I struggled to complete this book while engaging in and supporting the ongoing resistance against a new protofascist turn in US politics, one in which racism, misogyny, and all varieties of xenophobia are alarmingly pronounced. In my effort to make sense of an ever-changing national and global landscape, I hope this book makes some small contribution to the freedom-making work that lies ahead of us. If Alicia Garza’s initial Facebook post in 2013 was a love letter to Black people, this epilogue is a love letter to the organizers in the Movement for Black Lives, and a tribute to their increasingly expansive vision.
First of all, thank you. Thank you for your courage and your passion, for your savvy and your boldness. Thank you for facing the bloody reality—embedded in the historical fibers of this country and become all too routine—and saying “no.” And in saying no you brazenly rejected the bourgeois trappings of respectability. In other words, you said “hell, no” to state violence in its crudest form, as well as to the slow death that racial capitalism and its neoliberal practices have caused over time.
Your practice reflects an understanding that only when elites cannot buy you off, dazzle you with their power, intoxicate you with a sense of your own importance, and tempt you with trinkets and access and money and celebrity can you be truly engaged in a liberatory process of freedom making. For many of you, this time has come. When amazing Chicago organizer Aislinn Pulley declined an invitation to the White House without blinking, because she did not want to be a part of a photo op with no outcome, we all felt a little freer. When Black Brunch protesters strolled into fancy eateries and began “impolitely” talking about Black death, breaking the bubble of denial that shrouds yuppie privilege, we knew we were a little bit freer. When you refused to be Al Sharpton’s protégés or political accessories, or the human backdrop to his press conferences, we knew we were a little bit freer. When Bree Newsome climbed up a South Carolina flagpole and yanked that Confederate flag down, we felt a little freer. And when the respected Southern-based organizer Mary Hooks told us, as only she could, to pool our dollars, to use them as crowbars to pry open the steel cages and free our sisters during the Black Mama’s Bail Out campaign, we all felt a little freer. Acts of defiance, disruption, and insurgent rule breaking are ways that we delink from the politics of routine, of acclimation, of compromise, and of collaboration. To paraphrase James Baldwin, it is when we demand the impossible that we come close to real freedom.
What do I see when I look at this cohort of activists? I see the faces of thirteen-year-olds who peered out the narrow windows at the Juvenile Detention Center to see hundreds of young activists marching through the chilly Chicago night holding up signs saying “We love you.” I see you on ladders wrapped in chains, holding flags and banners. I see you daringly wading out into rush hour traffic on major highways to force people to look at the reality of Black death, determined in the spirit of “No pasaran.” I see Josh and Jasmine peering from behind cold steel bars, and I see MarShawn dead on the steps of the Ohio statehouse. I see you crying quietly at the back of the church during Alton Sterling’s funeral and standing alongside Eric’s daughter, Tamir’s mother, Rekia’s brother. I see you in a hot, crowded little house in Havana, drinking beer and talking politics in two languages; in a dusty refugee camp near Ramallah; in a favela in Rio after meeting with the Landless Workers Movement, comparing notes about displacement; and in a shantytown outside Joburg trying to make sense of a revolution gone astray. Above all, I hear you insisting this is a world family, and the struggle goes far beyond the borders that the colonizers carved out in the earth. And even when we disagree, we are dancing the same dance.
Finally, I see you building political altars, paying homage to the wisdom of grandmothers and grandfathers, knowing all the while that your eyes will witness, and your hands will build, a world they could only have imagined. When you chant, “We know that we will win,” in a spiraling crescendo, I believe you. I believe you with love, hope, and expectation all wrapped around you in a fierce and unrelenting embrace.