By Asha Bandele
In the upside down world that we who live in America have been experiencing since at least Trump’s vulgar foray into U.S. politics, even the question of freedom becomes a perversion of itself.
Women are free except with regard to body sovereignty and equal pay.
Black people are free except poverty remains legislated and police continue to stalk and occupy Black communities seeking evidence of criminality while ignoring the criminality in their own law enforcement ranks, or on Ivy League campuses and in white communities where more drugs are bought and sold and where the legacy of white-on-white child sexual abuse and endangerment was documented even by Freud until the powers that were silenced him.
America is free, except for that niggling matter of the Supreme Court where the conservative majority dares to call themselves originalists when it comes to the Constitution and American law, while simultaneously creating law that tramples on their own founders’ words about individual power, rights and authority.
America is free, a land of opportunity, the cornerstone of which is access to a good and strong equal education and luckily we do have public schools for children but the curricula has been reimagined as indoctrination and children aren’t taught how to think, how to question.
Many of our children–and I have seen this first-hand–cannot find the mental and physical wherewithal to even try to do because they are hungry and displaced. Forbes reported that America is home to two-thirds of the 15 wealthiest people on the planet–the whole planet–and the Children’s Defense Fund, almost simultaneously, reported that 11 million children in the U.S. are living in abject poverty and roughly 1 in 6 are living with food insecurity (that means they likely don’t have enough to eat or sometimes anything to eat, everyday).
We are living in a nation that by 2022 had seen rents increase so much that a person working full-time, all year, at the minimum wage could not afford a humble two–bedroom apartment in a single U.S. state nor the District of Columbia–and still have the money to eat, pay utilities and other life necessities like healthcare. Homelessness, which has just been criminalized, has risen 63 percent in the last 15 years.
And all of this is happening while children of every race, but disproportionately children of color, are living in subpar conditions while a loud bunch of narcissistic, racist, sexist homophobic, xenophobic, undereducated and inarticulate people ramble on about how free America is.
In the face of this particular brand of American crazy, I maintain sanity by returning the most brilliant thinkers and seers and writers among us, most often remembering the words of the Mother, Toni Morrison who admonished us not to repeat at least these errors of human fancies:
We mistook violence for passion; indolence for leisure and thought recklessness was freedom.
Here are 8 other quotes about freedom that keep me going
when I feel my legs, my heart, my spirit giving out.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another. ~ Toni Morrison
I’d rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing, than to save my skin by taking back what I have said. ~ Ida B. Wells
The cost of liberty is less than the price of oppression. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois
You don’t have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being. ~ Malcolm X
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The function of freedom is to free someone else. ~ Toni Morrison
…The world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed. ~ Barack Obama
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains. ~ Assata Shakur
