I recently posted a long essay on what I’ve learned from starting with liberation over the years. The first third of that piece is copied below; you can read the full post here. I’m also expanding Liberation is Local! Now, twice a week, I’m hosting containers to learn and develop liberatory practices in community with others. Sign up to join the Liberation is Local email list by downloading the pdf from my Buy Me A Coffee Shop (it’s free!).
Now, back to the opening portion of that long essay:
I remember the first conversation I had with someone about grounding all our projects for social justice by first answering the question, “What would a world without oppression look and feel like?” Like most experiences of excitement and epiphany, I felt like something important was finally clicking.
Such moments of critical consciousness also illuminate what we thought we knew by shining a light on what we do not.
After a decade of formal study, learning, reading, and teaching about oppression and how to shape the world into a better reality (and studying feminist epistemology, no less!), I wondered how was it possible I had not encountered this question before? Had I just missed it? Maybe. Was I too caught up in my own way of thinking, or reading people who were focusing on other things? Most likely. Did I need it presented more directly, in this simple phrasing? Obviously. (Or, is this simply what it feels like when one is always still learning?)
Posed so succinctly, it reframes everything.
Yes, we have to accurately know the problems in order to challenge and change the conditions that create them. This is the way of critique. This is necessary for dismantling anything. But part of me felt like I had been misled, or at least that something crucial had been overlooked and omitted. Shouldn’t we also know where we want to go, what we could otherwise be building and creating?
I know that through all of my own learning, I did encounter ideas and language around liberation in the work of others, specifically from Black thinkers and writers who have articulated matters of liberation for centuries. But I do wish I could recall a specific moment when someone directly asked me to go beyond the oppressive norms, values, and assumptions of our current conditions, even my ingrained habits of thinking, and really connect with what it — life, culture, relationships with others and ourselves, everything that we humans collectively choose to do — could be like. Maybe I wish someone (me?) had taken the question (or myself and my own agency?) more seriously.
Really.
That first conversation was nearly a decade ago. Since then, I’ve been grounding almost all of my work in the question, “What would a world without oppression look and feel like?” I designed a college course around it. It’s how I ground engagements with groups and organizations that hire me for consulting services. It’s how I introduce my keynotes, and it provides the foundation for all the learning experiences and workshops I facilitate.
Until I went on my own as an independent philosopher a few years ago, I actually shied away from using language of liberation, mostly because I didn’t want it to be co-opted as another buzzword or misused and watered-down the way other critically important concepts had been, like performativity and intersectionality. (A soapbox for another time.) Like suggesting that love be a core value to guide organizations (and, well, basically everything), or how I think freedom is the clarifying bedrock for navigating our most pressing ethical dilemmas, liberation is one of those powerful values with which it seemed better to be quite careful. Most people, unfortunately, will not “get it” just yet, let alone meaningfully incorporate liberation beyond new vocabulary and into their actual ways of being. We have seen how it’s gone for ‘diversity, inclusion, and equity.’ Some things are just too precious to handover to the masses too readily.
But then, in the way collective consciousness tends to evolve like murmurations, things started shifting and attention on liberation became more mainstream. I began speaking more explicitly about liberation about when it started popping up in popular discourse, particularly across social media. Ahhh, remember 2020 and how much we all started learning about ALL the things? And how “we” and “all” became more obviously the echo chamber bubbles we choose to bounce around in while much in the “real world” carries on mostly unchanged?
In my own spheres of daily living, patterns quickly emerged in how most people would respond when I would bring up liberation. Barring like-minded folks I follow and/or call friends who can typically engage more deeply around what collective liberation entails and demands, most people would respond rather immediately with, “What do you mean, ‘liberation’?” Some would pose suggestions. “Like, nirvana as a form of enlightenment?” “Like, ascending to heaven?” Far from what I mean and meant — i.e., concrete and tangible possibilities for the here and now of our earthy, human all too human existence.
Most of the time, when posed with the initial, provocative question, “What would a world without oppression look and feel like?” people default into describing the oppressions it would not have. No poverty. No violence. No discrimination. I get it, this is a leading question that pulls focus on the “not-ness” of “without.” (Although, I quickly realized even asking this question presumes people understand the nature of oppression. It is not uncommon to also be met with, “What do you mean by ‘oppression’? In general, the vast majority of the public is still quite ineloquent when it comes to understanding the daily contours of oppression as pervasive, present, and not a historical, political abstraction. We have much work to do.)
Questions evolve as we seek different answers. Thus, in the most recent years when “we” boldly leaned into the lexicon of liberation, I started rephrasing the question as, “What does liberation look and feel like?” While this doesn’t get around the definitional “what do you mean” questions of liberation and still presumes some understanding of not-oppression, it is a prompt that encourages us to focus on the details of what liberation is, could be, would be, if only…