Reflecting on Black History Month and entering Women’s History Month, I automatically think about a woman who subsequently changed my life and my views on how women of color have always been treated.

Angela Y. Davis, famous Black Panther communist and women’s rights activist changed my life with the book Women, Race, and Class.

As a woman of color who was jailed in a system specifically built for people of color, she experienced the prejudices of the racist system and even fought defending others when it was impossible to win.

Being a part of the Black Panther Party in the 60s and 70s meant they automatic criminal- it didn’t matter if they fed poor students meals or defended the right to life, because they had a different take on the fight for racial equity, they were made the automatic antagonist.

Davis wrote in the book about how Black slave women were antagonized for never being the typical caring, loving, caressing, white mother.

Because of the hardships they endured and the equal to harder work they did in comparison to the men slaves, they were seen as rough and rigid because of white stereotypes.

She taught me that these stereotypes are damaging for generations, feeding into the ideas of absent fathers and tough mothers when that isn’t the case at all.

Although I cannot speak to the experiences of a Black person in America, she sympathizes with the causes of the poor uneducated Native Americans and immigrants within this country.

She opened my eyes to the fact that our American education system is extremely whitewashed.

I was taught that all race issues went away when Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Selma and Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat on the bus.

Race issues have obviously started way before that and the Jim Crow era, yet we continuously sweep them under the rug to protect this American ideology that we are the greatest.

In all reality, we’re far from it- people of color alike are exploited for our culture and left to die by a brutal system built by white suppressors.

Even movements like the Women’s suffrage movement were extremely racist- women like Susan B. Anthony were racist enough to purposely leave Black and Brown women out of the fight in fear that they would lose white southern supporters.

Davis showed me the true purpose of movements, with sole purpose of giving white middle and bourgeoisie class women the vote with the intent of taking the vote from the Black, immigrant, and native vote in the US.

Davis wrote “if they, as white women of the middle classes and bourgeoisie, were given the power of the vote, they would rapidly subdue the three main elements of the U.S. working class: Black people, immigrants, and the uneducated native white workers.”

Her work with the communist party and Black Panther Party showed me the bravery women of color need to have in order to lead this fight.

She showed me the power of liberation through education and the types of powerful movements that stem from being educated and what enabling that learning can do for minorities all over.

Education is not only for middle- and upper-class people, but also as essential as a right to govern our own bodies, and it is essential to rising minorities out from poverty that the government has purposely kept us in.

Angela Davis’s teachings on women, race, and class in America was life changing, and I thank her and all of the powerful women of color who came before and set the example of excellence.