Leadership Quote by Angela Davis

Davis is doing something more strategic than celebrating representation: she is rewriting the labor movement’s self-image in real time. The line is built like a guided tour - "if we look" invites the listener into an ostensibly neutral observation, a move Davis often uses to smuggle a radical reframing into the space of common sense. It’s not just that Black leaders have appeared; it’s that their presence marks an evolution, a verdict on what labor has been willing to become and what it has historically refused to see.

The subtext is a critique of labor’s old bargain: class politics that treated race as a sidebar, or worse, as a wedge to be exploited. By emphasizing "over the last couple of decades", Davis situates this shift in the long afterlife of the civil rights era, deindustrialization, and the rise of public-sector and service labor - sectors where Black workers, especially Black women, have been central. Leadership changes aren’t cosmetic in that landscape; they signal which workplaces count as "real" labor and which struggles get platformed.

"and this is true today" is the quiet pressure point. It rebuts the nostalgia that haunts union rhetoric and it refuses the lazy narrative that Black political power peaked decades ago. Davis’s intent is both descriptive and disciplinary: if the movement is changing, it can’t keep telling the same old story about who labor is for. The sentence turns demographic fact into a demand for solidarity that doesn’t require Black workers to check part of themselves at the door.