On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

In the absence of a space that exists in which you can see yourself, you must create a space that you feel safe in and you must do it in a way that allows you to show up fully, that allows for all of the behaviors, actions, and attitudes that you were quiet about before. And like in the library, when you whisper, other people will hear it and come over; other people will realize that they too can talk.

  There are many people with clean hands, but who have killed—people who have used words like “faggot,” “dyke,” and “tranny” to destroy lives, to crush spirits, to harm in ways that take a lifetime to heal. And they did not always mean to kill, but they did. Some said they were merely joking, as if words were mere wisps of smoke and not tools of power. Others knew their power and wielded it anyway; they took pride in murder. But our power can never be defined by the things we destroy; it must be, must always be, defined by the things we build. I have seen people indifferent about the lives they’ve damaged because they fail to understand that destruction is not something to be proud of—that anyone can destroy, but only few can build. I have seen people murder because they have yet to understand that the lives of those they seem to hate have value. And these people, those who kill, don’t realize that they are likely to be the victim one day. Indeed, that there will be someone for whom their own identity does not have value, and the weapon their predator employs might not be words but something else, something perhaps even deadlier.

  I now realize that gay black men are often meant to adorn, to embellish, to enhance the things around us, but are rarely, if ever, meant to stand on our own. The treatment is akin to the way one regards a nice pair of earrings, an accessory that serves a particular purpose until it doesn’t. And this plays out in relationships with men and women, on a loop. To homophobic men, you’re never really one of the guys, so the moment conflict arises, you’re reminded that you weren’t actually welcome in the first place. And to homophobic women, the moment conflict arises, you’re reminded that you weren’t really one of the girls either. In men, homophobia is often loud; in women, it often is playing softly in the background before it becomes loud. I now know that the pernicious aspect of homophobia, like most things, begins with the ideas, laying the ideological and theoretical foundation that then allows physical violence to manifest.

  In activism, I am often asked if I am gay or black first, as if I am not black and gay and male at the same time, all day, every day. The writer Myles Johnson said it best: “Blackness and queerness do not exist in the body separately like oil and water. Blackness and queerness come together like hydrogen and oxygen to make a newer, stronger, and more relentless element.”* I am asked if the “gay agenda” has superseded the goal of bringing about justice and equity, as if there aren’t gay black people or as if the oppressions aren’t connected, interwoven. I encounter homophobic people who are kind to me, who treat me as an exception to their hatred, as if I want to exist as the temporary respite from the terror they inflict in the world so I can be a tool of whatever aims they have in the moment. And sometimes I encounter those who fetishize black masculinity itself, only recognizing stereotypical renderings of black men as desirable, in lust with specific attributes of the black male body, but not in love with blackness or black men. The black male body becomes an object to be consumed, not to be loved; worthy of sex, but not of partnership.

  How do the language and actions that reinforce the regressive notions of identity, especially homophobia, emerge? There are four primary ideas that lend themselves to homophobia and that circulate and do damage: first, that the media privileges effeminate gay men over traditionally masculine gay men and are thus contributing to the weakening of masculinity, and in the case of black folks, blackness itself; second, that being gay is inherently a sign of weakness, as if one’s strength or commitment to justice is defined by the person one loves; third, that blackness is one’s primary identity and that the “gay agenda” is ruining our collective fight for liberation, as if identity is not interwoven and complex; and last, that identity is a choice and we should not highlight trans communities or gay communities because some heterosexual parents don’t want their children to “choose” an identity not within the strictures of heterosexuality.

  In the media, black people are either entertainers or are still centered on trauma—shown heroically or romantically surviving the impact of trauma or celebrating the survival in the end. It is only recently that shows with majority black casts allow for multidimensional characters to exist as staples and not as mere momentary features. The core of this language that dismisses or defames the complexity of identity is an attempt to advance the idea that there should not be many identities but a singular identity, that the embrace of identities somehow weakens us collectively. It is the same force that whiteness advances and blackness resists. Here it is homophobia. There it is racism. In other places anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

  All of this serves to distract us from engaging with the only true question that matters: do we view ourselves as stronger when we make space on our team for those who didn’t think they had a place or not? I will always believe that an embrace of others’ identities makes us stronger. The work of justice always begins from a place of disadvantage, a recognition that this country has not yet guaranteed access, equity, and opportunity as we can and should. And the way to transition from disadvantage into advantage is by tapping into the quiet and building a team of those who understand the work.

