue
until then. After the civil rights movement,
progress was made.... just kidding, the issue
got worse. Davis blames
the worsening issue on the application of
neoliberal economic theory, which was tarted
by this American Economist named Milton Friedman,
who believed that the government should spend
less and that more things should be privatized.
This led to private prisons and private healthcare.The
same bias that was allowed to flourish in
the prison system resulted in people of color
being left impoverished. This means that the
bias of the system also left them out of the
healthcare system, and the development of
the healthcare system without people of color
led to the racial bias against them being
put into the healthcare system as well. Davis
notes that this has mostly been an American
problem, but don’t worry Europe, this is
starting to become a problem for you too.
