Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Longtime activist, author and prison abolitionist Angela Davis wasn’t excited to hear that Joe Biden picked Sen. Kamala Harris to be his running mate, citing the former prosecutor and state attorney general’s “difficult history.”

Davis, 76, a professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, said Thursday during an online fundraiser that she “wasn’t excited at all” about Biden either, “particularly given his history in relation to mass incarceration and other issues.” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker called Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee-to-be, “the architect of mass incarceration” in a presidential debate last year for authoring a 1994 crime bill toughening sentences for many federal crimes.

“Kamala Harris has a difficult history,” Davis said without elaborating during the online event, which raised $80,000 for Courage California, a 1.4 million-member progressive organization.

Davis has endeared herself to a new generation of racial justice activists, many of whom were born decades after she entered the national spotlight for opposition to the Vietnam War and membership in the Black Panthers. She spoke in June during a rally at a one-day labor shutdown at the Port of Oakland to protest police brutality and racism, where she encouraged unions to support “abolishing the police as we know them” and “reimagining public safety.”

While her prison abolition stance puts her at odds with Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, the two do have something in common: While Harris is the first Black woman to be on a major party ticket, Davis, who also is Black, was the Communist Party USA’s vice presidential nominee in 1980 and 1984.

Despite her lack of enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, Davis stressed that people should vote — mainly “to guarantee that the person who is currently in office is no longer the occupant of the White House come November. That is our major goal.”

Yet Davis said it is too much to expect any one candidate to change a flawed system.

“I don’t think that simply finding new actors to participate in a system that is structurally racist and misogynistic is going to lead us in a progressive direction,” Davis said. “But at the same time, I don’t think that means that we don’t participate in the electoral system.”

To that end, Davis encouraged the 200 people attending the online fundraiser to support “those who are going to allow us to move forward. And I think that, given the fact that Kamala Harris has been pressured in the past —perhaps not in the right direction — maybe she will be amenable to the kind of progressive radical pressure that we can exert in the future.”

Davis was dubious that disaffected Black voters would support rapper Kanye West, whom Republican operatives are reportedly trying to get on the ballot in several battleground states in an attempt to pull voters from Biden.

“We need a party that is feminist, we need a party that is anti-racist, we need a party that is anti-capitalist, but we don’t have that now. And I don’t think Kanye West gives us that,” Davis said. “Maybe some people will vote for him but … I don’t think Black women are going to be lured away by it. Black women are the most sophisticated participants in the electoral process in this country.”

Davis has little faith in either party to offer fundamental change. “Change comes from masses of people in movement,” she said. “All of the major changes, all of the advances in democracy in this country have come from movements.”

She said she was encouraged that the racial justice movement emphasizes collective leadership and responsibility, in contrast to the tendency in her youth for movements to seek out charismatic figures to speak for them.

“That is why many veterans of the movement don’t recognize themselves in the younger generation,” Davis said. “They say, ‘Where is your manifesto? Where is your agenda? Where is your single leader?’”

Yet she cautioned that while the current movement’s massive street demonstrations “are the dramatic moments, they’re not necessarily the moments that actually bring about the change. They are the moments when we become aware of our collective strengths, and of the possibilities that lie before us.”

She urged people to couple street activism with the “sometimes unglamorous work of figuring out how to get school resource officers out of schools.”

“I’m 76 years old and I’ve participated in movements during so many different eras, but I have never experienced anything like this,” Davis said. “But we all have to do the work that will translate these dreams these ideas into reality.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli

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