Politics & Power Quote by Angela Davis

Davis is pointing to a fracture that polite talk about "progress" likes to blur: representation and mobility are not the same thing as collective power. The sentence is built around a quiet pivot, "political connection", a phrase that refuses sentimental ideas of racial unity and instead asks a harder question: who is organized with whom, and toward what ends? In Davis's framing, class is not an add-on to race politics; it is the terrain where solidarity either becomes real or dissolves into branding.

The intent is diagnostic and accusatory without being moralistic. "Lack" signals something missing that used to exist or was at least more imaginable: a feedback loop of shared institutions, shared risk, shared agenda. Davis is gesturing at the post-civil-rights era in which the black middle class expanded alongside deindustrialization, mass incarceration, austerity, and the shredding of welfare supports. Those trends produced "increasing numbers" of people pushed into precariousness even as a visible slice of black America gained access to elite schools, corporate ladders, and electoral office.

The subtext is about incentives. As some individuals move closer to mainstream power, the costs of antagonizing that power rise. Respectability politics, professional networks, and donor-driven elections can turn upward mobility into a kind of political insulation. Davis, shaped by radical traditions that linked liberation to economic redistribution and anti-carceral struggle, is warning that without an intentional bridge between classes, "progress" becomes a gated community: celebrated on television, absent in the neighborhoods where harm concentrates.