On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  When we protest, we are simply individuals coming together to use power and activate hope. I have yet to meet a protester rallying against a reality that she didn’t think she could change. And from those first days in Ferguson to now, that is what the protests have done all over the country and all over the world. People have been reminded that they have power, that they must stand in that power, and that when they do, they can change the world. But working for change implies a freedom to look toward the future, a freedom scarcely experienced by people consumed by the pressing concerns of daily life. I know what it’s like to be so overwhelmed.

  I grew up in a community of recovery—both of my parents had once been addicted to drugs, my mother left when I was three years old, and my father raised me and my sister. We slept on the floor when gunshots got too close to the house, thinking that it would be harder for a bullet to pierce the floorboards than the window or wall. Of my four aunts and uncles, only one ever had schooling past high school, and neither of my parents did. We were not quite middle class but lived a life that shielded us from aspects of the reality of our poverty. I never imagined a world outside of Baltimore, not because I lacked a rich imagination but because Baltimore was the only world I’d ever known other than what was on TV. As an adult, I now realize that I had only seen the majority black parts of Baltimore, which happened also to be the lower-income parts; I didn’t know that affluent neighborhoods like Homeland or Canton even existed. I could not name mass incarceration, the racial wealth gap, or describe food deserts until recently. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen the impact of these things in my life growing up. I had. But to me they were not phenomena to be named, studied, and “reformed”; they were simply the way the world was.

  Only through exposure would I learn to see the world differently, and thus gain the tools I needed to broaden my perspective. A white water rafting trip in college provided one such opportunity. The trip was designed to help train me and others for our roles on the Residential Life staff. I’ll never forget it because I fell off the raft and got trapped in the current. In that moment, I thought I was going to die. I can swim, but if you’ve ever been caught in a current, you know that it’s hard for even the best swimmers to escape its wrath. All that I could think about was my next breath—I wasn’t thinking about my sister, my father, my hopes and dreams. I just wanted to breathe freely again. I realized that this is what being in proximity to trauma sometimes does to us—it traps us in the current, in the present.

  Too many of us are forced to think about life from the vantage point of the current, and thus it’s tempting to accept trauma as a condition of the world we live in. This is not because we lack hope, but because our hope has not yet been activated. We are, after all, inundated with images of injustice and atrocities daily. Life goes on, as they say. Doing anything more than coping can seem too great a task when there are bills to be paid or family to be taken care of. But to accept trauma as a condition of this world is to surrender both our imagination of what tomorrow could look like and our agency in actively shaping what today feels like. Make no mistake, our world, our experience, is changing constantly. When we surrender, we leave it to others to define what that change looks like. History has shown us the consequences of inaction. We can and should acknowledge the trauma that we face, but we should not accept it. Indeed, we cannot fight what we do not name, so name it we must, but we can never accept it. We will never get to the other side of freedom if we accept the trauma as a feature and not a flaw of this world.

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  THERE’S A DOUBLE STANDARD to protest in America. Something is different for black people who should dare to ask questions, and further, for those who protest in blackness. Protest in and by black bodies is never deemed legitimate, never deemed worthy of engagement. It seems that we have simply not earned our right to grievance yet. And because we have not earned our grievance, our grievance is illegitimate—we do not deserve sympathy or, ultimately, justice.

  This is a familiar mode of reasoning. There is an earn/deserve paradigm when it comes to resource allocation, and it determines the degree to which one is worthy of a service, a good, of power, or of life. It is a commonly held belief that people of color or poor people have not actually earned health care, housing, access to equitably funded public education, and so forth. To the contrary, the attainment of these things, the argument goes, is a function of effort, or intelligence, or decision-making—all things that these groups supposedly lack. On the flip side, those who already have health care, or housing, or access to equitably funded public education believe that they earned these things, and should they somehow find themselves lacking, that they have a case for intervention.

  Racism, the belief that one race is inherently less valuable than others, is rooted in an imbalance of power. In terms of the earn/deserve paradigm, racism dictates that a set of people, defined by race, are simply less worthy, regardless of individual or collective effort, and that there is no set of actions that could actually make them worthy, because the bar is always moving. Conversely, white people are inherently worthy; they have obviously done the work of earning and therefore are entitled to resources, opportunities, and life.

  The reality is that human flourishing is a more complicated function of effort, circumstance, and luck, among other things. But regardless, what we find with race is that people of color are deemed as high need-to-earn and low deserve, while white people are high deserve and low need-to-earn. The closer one’s proximity to power, the greater one’s sense of entitlement to that power.

  There was a time when I believed that racism was rooted in self-interest or economics—the notion that white supremacy emerged as a set of ideas to codify practices rooted in profit. I now believe that the foundation of white supremacy rests in a preoccupation with dominance at the expense of others, and that the self-interest and economic benefits are a result, not a reason or cause. I believe this because of the way that white supremacy still proliferates in contexts where there is no self-interest other than the maintenance of power. I have seen it hold sway even in contexts where it does not materially benefit the white people who hold the beliefs.

