Time & Perspective Quote by Angela Davis

The sting in Angela Davis's line is the inversion of a comforting story: that racism, having lost its bluntest legal tools, must be fading. Davis argues the opposite. The danger isn’t only that racism persists, but that it has learned to travel under cover - coded, procedural, and plausibly deniable. “Clandestine” and “hidden” point to a system that no longer needs cartoon villains or explicit slurs to reproduce inequality; it can operate through zoning boards, sentencing guidelines, school boundaries, hiring “fit,” algorithmic risk scores. When the mechanism is everywhere and the perpetrator is “the system,” accountability gets foggy on purpose.

The subtext is a warning about liberal self-congratulation. Post-civil rights America likes to treat racism as a solved problem with occasional flare-ups, a matter of bad attitudes rather than durable architecture. Davis insists that invisibility is not progress; it’s strategic adaptation. A hidden phenomenon is harder to name, harder to organize against, and easier to gaslight away. The person harmed is forced to prove what the institution is designed to obscure.

Context matters: Davis’s politics are rooted in abolitionist critique - the claim that prisons, policing, and surveillance aren’t deviations from democracy but central instruments of racial management. In that frame, “far more terrible” isn’t rhetorical inflation. It’s an assessment of scale and sophistication: racism that can be bureaucratized, normalized, and rendered “colorblind” can spread further, recruit more participants, and endure longer than the overt racism we already know how to condemn.