It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo
Written or stated in print byAngela DavisBorn 1944 · Scholar and activist
“It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo” Angela Y. Davis, Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia (1994), Opening page, Critical Inquiry 21(1), p. 37.
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This is a modern English publication from 1994. Only a brief identifying excerpt is reproduced; no public-domain claim is made.
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Context
Why it mattered
Davis begins with a young man recognizing her only as the Afro after a performance involving incarcerated women. She uses that encounter to examine how historical images can reduce a politics of liberation to a fashion memory, and how easily their original context is lost.
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Angela Y. Davis is a scholar and activist whose work connects feminism, racial justice and the prison system. A distinguished professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, she helped found Critical Resistance and has written books including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete?.
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The primary source (Chicago)
Davis, Angela Y. Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia. 1994. Opening page, Critical Inquiry 21(1), p. 37.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo’?” Last verified 9 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-both-humiliating-and-humbling-to-discover-that-a/