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…
After asking what liberation looks and feels like with the hope of emphasizing that liberation is something to which we should (must!) dedicate our attention, I’ve encountered other common responses.
First, many to most, if not the vast majority of people I encounter, acknowledge they have never considered this question. Nor have they seriously entertained liberation as a possibility. Instead, too many people echo defeatist statements like, “People have oppressed each other for all of human history since the beginning of time. It’s inevitable. Practically human nature! Why waste energy trying to stop it or change.” (I cannot accept this. Add it to the growing list of soapboxes for another time.)
Of course “we” do not know liberation. “We” haven’t even been invited to dream about it. An epistemologist who understands that everything is political and how power shapes what we know and don’t know would be eager to suggest that our “not-knowing” of liberation is not an accident. Not asking such a question serves a purpose — to maintain the status quo of oppressive systems. Not asking such a question is by design.
Another response, perhaps an unexpectedly inverted side of the same coin, comes from people who know oppression. These are people who live every day, for generations, surviving unjust systems and navigating harsh realities because qualities or characteristics they cannot control have been vilified and denigrated to they point where these people, and their communities, are actively targeted by very real threats of violence and domination from oppressors on a regular basis. Sometimes, someone who knows oppression like this will deem my question naive, dismissive, or even insensitive. “I cannot afford to dream of liberation or a world without oppression when I don’t even know if I will survive tomorrow. I want to make it home safely today.” This pain is real. The violence is real. Oppression is at the front door. I understand and I am listening. To them. And I am listening to the ancestors and teachers and poets and artists and philosophers and writers and movement leaders who have led us through all of history to meet here, with visions for who we want to be, practically begging us to bring forth the world we want to create.
I believe, deep down, that at the core of every struggle against oppression is a desire to reveal what it means for us to care for one another in ways that would answer the question.
“What does liberation look and feel like?”
The project of getting to know liberation — to become intimate with what liberation looks and feels like in high definition, with vivid details, through such radical imagination that could satiate all of our senses — is not to bypass, downplay, or ignore the realities of oppression. It is a project to ground us in vision and possibility, to direct our efforts toward something and not just away from what harms us. As much as we must understand our problems in order to effectively address them, we must also anticipate the alternatives we desire, for which are willing to fight and live and struggle and unite. To consider that taking the question seriously as a form of avoidance or escapism would be to mistake the purpose of answering the question in the first place. It also reflects a misunderstanding about liberation itself.
Liberation is not just the ultimate end goal. The more I engage with my own consistent practices of knowing what liberation looks and feels like in everyday, concrete ways, the more I understand how liberation is also the most powerful source for resisting against oppression anyway.
To make this point more clear, I’ve added another question to the list of prompts: “What would a liberated response to this form of oppression look like?” This, I believe, invites us to connect with more radical and emergent possibilities for being, organizing, and creating projects in real time, under our present circumstances. But we can hardly answer this question if we remain gravely unfamiliar with liberation.
Developing a more intimate relationship with liberation is a necessary and worthy project. We have to invite liberation in with equal parts commitment, passion, and curiosity. To know it. To breathe it. To live into liberation during the dull moments of our mundane experiences. Maybe then it will be more evident how we can find liberation during our most difficult.
When we think of liberation as contingent and conditional, that is, as only being possible “without oppression,” we play into the abstract notion of liberation as a utopian fantasy. We, perhaps and, again, by design, have been led to believe that liberation is only an idea, a concept, some ideal toward which we may gaze our eyes but will never know in this season of human history. Liberation is coded as “a dream,” which tacitly reminds us that we must struggle in real life, in reality, with scant alternatives. One has to wonder what good such a perspective brings.
I am among the cohort of people who recognize liberation as possible, here and now. Today. Yesterday. And tomorrow. Of course, collective liberation is the goal, that is, the state of affairs where everyone and all living beings across the globe are free to live, thrive, and flourish with harmony, ease, mutual support, and sustainability. It is what we must all strive for in our pursuits and projects. And, obviously, collective liberation is not the current state of things.
