In The Direction of Freedom
Four years ago, I quit a well-paying job in search of something I knew no employer could offer. I think I finally found what I was looking for. The answers are in Mariame Kaba’s new book We Do This ’Til We Free Us.
But first, let’s rewind.
In 2016, I participated in the Mandela Dialogues on Memory Work, a two-part series of conversations that took place in South Africa and Sri Lanka. In my application, I wrote about wanting to think about the relation between archives and memory as it pertains to the problem of police murders of Black people, about which I had recently written and helped organize a project. I have never articulated how the Mandela Dialogues shaped me, but in the interest of tracing my own thought process, now is the time to do so. The Dialogues changed my life’s direction in at least two pivotal ways.
First, its inclusion of memory workers from several other countries — Rwanda, Colombia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, among others — allowed me to see how the struggle in which I was involved is truly a global one. Doria Johnson, a series participant who was then a PhD candidate in history at the University of Wisconsin, embodied this spirit more vividly than anyone I have ever met. As an example, Doria is perhaps the person most singularly responsible for the US Senate’s apology in 2005 for failing to intervene to stem the crimson tide of lynching. One of Doria’s lasting legacies before her too-soon death was the installment of a historical marker at the South Carolina site where her great-great-grandfather Anthony Crawford was lynched. But Doria left a lasting legacy on me as well. I will never forget her aphorism: we in the fight for freedom must use memory work as a bullet for liberation.
Doria’s evocative phrasing highlights the second major mark that the Dialogues left on me: introduction to the concept of liberatory memory work. Though it would be more than a year until I formally left the archival profession, in my heart I was gone once I finished reading about it. In the intervening months and years, I have returned to it regularly. I first alluded to it in a somewhat-regrettable exit letter. I then facilitated at least five workshops in five different cities using its framework. I mentioned it on panels, including one from just last month.
What I have always found (and still find) useful about it is the way it enumerates the many modes in which one can simultaneously do the work of memory and liberation, but that the latter is not necessarily inherent in the former. I also appreciate how the authors, Chandre Gould and Verne Harris, declare that “Liberatory memory work is about making a liberatory future,” a part of which must make space to destabilize the dichotomy between so-called perpetrators and so-called victims. As generative as I found the framework, though, I always saw it as a bridge to something else that would elicit a clearer answer to the question often posed in the wake of police killings: what is to be done with killer cops? More broadly, I wondered how we who struggle towards abolition should propose to handle the Daniel Holtzclaw’s, the Jerry Sandusky’s, the Bill Cosby’s, or the Gary Urton’s — all men who abused the power they held over other people — with something else if not prison? During the first year of my doctoral program when taking a class on transformative justice, I thought I had found the “something else.”
Transformative justice, I would soon learn, was an increasingly popular term that was being increasingly decontextualized from its origins. I didn’t make matters any better. In my final paper for the class that I later revised and gave at a conference, I tried to consider what transformative justice and its core principles (especially liberation, safety, and accountability) could bring to bear in cases where powerful men in uniform — be they cops or soldiers or department chairs — demonstrated themselves to be interested neither in stopping their serial abuses nor taking accountability for it. I never felt too convinced that such a connection existed at all, but I assumed that the exercise itself was worth it. This assumption did not hold. It was, after all, not worth it. Kaba’s book explains why.
In an essay written with Rachel Herzing about R. Kelly, the authors state emphatically that “framing transformative justice as an alternative to imprisonment demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the concept” given that transformative justice was never proposed as a substitute or successor to the prison. In the book’s next chapter, Kaba further explains that transformative justice isn’t concerned with what we do with or to people who cause(d) massive amounts of harm; she helps us see that transformative justice is about what we do with ourselves, our norms, and our practices that gave rise to the abuse. The inward-outward lens of transformative justice, then, is distinct from accountability. Accountability, she reminds us, is what a person who caused harm does for and with themselves. While people can be supported toward that end, accountability cannot be done for someone. They either receive the support and take accountability. Or they don’t. Relatedly, some actions exceed the capacity of an accountability process or transformative justice. These concepts are not, I now understand, templates. They are tools. We reach for a screwdriver when really we need a hammer at our own peril.
Let me give an example. Last summer, I was a co-collaborator and a signatory on an open letter addressed to two academic departments at Harvard, one of which (Anthropology) is the department with which I am affiliated. We wrote and published the letter as a response to an investigation that detailed years of abuse and harassment by several senior faculty who, along the way, were enabled by other senior faculty as well as a culture of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. Thus we proposed interventions to transform the culture based on the understanding that what is truly rotten to the core and irredeemable is that not only did other professors and students spend years denying, dismissing, and minimizing these harms but also that these white men would still have access to further their abuse if not for former and current students courageously speaking up about it. Sadly, but predictably, the propositions in our letter have not been accepted. The problem wasn’t that the right tools weren’t available, it’s that there were too few workers willing to use them. But if they had, then such a shift would have been much more likely to prevent a recurrence than a purely punitive approach. Kaba’s compilation of essays elucidates that transformative justice has less to do with promise than with potential.
We Do This ’Til We Free Us reminds me of another stellar set of essays that I recently read, The Black Woman: An Anthology, which was edited by Toni Cade Bambara and first published in 1970. While pondering the prospects of Black revolution, Bambara issues what we might consider a clarion call to abolitionists: “Perhaps we need to face the terrifying and overwhelming possibility that there are no models, that we shall have to create from scratch.” Her instructive insight reveals that the danger is not that we don’t have a map for freedom but that we keep looking for one. By entertaining, as I did, the question of “what will we do in the case of [some really awful thing]” we are seduced into searching for a map instead of following the direction. The direction is freedom, and any map that purports to point us there isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
It is, in a way, quite fitting that the cover for We Do This ’Til We Free Us comes from the canonical canvas of artist and organizer Monica Trinidad. The illustration is of a moon’s (or sun’s?) light reflecting off the water. The image illuminates the fact that for enslaved people who sought to run away, the cover of night provided their best chance for success. The darkness would have made a map utterly useless. Instead they were guided by a general direction, one of freedom, and whatever light they needed came from the moon or stars. This is the lesson for those of us who struggle towards abolition. That a map doesn’t exist is the surest sign of our strength. All we have to do is look for glimmers of light in the dark, such as Mariame Kaba’s beacon We Do This ’Til We Free Us, and we can be assured that we’re headed in the right direction.
This essay is part of TAVP’s new series of writings and reflections on liberatory memory work and transformative justice. We are grateful to Jarrett, whose work and thinking have inspired us over the years, for contributing to this series.
