On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  By and by, I began to believe that I was doing the work that I was meant to do, and that as long as I stayed true to my convictions, I would be okay. It was an understanding of God that helped me to think more about accountability. I had heard people mostly use accountability as a weapon to challenge people who did not adhere to their ideas or actions, or who made decisions contrary to the loudest voices. But it was in understanding faith better that I came to understand accountability as the quality of one’s adherence to one’s own values, beliefs, and commitments.

  I often think of God in the context of activism as reminding us of our moral courage—of being a compass as we navigate key moral issues, those of good and evil and those of justice. Moral courage is the courage summoned because you are firmly rooted in the righteousness of the task at hand. And I think that faith is often an easier facilitator of moral courage than is its absence. But in this moment, the call for moral courage is received differently, as the movement has not been rooted in a belief in God. And thus religious belief has not been the anchor it once was. And I have been thinking about what it means to win in the absence of a belief in God. When I read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “winning” is so closely tied to an ultimate “win” that is salvific. And I think that there is something particularly powerful about anchoring an idea of victory to a world that has not existed before. It keeps the focus on the possible, on the things that we know to be true but are yet unseen, like freedom.

  In a complicated world, we know that the institution of the church isn’t the only moral compass, but that ideas of good and evil come from many places—Storm taught me that before I ever understood any teachings from church. It will continue to be important that we validate the many ways that people come to navigate this world with regard to morality, especially when the church hasn’t been an open or safe space to so many for so long. I found faith in the streets and in seeing a set of churches live their commitment to justice.

  I learned more about God and faith in the protests. But Storm raised me.

  SEVEN

  Taking the Truth Everywhere

  Working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.

  —PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

  The West Wing is small, smaller than it appears in shows like House of Cards or Scandal. The ceilings are low, the hallways are narrow, and the lone bathroom stall off the main corridor is a reminder that the layout is from another era—that it is truly an old American building. I was reminded that some of our traditions are old America as well. We are a nation of theoretical equals, but President Obama’s chair was the largest in the Roosevelt Room and it was in the middle of the table, as is perhaps expected for the leader of the free world. It was cold outside, as this meeting was on February 18, 2016. But it was warm in the West Wing.

  I received an emailed invitation to join a group of activists to meet with President Obama in late January 2016 in the first intergenerational meeting of civil rights leaders ever hosted by a president. There was a mandatory call with a White House staffer in advance of the meeting. I took the call from home and shared the line with an activist from Chicago and another young leader from the NAACP. The facilitator explained that we would meet with senior White House staff and then with President Obama; we would give introductory statements, then proceed to ask him questions, which we were requested but not required to provide in advance of the meeting.

  I was ready to meet the president. His administration had, after all, been slow to pressure police departments to change their practices by withholding their funding from the Department of Justice; and they had been slower than we expected to condemn police violence and validate our cause. I knew that no meeting would bring back any of the people whose deaths had brought us to the streets. But it could help prevent future trauma.

  Our future will be the result of choices we are now making, and thus it is incumbent on us to engage with the political process. Of course, politicians are rarely the saviors we want them to be. And this is often less of an indictment of them and more of a reminder that they are still human, working within structures we’ve created—both of which are flawed and imperfect. Though flawed and imperfect, they can move us tangibly closer to freedom—or move us further away. And while politicians come and go, the citizenry remains. Our greatest responsibility in all of politics, then, is active citizenship: protesting, voting, running for office, working to address issues in one’s local community, and so forth.

  I am constantly reminding myself that the goal of protest is progress, not simply more protest. Protest, though not the solution, is a precursor to the solution. It creates space that would otherwise not exist, and forces conversations and topics that have been long ignored into the public sphere. It illuminates what our country would rather forget. Protest remains necessary in a country with such ingrained systemic inequity and in which the traditional mechanisms of power have not often benefited marginalized communities without direct pressure. In agreeing to meet with President Obama, we recognized that our commitment to this work begins with protest, but that it does not end there.

  I committed to what would be the first of several meetings with President Obama and his team to tell the truth and to listen. I was hopeful that he would hear us out, and when he spoke I was reminded that his power, while both structural and systemic, was also a power of narrative-shaping and storytelling.

  He gave us all a chance to speak before offering reflections on the things that he’d heard. He explained that he would move forward with nominating the next member of the Supreme Court; that the administration was working, with others, to address the mens rea issue in the context of current sentencing reform legislation; and that while there was significant work yet to be done, much work had been done already, and we were in a better position than we had been in before. This was a consistent refrain of his in those final days of his administration—that despite the distance ahead, we’d covered much ground already. It was a long meeting, having run over its allotted time; when it did, he noted that he would only have time to engage the younger civil rights leaders, and we continued our conversation.

