Friday, September 19, 2014

#263 / Heroic Individuals



Angela Davis (pictured) recently contributed to a Q & A page in The Nation. Here is one important observation, contained in her interview with Frank Barat

Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective—also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades—the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to dissociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-twentieth-century US freedom movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.

I couldn't agree more. We are all in this together. We don't create the human world by individual actions.


Image Credit: 
http://www.naturalhairmag.com/cultural-icon-angela-yvonne-davis/

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