  The challenge is that I know I’m fighting for people who don’t think I’m worthy of fighting with. Partly because, I think, so many parts of ourselves are in the quiet in ways that we don’t acknowledge, that it’s hard to understand the parts of ourselves that share the quiet with parts of others. I’ve been in spaces where the homophobia is palpable, from men and women. I try to remember that culture doesn’t shift as quickly as we always want it to and that no individual carries the burden of being the entrance into the work of justice for everyone. But it’s hard to know that one’s criticism of me is not rooted in a particular idea I’ve expressed or a policy position, but in their perception of the politics of my love and my identity.

  When those in the quiet come out of it, and come together, the world changes. In many ways, the quiet is not living in an identity and disavowing it, but being alone in it, unsure of what to do there. Over the past four years, I’ve learned that there are so many people coming out of the quiet, so many people looking for ways to be seen and heard, waiting for others who share the belief that there is power in collective whispers. And it’s happening all across the world—all of us tweeting, all of us who thought that we were alone, all of us who thought that our stories about the violence we’d endured would go unheard. Social media became, and is, the place where people come out of the quiet and come together, where the collective power of the whisper is captured, where the silence is rendered into deafening sound. It was on Twitter that we learned to fight erasure. In protest, we became the unerased. Each of us will have to continue to find the people in the quiet and to create space for and with them. Our work as organizers is neither to tell the people whispering in the library to shout, nor is it to tell folks to be quiet—our work is to listen better.

  Just because people aren’t shouting doesn’t mean that they are being silent.

  Just because people aren’t showing up in the way we expect doesn’t mean that they are hiding.

  We have to remember that we are all of our identities at once, every time.

  ELEVEN

  On Organizing

  No, I do not weep at the world—

  I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  In our first summer in Ferguson, the sweat was almost as endless as our resolve. I was intrigued and relieved when we got word that there would be a training session by a national organizer in a local church. It seemed like a good opportunity both to cool off and to learn. Up until then, we had spent the majority
of our time in the street; and when we weren’t in the street, we were meeting in small groups to plan actions. There hadn’t been any formal training yet. Perhaps, I thought, we would learn the art of organizing.

  It was hot in the meeting room at the church too, but still cooler than it was outside. When the organizer arrived, she began by teaching us about power mapping—the skill of identifying the key levers of power in a given context and noting ways to influence and/or challenge them. In a more traditional setting, this may have been an ideal lesson. But we were getting teargassed, pepper sprayed, arrested, and shot at with rubber bullets. We knew who had the power, and it wasn’t us. We didn’t need to map it.

  Looking back, it’s clear that we walked into the room that day with the fundamental skills we needed to be effective activists and organizers—and that we’d walked into many rooms with more skills than we thought we had. Sure, we needed to refine them and sharpen them and use them in targeted ways. But when it came to organizing, to coming together to build power in order to collectively confront a problem and then work to solve that problem, it seemed to me that thinking about this activity as a series of tactics that needed to be taught was insufficient. That tactics would be taught suggested a typical top-down model in which an organizing body or institution confers knowledge, gives direction, grants permission. The work of organizing precedes the organizations and it precedes the tactics. Organizing is the act of bringing people together in an effort to harness communal energy to challenge a system or structure to bring about a specific, desired change. From there, the methods and tactics groups employ can vary greatly.

  Back then, I thought that we were going to show up and learn the secrets of organizing, that the instructor would introduce us to practices as-yet-unknown to us that would undoubtedly increase our likelihood of achieving our goals. I thought she’d hand us the playbook for organizing. Instead, what we got were a set of tactics and strategies that we couldn’t use. They were developed and employed in a time and place wholly different from the context we were in and the things we were experiencing.

  Now, this isn’t to say that we can’t learn from the organizers and activists who have come before us. We can and we must. But I had an epiphany in that room: I realized that there were no secrets, only ideas and tactics that perhaps had not been adapted to a particular moment or were yet to be discovered, and there wasn’t a mythical one-size-fits-all playbook that would liberate us. Importantly, what this means is that organizers must employ the tools and tactics that are available. The tactics that were effective in bringing about change in the sixties, seventies, and eighties are well known to all—especially those who oppose them. Indeed, the detractors have had decades to adapt to them. And thus we needed new tactics for a new time. To ignore the role of social media as difference-maker in organizing is perilous. If anything, the most recent election and the manipulation of social media by foreign parties show that the strategies of organizing and influencing are evolving. Knowing this, I was finally free to begin to imagine, and to feel empowered to create new tactics and strategies.

  We don’t enter spaces empty-handed, like we think we do. And we don’t always pay attention to the things we carry, or the things that carry us. For many of us, things like a sense of safety, the people we love, and peace of mind have all been lost. But we did not misplace these things; they were taken from us.

  Even so, we are still carrying pieces of all the lost and taken things with us, every day. And we’re holding on to other things too—other things that have remained ours, things that give us strength and power and joy. We must take inventory of the things we carry, and no matter how frequently we experience loss, we must resist the urge to forfeit our dreams, our hopes, our lives, in anticipation of having them taken from us.

