Activist and professor Angela Y. Davis delivered an impassioned oration on Monday in the First Church of Oberlin, challenging students and community members to think of contemporary issues of social debate as “new abolitionisms, new institutions grounded in gender, justice and racial equality.”

The lecture was in celebration of International Women’s Day and was sponsored by the gender and women’s studies department, the African American studies department and the Multicultural Resource Center, among a host of other bodies.

Davis first emerged as a champion of civil rights struggles in the 1960s and ’70s. She was removed from a teaching position at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1969 due to her work as a social activist and involvement in the Communist Party. Ronald Reagan, at that time the governor of California, promised that she would never again teach in the UC schools. Later, Davis was the subject of an FBI investigation and subsequent trial, both predicated on false charges. Today, she holds a tenured position in the University of California in Santa Barbara’s departments of history and African American studies.

Though the general theme of Davis’s speech was “resistance and the progress that can be achieved through resistance,” the discourse that emerged was a consideration of institutionalized oppression both at home and abroad, as well activism in the context of critical thinking. She asked the crowded chapel to envision all types of cruelty and injustice, whether having to do with race, gender, class, sexual orientation or nationality, as one common issue of “epistemic violence.”

Department of gender and women’s studies professor Frances Hasso delivered an address about the nature of International Women’s Day that proceeded Davis’s lecture, tracing the roots of the commemoration back to women’s protests for bread and peace in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Professor Pamela Brooks of the African American Studies department, introducing Davis, called for all Obies to “rededicate” themselves “to justice and the common good.”

After receiving a standing ovation, Davis began by addressing issues of racial and gender justice in the United States. Pertinent to the occasion on which she was invited to Oberlin to speak, Davis explored the tendency to idolize any person who is a “first” regardless of what they have done or not done. Instead of blindly honoring any woman of an ethnic minority who happens to be the first this or that, Davis argued, “we need to be more critical.”

She took particular aim at President Bush’s secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, the first black woman to ever hold the position, saying “I would gladly trade a black female secretary of state for a white male” if it meant the politician would move the country in a direction in accordance to progressive values.

Davis also spent a significant portion of her talk criticizing Bush’s efforts to promote multiculturalism. She said that the administration was guilty of paying lip service to domestic and international pressures to appoint racial minorities and women, resulting in the “reemergence of a traditional patriarchy.”

She added that the administration’s attitude also reflected “an ironic way to think about a multicultural nation.”

According to Davis, such “a proclivity to establish hierarchies” has become endemic in American foreign policy. Claiming that the Bush doctrine of “freedom and democracy” is really nothing more than a tool for global institutionalism, she posited that the current war on terror is itself a form of state-sponsored terrorism.

Finally, Davis’s speech returned to the theme of socioeconomic justice at home as a key battle to be won in the fight for justice on a global scale. She called for an understanding of fairness in America as not equality, but rather as a full accounting of systemic injustice that results in an uneven playing field. Exhorting her audience to fight for the preservation of the current social security system in the coming years, Davis portrayed attempts to alter it as “the juggernaut of capitalism seek[ing] to dismantle those institutions that serve peoples’ needs.”

Davis ended her lecture with a powerful call for youth involvement that resonated with the Oberlin students seated in First Church. She invited the current generation of college students to stand up for their rights and for social justice, proclaiming: “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”