  When we met with him again four months later, the tone and tenor of these issues had grown even more severe. I had been arrested in Baton Rouge shortly before I met with Obama for the second time, in what would be the longest non–national security meeting he participated in while in office. There were no reporters in the room during either of our meetings; no cameras or tweets were allowed. This was an opportunity for genuine conversations about reform—not a press conference or a photo opportunity. Nevertheless, there were calls from within the protest community and from without accusing us of political grandstanding and labeling the activists in attendance as sellouts. I did not agree with the Obama administration on every issue. I still cringe when I think of him using the term “thugs” to describe protesters in Baltimore—and I told him as much. But if we only meet with people with whom we totally agree, then progress will never happen. And if the goal is real, lasting change, then we will have to take the fight everywhere—and that included the Obama White House.

  I have heard people decry “reform” as a weakening of the spirit of protest. But this is simply false. Reform is an acknowledgment that we can change things today that will improve people’s lives in both the short and long terms. Ensuring that those who are incarcerated can call their families at as little cost as possible is good for people today. Creating access to books for families in schools that have historically struggled to teach literacy is good for families today. Developing a strategy to ensure that black families have access to more information about financial literacy is good for families today. These are not wholesale systemic changes, but they move us in the right direction.

  Reform is not a concession or an unwillingness to plan toward larger political goals—such as fundamentally altering our conception of demo
cracy or of the two-party political system. Reform is not a reshuffling of the status quo or political musical chairs that serves as a performance of substance with no impact. But we must work to change the conditions of our lived reality today, while maintaining a commitment to changing the core power structures that led to the conditions that caused us to fight in the first place. It concerns me that those who decry reform would sacrifice people’s immediate well-being while holding out for an “ideal” plan that wouldn’t begin to see returns for half a century—when the communities that need it most today are already dead.

  In meeting with elected officials, whether it was the president, a mayor, or a state senator, we kept to a set of core commitments: first, a seat at the table requires that you bring the truth with you while recognizing that, second, you are not the only person who can bring the truth, and, last, that you work to keep the door open for others. We met with President Obama in an attempt to influence an agenda at the national level that could potentially help create a model for states and cities to follow in leveraging the power of the federal government to hold police departments accountable.

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  THE TENSION between purity and participation is real. I felt it when I ran for office, when—despite growing up in the city, working as a youth organizer as a teenager in the city, launching an after-school center for middle-grades—I was branded an outsider by detractors who felt that I sought office without gaining their permission first. And the facts didn’t matter because the activist community was as fervent as the political establishment about maintaining its gatekeeper role. Moreover, before the election of Donald Trump, there was a widespread belief that all activism happens outside of systems and structures. So the mere notion of me seeking office upset many people. I was unprepared for leftist publications to deride my decision to run for office by claiming that it wasn’t my decision at all, and that I must have been a pawn or tool of the white elite. But I got a keen sense of the way that supposed ideological purity can change the political landscape with mixed effects, especially inside the activist community.

  Running for office is like basic organizing—there is no substitute for connecting with people, and relationships, especially one-on-one, matter. We raised three hundred thousand dollars in about sixty days, knocked on thirty thousand doors in that same time frame, had donors from every state and the third highest number of donors from Baltimore City, and pushed each of the candidates to release more detailed platforms than had existed before. One of the reasons I ran in the first place is that I realized that, with roughly eighty days until the primary election, almost no one then running had a robust platform. It was as if they had simply taken for granted that they might prevail on account of their name alone. I knew that our city deserved more, that we deserved leadership with a vision and a plan, and I knew that I could offer one.

  Ideological purity is not a political goal. Nevertheless, the desire for it is strong, especially among those who know that it is an implausible reality. Politics, the decision-making process that helps to shape the way we interact with our communities and vice versa, is necessarily one of compromise, as ideas, experiences, and plans regularly come into conflict with one another. To assert that politics is compromise is not to suggest that we should ever compromise our core values. It is to suggest, however, that the process requires that we understand that the people with whom we engage have different experiences and ideas that will influence how they make decisions.

