For too long, I, too, thought like that. I had a hard time identifying with African Americans and it was too easy to judge them for their lack of effort or lack of collective success. It wasn't until I started reading books like The Autobiography of Malcolm very meaning of Afro-Americanism. It was then that I finally understood what a systematic effort to undermine the very identity of African Americans was doing to black people in America. Angela Davis became an icon that I could appreciate in her. I saw the drive of a warrior and the fierceness of a lady who would not give in or give up in the face of racism and sexism. Her afro was the very essence of defiance, instead of pandering to the will of a Eurocentric beauty ideal, she instead adorned the afro to show how blackness was beauty and how the very things that were used to degrade black people - frizzy hair - -could be used to symbolize beauty. Angela Davis symbolized the alternative vision of bl...