Angela Davis’ Views

Angela Davis, in a recent speech at CSUN, delivered a fallacious message of gloom and doom. According to Davis, “African-Americans are suffering the most oppression since slavery,” and there should be a “new black revolution.”

Drug use, crime and welfare dependence, according to her, are the results, not the cause, of societal oppression.

Certainly, it is not society impregnating unmarried black girls. It is not society that forces young blacks to drop out of school and into drug-dealing, into gangs and into killing. The argument that only minimum-wage jobs are available is specious. After all, numerous immigrants have come to the United States, taken minimum-wage jobs while seeking an education in their after-hours time, and have gone on to better jobs and to owning their own businesses.

Many of the students that Davis spoke to at CSUN were black and are seeking to better themselves through higher education. Our country is now replete with many blacks in positions of prestige and power, ranging from Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to Mayor Tom Bradley, elected with white votes; entertainers such as Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy, supported with white dollars; and athletes deriving their incomes from ticket sales to whites. Our society also is filling up with black doctors, lawyers, civil servants, police and firefighters, certainly a far cry from “the worst oppression since slavery.”

Davis might try to explain why black Haitians’ escape to the United States, leaving their black despotic governments; why black Ugandans kill and oppress each other; and, since she is such an admirer of communism, why the black government of Ethiopia has made such a mess of its economy that the country is dependent on handouts from capitalists to survive.

Recently, Nelson Mandela told the black youths of South Africa to get an education in order to lead their nation. Why hasn’t Davis advocated the same here?

ROBERT S. ELLYN

Calabasas