On knowing the nature of reality and imagined possibilities, intimately.
Liberation is not just a concept. It is a practice.
Liberation is not just a destination. It is a way of being.
Liberation is not just an ideal vision. It is a process.
It certainly is not a motto, vocabulary word, or social trend.
Liberation is not a political phase.
Liberation is the goal and the guide.
Liberation has a sense of place. It is a lens.
But what do we mean when we speak of liberation?
The point here is not simply one of definitions, though clarifying definitions may be a helpful first step. I believe the salience of this question, “What do we mean when we speak of liberation?,” is most powerfully revealed in the context of our capacities (or, likely, in the gap between where we are and where we otherwise could be).
Could we write about liberation in tomes? Can we be effusive and poetic, direct and incisive, because we know liberation so well, so deeply in our bones? Could we teach it to our children, in classrooms, and in our families?
Could we recognize the myriad ways liberation animates how we live our lives? Could we effectively direct our labor to align with liberation, clearly and purposefully? Can we comfortably build spaces that inevitably reflect liberation back to us because that is the culture that would naturally emerge from such conditions?
Is our familiarity with liberation evident in the energy that animates all our relationships, even the relationship we have to ourselves? Could we implicitly shape new possibilities on local and collective levels from how effortlessly we move together, toward the same horizons, with shared goals?
Can we speak the same language across all our tongues, and are we compelled to radically change over a lifetime, or in a moment’s notice, because we hear Liberation say, “Meet me. I’m right here”?
ON DEFINITIONS
bell hooks wrote one of the most radically popular books, All About Love: New Visions, out of the recognition that we lack shared language and meaning when it comes to love. Without the sensibility to recognize love as an intentional choice to direct our will toward particular ends, we are taught to mistake love for romantic feelings or something that passively happens to us.
It’s not possible to build a different world, from a place of love, if we do not have the conceptual, social, emotional, and political tools to develop a love ethic – a way of choosing how to live our lives in alignment with love’s values. When we learn what love is and what it entails, we can approach love as a verb, as a practice, something that is demonstrated through action. Love can be made real.
I’m struck by the parallel situation when it comes to liberation. Though we may refer to it more casually as liberation rises up in our lexicon, we have far too little shared notions of what liberation is, what it entails, what it requires through action to be made real.
What we lack on collective levels related to liberation in terms of language, conceptual resources, cultural practices, lived experiences, historical narratives, and modes for meaning-making is by design. That is to say, we do not know about liberation in the ways we could – the ways we need to – because knowing about liberation is an initial step to realizing it.
And the current world we know, the world in which we live, is not built for liberation.
LIBERATION AS NOT-OPPRESSION
There are many historical examples that illustrate why we should be skeptical of any category that is primarily defined only in negative terms of what it is not, as the “other” to something else, especially when whatever serves as the “Other’s” counterpart is granted enough credence to be defined in its own terms. In general, this is how entire groups of people have been subjugated: by being categorically set against those who are deemed more real and defined (which is always a matter of power). And this is why self-definition, when it comes to forming and developing identities on one’s own terms, can be a powerful form of resistance to domination. Naming is an assertion and demonstration of power.
In terms of developmental processes and how we know, perhaps it is appropriate to begin with differentiation (which, by the way, is not the same thing as ending with stark binaries). It is the easiest place to begin, like when breaking down a large tree for firewood. Maybe we need to start with chunky blocks before we can discern where we could create smaller pieces in how we know and interpret the world so that we can better act as part of it.
In our attempts to define liberation with our first chop, then, liberation is not oppression. Liberation is without the characteristic markers of oppression. It lacks oppressive features, qualities, and structures.
It makes sense that people would also quickly connect liberation with having something to do with freedom, and more specifically, freedom from oppression. It seems obvious enough that if I were liberated, I would no longer be oppressed. Similarly, a liberated world would be a world without oppression. This description reflects an early stage of understanding liberation by virtue of what it is not.
When liberation is understood as freedom from oppression, oppression is still centered in a way, so the question becomes, “What would a world without oppression look and feel like?”
Here we should pay attention to how the questions we ask influence our answers. How we ask a question shapes what we anticipate as the answer. Or, if we are flexible enough to understand this point, we can start to recognize how our presumed “answers” (which may be subtle, implicit, or even unconscious) are often the drivers of our questions themselves.
Immediately, and to be very clear, this is not how we would understand liberation from a place of liberation. At best, it is a way to get introduced to liberation through the lens of oppression.
