https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/black-bodies-in-motion-and-in-pain
We do not seek to cling to promises that were never made to us...
Freedom has long been mistaken as a guaranteed outcome—a foregone conclusion—for dreamers who misunderstood the mission, and for separatists who, perhaps, understood it all too well. Before there can be freedom, there must first be liberation. Before there can be liberation, there must be the revelation of the possibility to be liberated. What is freedom to a being still shackled to the post deeply rooted in the soil of an oppressive ideology? For the purposes of this exposition, both liberation and freedom are mindsets; the psychological postures that are fought for, worked towards. They are the fruits of the spirit, that pour out of transformed hearts and minds.
In the language of the unheard
Lies a fortune to find;
Rich textures of meaning,
Ties that can bind the mind
To the lessons of the past
Remnants of a tortured history
Hidden in the presuppositions
And hostilities
of a time
That no longer exists
Spoken in the language
Of the unheard
“You go along for years knowing something is wrong, then suddenly you discover that you’re as transparent as air. At first you tell yourself that it's all a dirty joke, or that it's due to the political situation. But deep down you come to suspect that you’re yourself to blame, and you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly.” - (Ellison, 1947)
Freedom stands on the shores, waiting for liberation to meet it by way of hope—traversing the landscape that seems fixed but has always been mutable, always shifting. It beckons to us, waving us in from a sea of -isms, dividing to conquer and overwhelm the masses with its ability to lose men during the baptism of suffering—taking them underwater without the guarantee that they will be brought back up. Where do we go from here?
“Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by the turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s own self-worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic that must be at the center of the politics of conversion.” (Cornel West, 2001)
West posits that what we need to combat the nihilism in Black America is a love ethic that transforms pain into promise. The mind is still held in chains and needs to be liberated, but it must first realize that it can be liberated—or that it is worth liberating.“What will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error? At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion.” – Plato
We are, all of us, in different stages of liberation—different stages in the process of nigrescence. Some are waiting to be liberated, while others are still figuring out that they are worth liberating. Self-determination is a byproduct of self-actualization, which stems from the praxis of becoming that which is whole, healthy, and able to work toward the worthy and progressive ideal of the collective. It is the process of reconstituting the self-image and narrative into one that is cleansed; one that is positive; one that focuses on the humanity of the self and the “other.”
Ellison, R. (2010). Invisible Man. Vintage.
Goldblatt, D., & Brown, L. (1997). Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts.
Montmarquet, J. A., & Hardy, W. H. (2000). Reflections An Anthology of African American Philosophy. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA65356223
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