Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Davis

There’s a needle hidden in the blandness of “of course”: Angela Davis performs agreement to expose complacency. The line nods to a popular American bedtime story - that the Civil Rights era “fixed” the country - then quietly tightens the screws. Yes, the most explicit architecture of Jim Crow is gone. But the phrasing is calibrated to make that victory feel oddly incomplete, almost bureaucratic: “laws” have changed, “within the society,” “any longer.” It’s the language of policy checklists, not liberation. That’s the point.

Davis is an activist who came of age when desegregation was the headline and racial capitalism was the subtext. Her intent is to mark a real historical shift while refusing the cheap moral closure that often follows it. By limiting “progress” to the removal of formal segregation statutes, she implies the harder truth: power is adaptive. When law stops being the blunt instrument, it becomes a smarter one - housing markets, school zoning, policing practices, sentencing, surveillance, and labor stratification can reproduce segregation’s outcomes without naming them.

The subtext is a warning about how societies congratulate themselves. “We don’t have laws...” is an invitation to ask what we do have instead: policies and institutions that can maintain racial hierarchy while preserving a self-image of fairness. Context matters here: Davis’s politics have long targeted the carceral state and structural inequality, arenas where racial control often hides behind “public safety” and “colorblind” procedure. The sentence works because it refuses to let legal reform stand in for justice, and it treats progress as a moving target, not a trophy.