  I’ve been in hundreds of meetings about pathways to change over the past three years, and I’ve come to realize that the earn/deserve paradigm is potent and pervasive, and that it is the prism through which much of our media does its reporting and the bedrock of our leaders’ policymaking.

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  —

  WALTER SCOTT WAS KILLED by Officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. He was shot in the back while running away from the officer. Later, Slager lied about the event, claiming that Scott had reached for his gun, thus causing the officer to fear for his own life. Video evidence captured by a bystander proved Slager a liar, and he was later convicted of murder. But these facts were somehow not always salient to the local media. I was in South Carolina on the day of Walter Scott’s funeral, and I remember standing outside the funeral home after the service when the front page of the Post and Courier, the largest newspaper in South Carolina, caught my eye with the following headline: WHEN YOU’RE BEHIND, YOU’RE BEHIND. LIKE MANY DOGGED BY MOUNTING CHILD-SUPPORT DEBT, WALTER SCOTT FACED AN ARDUOUS FUTURE, LIKELY JAIL TIME.* Now, one can read this and not realize that Walter Scott was the victim. But anyone with even the basic facts of the case would certainly question how this newspaper could have framed the event in terms so divorced from reality. Of course, if you think that Walter Scott could have, perhaps should have, made different life choices, and that these different life choices would have saved his life in the end, then this framing makes sense.

  The headline shifts culpability from the officer who used deadly force on an innocent man and places it on Walter Scott, the unarmed man, the victim. It is as if Scott’s case, which by then had clear evidence that he was shot in the back as he ran away, was still being contested. That is the earn
/deserve paradigm at work in the media.

  Notably, this line of thinking is not simply confined to issues of policing or media representation. Public education is another area where clearly we see this logic function to devastating effect. Take Baltimore City Public Schools in my home state. Over 90 percent of students are black and Latino, 90 percent of students live in poverty, and the school system has the highest percentage of special education students in the state. In defending the inequity of resource allocations to the school system, the governor of Maryland has made the following statements: “This may be the most highly funded school system in America” and “Maryland spends more than twice as much in Baltimore City as we do in the rest of the state.” That Baltimore City is one of the highest-funded school systems in the state of Maryland is patently false. The state funding formula that the governor’s statement is based on in fact uses a regressive property tax that disadvantages Baltimore, a city with a poor population. This is just one example, but one that might find echoes in other states across the country.

  Why wouldn’t we simply allocate whatever resources we need to ensure that our kids have a great education? Because they are black and brown and the subtext is that they have not yet earned a sufficient investment. We must ask, What would they need to do though in order to prove that they are worthy of additional resources?

  How does one respond to an ideology that does not deem you worthy of basic necessities like food, water, shelter, even life?

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  —

  ON AUGUST 14, 2014, we stood in the largest meeting room of the Urban League Building in Minneapolis, about a hundred or so people, waiting for the conference call to begin. I was sweating a little, a combination of my nerves and the weather. Somehow, I was on red-ribbon duty, tying red ribbons around everyone’s wrists in an act of solidarity for the call.

  Then the call started, with people from all over the world participating. We had a moment of silence for the life and death of Michael Brown Jr. and other victims of police violence. It was heavy. It always feels heavy when we talk about death, regardless of how many times we’ve discussed it. I left the moment of silence and stood in front of the Fourth Precinct police station, holding a sign in protest so that drivers could see it as they rode down the street. This was the same precinct that protesters would barricade and shut down in memory of Jamar Clark two years later.

  I felt like I had done something, that I had done my part, perhaps, by attending the National Moment of Silence. I didn’t know at the time, but I was in just one of 114 cities that participated in the National Moment of Silence organized by @FeministaJones via Twitter. I’d never been in a room of strangers with a shared purpose like that before. So many people coming together because a kid got killed. And somehow it didn’t feel like enough to me, though I didn’t know what more looked like.

  Years earlier I taught sixth-grade math in Starrett City, the largest federally funded housing projects in the country, in Brooklyn, New York. Teaching is the most important thing that I’ve ever done. And it was there that I started thinking more about ensuring that the commitments I made were living commitments.

  As a teacher, I was always frustrated by people, many of them fellow teachers, who proclaimed they stood with and would fight for our students but who never put those ideas into action. We’d be in professional development sessions and educators would say things about our kids and their families that would never be acceptable in mixed company. And when confronted about their tone, they’d scoff and assert that their comments weren’t representative of their true feelings, because, look, they were teachers!

  I found myself thinking more and more about what it would mean to do my part.

  I was living in Minneapolis at the time and working as the senior director of Human Capital for Minneapolis Public Schools, a role similar to the one I’d held previously in Baltimore. I was responsible for all staffing in the district—from hiring to salary setting. School systems hire the majority of staff during the summer, so by August I was busy at work and that was pretty much my life.

  But I needed to do more.

