What Is Freedom: Christina Sharpe

On July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass delivered his now famous speech “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?”  In this the 250th anniversary of what became the United States, if freedom means anything it might mean knowing that what Douglass knew and spoke 174 years ago of the brutality of a nation built on genocide and slavery holds true today. “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Black people in the US have endured 250 years of slavery and incomplete freedom, and emancipation as long and a non-event.

At this very hour, all black people face an imminent threat. In the US the hard fought for and meagre civil rights protections, most notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965, have been withdrawn; a white racist revisionist history is being fully deployed throughout primary and secondary schools and universities; a new paramilitary force, with the patrollers now known as ICE, have communities under siege; there are attempts to legislate trans people out of existence; and birthright citizenship continues to be under threat.

The right celebrates as freedom the fascism that they are installing. 

In the face of these attacks (only a small portion of which I have named), freedom, or something like it, can only be achieved through the embrace of abolition and with it, at the very least, the end of policing, the end of the proliferating regimes and structures of punishment and surveillance, the end of borders that make citizens and noncitizens, the end of the expropriation of every meter of land, air and water, and the end of capitalism with its categories of the savable and the expendable.

In the face of these attacks, freedom, or something like it, might be both the capacity to comprehend the full brutality of what we are living at this very hour and to be able to imagine and risk other ways of being, together, on this planet.