Angela Davis’s talk was filled with passion and sprinkled with hard truths. She basically said that America hasn’t come as far as we’d like to think since the days of the Scottsboro Boys. This is deeply troubling because she’s right. As she pointed out, the Black Lives Matter movement was quickly challenged by All Lives Matter, “as if [Black Lives Matter] is an opposition to all lives.” I’ve never involved myself in any protests or movements, which isn’t something I’m proud of, but Davis’s talk made me realize that that is a huge privilege. Whether the slogan of our time is “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” has never phased me in the past because I’ve never felt as though it, well, matters. I’ve never had to question whether my life matters, so I don’t understand what it feels like to go through the world feeling differently. My whole perspective changed when she basically said All Lives Matter was a way to oppose the fact that black lives do, in fact, matter.  

Davis said something else that struck me. Though I can’t remember her exact words, she said something along the lines of: young African American women are treated as though their lives have the least value of any demographic. I wish she had elaborated more on this, because it really unsettled me.  Every teenager is trying to figure out who they are, and why they’re important. To preceive that you’re inherently less valued in society because of things you can’t change at a young age is terrrifying, because preception is reality. Regardless of having the best intentions at heart, society has created a space in which young black people feel lesser than their peers, which is a system that has to be broken.