  I had a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Minneapolis, and most nights I slept on the couch with the TV on. Late on August 15, 2014, I was watching the news and saw the protests unfold, and then I checked my phone and saw the conversation on Twitter. On TV, it looked like the protesters were angry and unruly. On Twitter, it looked like the police were out of control and reckless. I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes.

  My best friend, Donnie, had recently gotten married, and part of our unspoken deal was that I wouldn’t call him in the middle of the night unless there was an emergency. I had a tendency to call before realizing what time it was, and I didn’t want to be that friend who called at all hours of the night. It was 2:00 A.M. Saturday when I made the decision to go to Ferguson, and I felt like I needed to tell someone before I drove nine hours to a place I’d never been before. I couldn’t call my father; he’d definitely say no. I could possibly call TeRay, my sister, but it would be fifty-fifty. So I just waited until 8:00 A.M., when it’d be okay to call Donnie.

  “I think I’m going to go to Ferguson. Now. What do you think?” I said to him when he answered. “If you think you should go, you should go,” he replied. By then, I’d already packed a bag and was standing in the doorway, just waiting for someone I trusted to tell me that I wasn’t losing my mind. I was about four hours into the drive to Missouri when I posted the following Facebook status:

  Almost in Ferguson, MO. Any friends (or friends-of-friends) in St. Louis with a spare couch I can crash on for a few days?

  I had faith that I’d know someone who at least knew someone else with a couch I could sleep on. I’d never been to Missouri before so I didn’t have any connections that I knew personally. Shortly after posting this, I got a call from Jessica Cordova Kramer, a former colleague, who told me that she’d reached out to one of her friends, Brittany Packnett, who found a place for me to stay for at least the first night.

  When I arrived in St. Louis, I went to Brittany’s friend’s house, dropped off my bag, and went to the streets. I didn’t bring a lot with me as I’d only planned to be in Ferguson for the weekend. At that point, I had only understood the protests from Twitter and TV.

  I didn’t realize that we’d be in the streets for over a year. On the second night, I was teargassed for the first time. And by day four, my legs were wearying from the walking.

  Joining the protest changed so much. It only took those first two days for me to realize that I’d stay longer than a weekend—indeed, that I’d stay in the streets for as long as it took. I called out from work, stayed the next week, then traveled the nine hours to and from my home in Minneapolis until I eventually quit my job and moved to St. Louis County permanently.

  I’m not from St. Louis, but I came to know it as well as I would a second home. I know it by the places we shut down, by the police departments we challenged, by the terrain of protest. It is a city with a spirit and resolve that stands apart.

  THREE

  The Problem of the Police

  You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

  —SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

  I could feel the mixture of misplaced fear and power in his voice, on his face, in the tension in his arm as he steadied his gun, pointing it at my face and then torso, yelling and cursing. I just remember fragments of his rage as he barked, “Put your fucking hands on the steering wheel,” and when I complied, he continued, “What the fuck were you doing?” He was young—likely my age, or slightly older, both of us just having entered adulthood, wearing it now like an ill-fitting jacket. The sun hadn’t yet broken through the sky, and dew was still on my windshield. I lived around the corner and hadn’t made it far before his flashing lights appeared.

  “It’ll be okay,” I sa
id to him in a low, level tone, repeatedly, as he approached the driver’s-side window where I sat. Sometimes fear is a luxury, the by-product of having the time and space to process, to consider options and alternatives. On that day, though, the fear came later. As the events unfolded, I felt like I was the sixth-grade math teacher that I used to be, trying to talk one of my students down from a tantrum, using a calm, steady tone to mask my emotion. I knew that I couldn’t yell back, that an escalation would certainly end in disaster, that I couldn’t exit the car, and that no phone call would be possible while his gun was pointed at me. And I sensed that silence wouldn’t work in my favor either. The officer yelled and cursed as he approached my window for reasons I don’t think either of us knew, and as he carried on, the only words that found their way to my lips were, “It’ll be okay,” over and over. It was all that I could think of to make the situation less tense—to calm his frenzy. I think it just wasn’t my time to leave this earth, because it worked. He lowered the gun, he gave me neither a ticket nor a warning, he simply got back in his car and drove away.

  Later, I called a former mentor and friend who worked in the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office and told her what happened. I asked her how to report it, and she told me to let it go and to be more careful next time. I did as she said. That was in 2009.

  Conflict exists in community. And not all conflict is the same; it has dimensions, nuance. If we are to live in community with each other, we must acknowledge this reality. Living in community requires a shared set of values and norms to serve as guideposts, defining the behaviors that we want to encourage and discourage, outlining the actions that make our community stronger and those that take away from its strength. In effect, we have rules for dealing with conflict. It is in this context that we understand that the choice to live among others requires the presence of a mechanism for responding to conflict, to instances when norms and values are broken or alleged to have been broken. But the choice to live in community also means that the community must dictate those norms and values for itself and must be able to manage the set of interventions used when conflict inevitably arises.