But liberation, as something real and possible, does not just happen, eventually, one day when all these preferred conditions are finally met. It is not a momentous event like a rapture. We don’t suddenly arrive there when Oppression in all forms shrivels up and falls into piles of dust while golden light shines upon everything and we all become liberated at once. This is a fantasy. Be more serious.
Anyone who plays into this way of viewing liberation discounts the actual, embodied, personified, very human expression of liberation that so many resistance fighters, caregivers, culture workers, visionaries, artists, lovers, mothers, children, political prisoners, abolitionists, and hundreds of thousands of others we don’t know by name already knew across cultures and histories, which is that liberation is marked by a freedom that is free in the sense that it moves to free oneself and others. Enslaved people were not miraculously not-enslaved in a liberating instant when oppression ceased. As history goes, enslaved people freed themselves. The conviction it takes to liberate oneself, let alone to free others, particularly under the most oppressive regimes, cannot be understated.
In other words, across the sordid realities of our human history, we can find innumerable examples of people who knew, really knew, what liberation looks and feels like. Perhaps, first and foremost, in order to take decisive action and create change for others in the ways they have access to, the most powerful revolutionary has to tap into that profound sense of liberation in themselves. To break the shackles that condition one’s mind to stay small and limited by the powers that be and dismantle the confines on what one thinks is possible, and then, to craft a blueprint for what one can do differently, how else one — how reality — can be. And then, one has to do those things.
I don’t have much more than the sort of gut feeling that feels obvious the more one sees it in action, but I strongly believe those who are compelled to do radical things to end oppression are more effective and most powerful when they are connected to a knowing of something beyond what is. I imagine it grows like understanding, like courage, like conviction, like clarity, like purpose, like meaning, and even eventually, like faith. To know it so fully is to inform one’s choice to align with it through practicing other ways of being that the Unfortunate Majority in the world deem untenable, unbelievable, unlikely, maybe even impossible.
“What does liberation look and feel like?”
When we can answer the question fluently, with a thousand words in one breath and a depth of feeling that makes our prose resonate like poetry, we are more equipped to see all the ways liberation is possible here and now. Today. Yesterday. And Tomorrow. Then we can do those things.
You can’t be what you can’t dream. Or, on the other side of things, be what you know we need.
Liberation must be possible because it has always already been what has genuinely compelled anyone who ever managed to move people out of oppressive realities. Liberation is not just the goal. It is also the way through and to. Liberation is not just an idea. It is something we do. Liberation is made real, here and now, based on how we choose to act. Liberation isn’t simply the natural byproduct of someday-hopefully-existent, non-oppressive conditions. Liberation is a process. Liberation is a practice that requires discipline and commitment. It demands our attention and learning. Liberation is way of shaping each other with mutual support and care and love to be and do better, given (and in spite of) the actual contexts within which we live. Liberation grows out of how we move. Liberation will never come from without until it comes from and through us. Liberation is what we create in spaces within and between us as real people, in real relationship, building real community, meeting real needs, solving real problems, creating new realities. Liberation is intentionally doing all of this without replicating, relying on, or necessitating that oppression be part of any of it.
For the past couple years, I’ve been describing “the work” of social justice as the intentional effort of creating spaces, moments, opportunities, and conditions for liberation itself. Am I naive to believe this is something we can do? When we know what liberation looks and feels like, we can move for and with liberation as the guide and the goal, the way through oppressive realities to collective liberation for all. As such, I think we ought to get very serious about articulating the textures and nuances of liberation, the smallest expressions of what it looks and feels like in micro-moments and across sweeping landscapes, how and when and why it is possible and something we can always choose. I believe we must. This is something we can develop and teach and learn and practice and build with one another.
To join in a shared process of articulating what liberation looks and feels like, join the Liberation is Local spaces on Wednesdays and Sundays.