While this may be a relatively accessible place to begin, it is only as useful for as far as our capacities can take us. The question, “What would a world without oppression look and feel like?” can only be reasonably answered if one is also already reasonably familiar with oppression. One must know the shape of something and be able to clearly identify it in order to perceive when it is gone.
Unfortunately, the problem with this question is that far too few people are even moderately fluent in their knowledge of oppression. Although it has been done by those who know oppression first hand for generations, among those who want to talk about liberation right now, far too few could actually teach their families about oppression or write tomes about the extent of oppressive violence.
SEEING OPPRESSION
We cannot change what we cannot (or will not) see. We will not address what we don’t (or cannot) recognize as a problem.
While this project is intended to introduce the notion of what it means to know liberation from a place of liberation (yes, even in these conditions), we can’t dismiss or underestimate the importance of this step. We have to know oppression because it is the reality of our current conditions.
When we reflect on oppression and what it feels like, we may instinctively connect it to feelings of being constrained, confined, restricted, closed in, surrounded by barriers, blocks, or walls. Oppression feels like being thwarted, unable to move, trapped because of our (real or perceived) membership to a group that is targeted by those who leverage their power within existing systems to dominate others.
bell hooks described the experience of oppression as the absence of choices. It is being locked inside a situation you did not create where you lack power to influence and control the conditions that affect you. You feel small. You may shrink to hide, perhaps you must make yourself invisible in order to survive.
You appear to have no out, no good option, and you know this is also by design. The field of possibilities that should open up wide before you is collapsed. Your sense of future is short-term, and the pathway to get there is narrow, if there is any pathway at all. Whatever move you make, you are met with threats of violence. Oppression is repressive, regressive. The only purpose of oppression is to dominate as it drives toward death.
Oppression is a project dead-set on cutting off freedom.
Metaphorically, oppression is commonly depicted as a birdcage. Conceptually, Marilyn Frye elaborates on this metaphor to highlight how it is by virtue of how the cage wires connect to each other that a movement is immobilized. Oppression is not one single obstacle, but a consequence of a network of hurdles, hindrances, tools, and structures that are set up – designed – to limit the free movement of freedom.
From an existentialist perspective, using our own freedom to cut off the freedom of others is among the worst transgression we could commit against any other person. But this is what we humans do when we support, uphold, and participate in oppressive systems. There’s no way around that.
Looking at the ugliest parts of our human capacities, which include the willingness and commitment to harm and violate others, is not pleasant. It’s grueling. If we look with clear conviction to understand just how awful and pervasive oppression has been throughout even just the history of the United States, we should be profoundly disturbed.
And this is what we must do.
I believe concepts are important and necessary, but do not get confused. Oppression is not an abstract thing, despite the tendency to extrapolate its implications in ways that may make oppression appear distant. Whenever we acknowledge the dimensions of oppression that are systemic, structural, and maintained through abstract things like policies, we have to reckon with the fact that all aspects of oppression present in material realities.
The way of our present world makes it such that oppression lives with, between, in, and through us in our days, our relationships, our thoughts, our feelings, what we eat, how we move, how we dream, what we enjoy, who we fear, how we work, and the stories we believe. When we look very closely in the mirror we can see the lines in our own flesh as a testament to what oppression means. We have to know the reality of who we are based on how we live.
It’s at this most intimate level that we have to know our current conditions.
We have to see oppression as it shows up in ourselves and each other. We must be able to point to it, call it by name, look it in the face, condemn it from the soles of our feet to the top of our breath. We have to be able to find it in the streets and in our homes so that we can address it. Then we have to speak to it to address it.
We can’t mobilize around oppression if we don’t know its form.
Not just an idea. Oppression has structure. It has legacy. It has a personality, and language, and culture, and motivation. It has degrees and scope. It is so close to us, and we can know it very well if and when we are willing to become critically conscious of it, when we want to shed light on it.
Just as oppression acts on us, we can act on it. We touch it. Push it. Sabotage it. End it.
If such a robust understanding of oppression is elusive to so many when – day in and day out, for centuries – we live in a world that is fundamentally structured by oppressive systems of power and the violence of cultures of domination, it is no wonder why the vast majority of people can hardly say more about liberation, that is, if they are even comfortable enough to utter the word.
We do not live in a liberated world. That is precisely why it is our responsibility to know liberation. We need to know what liberation means, what it looks and feels like, what life would be like if it were as intimate with us as oppression is as it courses through our veins.
…to be continued.
(I’m tired and it’s now officially the weekend. I will pick this train of thought up again soon)