  Baltimore, its own Charm City, taught me how to think about organizing—what it looks like, what it feels like, and why it matters. And from my teenage years on, my understanding of organizing was one that viewed organization and structure as necessary components. The people I’d seen who organized were either members or employees of an existing organization. And there was always a primary vehicle for disseminating the message—a formal campaign, a 501(c)(3), an established, enduring framework.

  In school, we were taught about SNCC and SCLC, the power of the black church and historically black colleges and universities as political forces, and the NAACP. I had not imagined a way to organize outside of a traditional structure before. And even when I imagined organizing that wasn’t embedded in an organizational structure, it still followed familiar practices and tactics—nonviolence, boycott, Alinsky’s principles, and the like.

  We have a tendency to frame the activity of building power as something that happens within the aforementioned structures. But if building power is simply about people coming together in an effort to identify and challenge an injustice, and proposing and/or imagining solutions that either mitigate harm or remove the challenge altogether, then the only thing required is people with a shared vision. Indeed, the only constants in organizing are relationships. Everything else is fluid. It is impossible to organize people with whom you have no relationship—impossible to organize people when you have no proximity to the challenges, to the work being addressed. In this same vein, we must remember not to confuse proximity to trauma with proximity to the work. There are many people who have the former and not the latter, for instance. And a person’s proximity to trauma does not make their analyses any stronger than another’s when they are not informed by an understanding of the actual frameworks and mechanisms of power and of the range of solutions possible.

  Part of the work of bringing about the world that we deserve is ensuring that our strategies and tactics grow as we grow, that we continually reflect on how power shifts and how the forces we’re up against adapt and respond to the strategies we’ve employed. And we must use all the tools we have at our disposal. We have now what many activists and organizers before us never had: the internet and social media. And because of this, we can communicate with and mobilize thousands, millions, at once. As Jason Mogus has written, organizing is the act of building power; mobilizing is the act of spending the power you’ve built.

  The lesson I came away with that day in the church was not the lesson I expected to learn, but sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and seeing the blind spot is the best lesson of all.

  TWELVE

  Letter to an Activist

  We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

  —BAYARD RUSTIN

  Selah, Isaac, and others,

  You have more power than you know, more power than they will ever want you to know, and they will spend their lives trying to hide you from yourself. But you have the strength of a people standing beside you. You do not stand in the shadow of those who fought before you; you stand in their glow.

  Remember, there is no America without you. This America was built on the backs of the people who died so that you could live, and the other brown peoples who were first displaced. Your claim to this country, to justice, is not merely one of ethics and morality. Your claim to this country is rooted in the reality that you, and the people of whom you belong, have already incurred the highest costs possible for the things you seek, and the time for payment is long overdue.

  In fighting to help this country, this world, to be one that is worthy of the beauty of your life, you will undoubtedly experience pain—the normal pain of life and the pain of struggle. But pain is not who you are. You are, and have always been, more than your pain.

  I have found that there’s a natural progression from thinking that you are the problem to realizing that the problem is rooted in the world and that you are impacted by it. I had to learn that liberation is not the same as struggle. Liberation is about the process of getting to the freedom and justice that our lives deserve. Struggle is how we talk about the act of fighting. They are related but
not the same.

  Language is often our first act of resistance. It matters how we talk about the work we do; the words we use or the words we create matter to describe the world we live in, the freedom and justice we deserve. It matters not whether you call yourself protesters or organizers, activists or the like. Whatever title you assume, be the people committed to fighting for accountability and justice. Let that be what defines you.

  Be mindful not to internalize the ills of the world, but to be able to recognize them and then actively work to disrupt them and undo their damage. You have surely learned things by now that you did not choose to learn: misogyny, homophobia, sexism, and so on. You learned these things because they are often so deeply entrenched in the fabric of culture that you may not always realize that there are alternatives. But there are. And the work of unlearning is almost harder, in some ways, than the work of learning. But you will need to identify these things and unlearn them and help those around you to do the same.

  The poet Cleo Wade wrote, “Not every ground is a battleground.” We get so used to fighting. We learn the battle so well that it bleeds over into everything. It becomes a hallmark of all of our relationships, even our relationship with ourselves. But not every ground is a battleground.

  To the question “What can I do?” I say, I wish there were an easy answer. I know that in order to do this work well, you’ve got to know an issue. Find an issue or a set of issues and learn them well. It’s hard to fight for things you don’t understand or for people you don’t know. Proximity matters. There’s a phrase that I’ve heard many people weaponize in this work: The people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. In reality, I think the truth is that the people closest to the problem are closest to the problem and that it’s impossible to be close to the problem without being close to the solution.