Fires In The Mirror

The interview is conducted over the phone while Davis sits on her deck in her Oakland home. Davis speaks of the communal link that stood for many years between blacks in America: “As a child growing up in the South / my assumptions were / that if anybody in the race / came under attack / then I had to be there / to support that person, / to support the race” (27). Davis speaks of how things have changed, and how she, in 1970, could not have imagined opposing a blackcandidate—Clarence Thomas—to the Supreme Court. She speaks on how marginalized groups “have been able to turn / terrible acts of racism directed against us / into victory” (29), which she believes Anita Hill did and so Davis has no problem coming out against Thomas. Similarly, she also has no problem opposing Mike Tyson.

Davis speaks to the pseudoscience associated with race, and how racism needed to exist in order for race to be created. She argues that European colonialists, in an attempt to rationalize and justify their subjugation of other people, used false biological categorization to construct the idea of race: “If we don’t transform / this…this intransigent / rigid / notion of race, / we will be caught up in this cycle / of genocidal / violence / that, um, / is at the origins of our history” (31).