Independent But Still Not Free

Is "freedom" just click-bait in America?

On July 4, 2024, the United States will celebrate the 248th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. For the first time in decades, I have plans that will immerse me in a setting of patriotic fervor. I will be the person not wearing red, white, and blue, the person not standing up for the national anthem, the person not buying the national myth that the holiday is about freedom.

Sometime in adolescence, I began to question why my southern Black family celebrated a holiday that did not mark our ancestors’ freedom, especially since our ancestors’ freedom might have come sooner had America remained part of the British Empire. In America, we learn that the main precipitation of the American Revolution was increasing British taxation of the colonies. I suspect that there was something else at play.

In 1772, two years before the Boston Tea Party protest, a British court freed James Somerset, an enslaved African. Somerset had been brought to England from Boston by his owner, Charles Stewart. While they were in England, Somerset escaped, but was later recaptured, at which point Stewart imprisoned him on a ship bound for Jamaica, where Somerset was to be sold. In Somerset v. Stewart, the British court ruled not only that Somerset could not be forcibly sold to another country, but also that there was no explicit British law allowing for slavery. The ruling did not end slavery or the British involvement in the slave trade, but it prompted several enslaved persons in America to sue for their freedom using it as a precedent. Their efforts did not work, but the writing was on the wall for both abolitionists and defenders of US chattel slavery, who had followed the case closely.

My first year in seminary, I took a class called “Faith and Freedom.” Ironically, while it was a course for the Baptist Studies certificate, it introduced me to Methodism. One of our readings was an article by John Wesley, in which he argued that the American colonists did not really want freedom; they wanted license to do whatever they wanted. In other words, they wanted power. They didn’t want the king exercising dominion over them, but they wanted to exercise dominion over Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the land.

“Freedom” in America has always been click-bait. People use the word to justify and encourage national loyalty, but a closer look reveals it’s a lie. Real freedom is about: liberation from all forms of oppression, the right to self-determination, and access to the basic necessities of life. Real freedom is for all of God’s children, not just for Christians or followers of the Abrahamic religions, but for the whole world, as in“He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

This is what civil rights activists like Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Bernice Johnson Reagan, and Angela Davis have been trying to teach us.

“Nobody’s free until everyone is free.” – Fannie Lou Hamer

“Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind.” – Ella Baker

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” – Audre Lorde

America might be independent, but it is not free, not until all its people are free (regardless of their citizenship status). We cannot be free while also incarcerating more people than any other country in the world. We cannot be free while supporting Palestinian apartheid. We cannot be free while separating immigrant children from their families and caging them. We cannot be free while controlling women’s health options. We cannot be free while limiting the expressions and rights of sexual and gender minorities. We cannot be free while criminalizing poverty and homelessness. We cannot be free while children’s life chances are constrained by the zip codes that they’re born into.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons,

Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons

(Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Ella’s Song”).

Sitting at Truth’s Table

This year’s Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing included a live audience recording of the Truth’s Table podcast. I’ve been a fan since it came out, so I was delighted to sit with Ekemini Uwan and Dr. Christina Edmondson to talk about self-care, mental health, faith, and justice. Check it out!

Celebrating 10 Years of Authorship and Survivorship

July 1 marks two important anniversaries for me: the tenth anniversary of the publication of my first book, Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength, and ten years of breast cancer survivorship. I still remember the day that I held a book that I’d written in my hands for the first time. It was one week before publication day and I was attending a workshop for pre-tenure faculty at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion in Wabash, Indiana, surrounded by colleagues from across the country as I unpacked the box.

Me with a head full of hair, smiling as I hold my book for the first time in the dining room of Trippet Hall at Wabash College. I can make out Drs. Reggie Williams, Derek Hicks, and Ruth Anne Reese in the background.

The Monday that I returned home from Wabash, I reported to the imaging center at the local hospital for what was supposed to be a “let’s just be on the safe side” biopsy. One month earlier, a routine mammogram had revealed some micro-calcifications in my left breast. After a follow-up mammogram, I was referred to a breast surgeon who doubted that it would be cancerous, but agreed that we should do a biopsy given my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis at the same age. One week later I was sitting in Dancing Goats coffee shop, reading Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat, when the doctor called. The tremor in his voice gave away the diagnosis before he said the words. I packed up my bag and walked out of the coffee shop in tears.

To this day, I still associate Dancing Goats and the publication of Too Heavy a Yoke with that call. For years, I felt like my diagnosis robbed the book of the launch that it deserved. So it’s been a pleasure to watch it spread through word of mouth and to hear Black women describe how the book has transformed their lives and helped to free them from living into the myth of the StrongBlackWoman.

This week I returned to Dancing Goats for maybe the third time since that first diagnosis. As I walked into the same back door that I once exited in tears, I smiled.