  There are some who believe that we should never engage those in seats of power, but this is an ideological stance and not a political stance. Our daily lives are shaped by large systems and structures—from trash collections to stoplights to parking tickets to schools to prisons. Not to engage the people whose decisions and choices shape our lives is to misunderstand our own agency and potential for impact. If engaging people in seats of power has the potential to positively impact the lives of the people we claim to serve, then engagement as a political choice is important. During the 2016 presidential election, some people refused to vote because they felt their vote didn’t matter, or they didn’t like the candidates, or they felt that the president didn’t influence their daily lives. And there were others, mostly elites, who told people that they shouldn’t vote because the candidates were different sides of the same coin, as if there weren’t marked differences between the candidates. I publicly supported Hillary Clinton in an op-ed in the Washington Post and received an intense backlash. But I believed Donald Trump; I took him at his word. I felt like the choice was real and clear, and I had to use my platform to try to influence as many people as possible. Unfortunately, it seems again that in this tension between ideology and outcomes, a fealty to ideology won out to devastating effect. Others would say things like “we can afford to lose an election,” positing options that exist only in a theoretical world.

  To be sure, there is a tension associated with engaging a power structure that we are simultaneously working to change. Why engage something that you are trying to dismantle, or something that you are trying to change so fundamentally that it will not be the same afterward? We engage the system for three reasons: first, where it’s possible to organize citizens to use collective action and power to make the choices in lieu of those in traditional power, we must do so; second, people inside of systems often need external pressure in order to push an agenda aligned with our values; and finally, we use every tool at our disposal to influence change, noting that there are often unlikely pockets of support that would not exist if we did not have a broad engagement strategy.

  Those who are unwilling to embrace this tension, who see themselves as taking a “radical” stance, do so at the expense of having a politics that challenges the status quo. A radicalism that at its heart is about dismantling the status quo in favor of an unimagined “better future” is not in fact radicalism, but actually a cold detachment from reality itself. To be radical implies having an idea in juxtaposition to the dominant one. The absence of an idea is not radicalism.

  We can acknowledge the imperfections of the choices that are sometimes in front of us while maintaining a focus on the consequences of action (or inaction). Our focus, indeed our North Star, is always a concern for improving lives, not for how we will maintain our reputation as radicals or revolutionaries—as if that reputation alone will prevent deportations, end police violence, or promote economic equity.

  This too is the tension between popular uses of reform and revolution. Reform is the realm of immediate change—we put something into action today and see the results tomorrow. Revolution is the idea that there are deep, structural, and systemic choices to be made that will lead to larger-scale changes. So ensuring that people who are incarcerated have adequate meals is reform to some, as it will mean working within a system to press for change that at the end of the day will negligibly impact the fight for the end of mass incarceration. But people who are incarcerated should have healthy meals, right? Yes, of course they should. This is an example of the tension that exists when theory meets practice. The role of the protester need not be akin to that of the general: leading a complicated strategy that knowingly, if remorsefully, sacrifices people in pursuit of the win. When we see that lives can be improved through actions we feasibly take, we must take them.

  Rightly applied, reform includes effective policies for improvement; wrongly applied, it simply makes cosmetic changes that work to uphold the status quo. After the death of Alton Sterling, the Baton Rouge police chief asked for higher salaries for officers in an apparent effort to improve the quality of the workforce through higher compensation, as if that would lead to lower rates of police violence by his officers. That is an example of bad “reform.”

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  WE KNEW THAT it would be important to work to influence the platforms of some of the nominees during the 2016 presidential election, too. I tweeted to both Bernie Sanders and Hil
lary Clinton requesting meetings; both replied that they would meet with us and they did. In setting up the meetings, we aimed to invite activists from across the country so that a range of perspectives were represented. We knew that the meeting needed to include more than just Brittany, Sam, Netta, and me. After both of our initial meetings, I wrote a post summarizing the main policy points that arose.

  We met with Bernie Sanders first, on September 16, 2015. In this meeting, we reviewed his expansive platform that addressed criminal justice and other issues of racial justice. Though his platform was impressive in its range, we had questions about its depth. In preparation for the meeting, we had a conference call to ensure that every participant had a working understanding of the ideas that he had proposed thus far. One of the things that caught us by surprise during the conversation with Bernie was when we began to talk about mass incarceration. He suggested that the police were policing black communities disproportionately because the majority of drug users were African American. The line went silent as we all tried to digest what we’d just heard, certain that he had more to say on the matter, but he didn’t. We addressed his comment in our response; we explained that his statement was totally untrue and that such thinking has consequences for the way policy is set. When his statement became public, Bernie’s team released a response: “While I clearly misspoke and had more to learn with regard to the causes of this problem, we all came to the meeting understanding what is absolutely true: the criminal justice system is broken and disproportionately arrests and jails African Americans.” We continued to connect with his policy team to influence his campaign’s platform, and it eventually gained more depth from all of the pushes within the social justice community—depth that matched its broad scope. This meeting was a reminder that even the most well-intentioned political leaders need to be challenged on core issues and that it is critical that we understand the ideas and beliefs that form the basis for the legislation they propose or support.