Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
In his book published in 2024, historian Timothy Snyder addresses the absurdity of talking about freedom while entertaining a fascist idea of dismissing history. Such a notion isn't possible, he argues if are talking about freedom. In On Freedom , Snyder writes that "freedom must be about possible futures." How can you talk about "possible futures" since these futures "exists on a line from an actual past." And Snyder asks, "[h]ow were we to draw those lines without history?"
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Snyder explains, the US, turning against itself, believed it had won against communism. Finally, now, capitalism would "replace" communism and "bring democracy to the world."
The first thing I learned about capitalism in the 1970s was that it was incompatible with democracy. As a Black American, I understood that no matter what, democracy wasn't an idea that most Americans believed in. It wasn't believed when the Founding Fathers wrote of freedom and most owned human beings, enslaved Black in their fields and kitchens, enslaved Blacks tending to the making of profits for their families and, ultimately, for the young country as a whole.
There was an era of pro-democracy in the US: the Reconstruction era. The era in which W. E. B. Du Bois writes of former enslaved Blacks building communities for their families to feel safe and accumulated wealth. These Blacks believed in freedom to become human beings. And then the fascists returned with a vengeance, claiming the land and the wealth to be all their doing. No sharing! No democracy! Using bullets and fire, these fascists swept away Black towns, homes, businesses, and families. And the era of pro-democracy ended while the US, believing itself exceptional, flexed its muscles within and without the country, daring anyone, any country to stop it.
We have yet to see the piling of books written by and about Blacks, Indigenous, and Latino/a people set ablaze. Yet, it's becoming increasingly difficult for young Americans to access the history of US violence toward those it stole land from and slaughtered by the thousands. It's difficult to access the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade that brought kidnapped mothers, fathers, children to this New World to build an empire. It's not at all difficult to read about the Founding Fathers and their greatness or how the history of "exceptionalism," American exceptionalism, enriched this nation. The very real anti-democracy movement, led by the organization of the KKK and the Confederacy, militias and vigilantes, lynched Blacks at formal picnics on Sundays, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, administered "justice" in barns and on the shores of the Mississippi River.
No, the book burning hasn't begun yet; nonetheless, the bans are working to spread ignorance and anti-democratic sentiments.
What I would call the revised narrative for the 20 th century USA needed Americans, particularly Indigenous and Black Americans to remember their place in the scheme of things. As Nixon announced, the problem in America resides with Black people. They could continue to organize for freedom after the assassination of Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. and other leaders. They could organize under the leadership of the Black Panthers and for socialist, if not, communist organizations. They could seek to recruit young whites as the Civil Rights Movement had done.
T hat was pro-democracy trying to come back but overwhelmed by the America First movement and American freedom-- white freedom, freedom only for a mythical white America.
In On Freedom , Snyder talks about his decision to take up history at a time when history "was deemed irrelevant." When Americans were asked to forget about "communism and fascism," he writes. A "negative freedom" becomes "common sense.
It becomes common sense to clear "away the junk of the past," he writes, and "in the jargon of the 1980s and 1990s," to speak of " deregulation , privatization , welfare reform ." Frightening, I remember then.
The welfare state was akin to communism. Socialism, the naysayers shout today. We were, Synder writes, to "ignore culture." Besides advising foreign nations to be forewarned about any rising again of communism, in the US, there's a growing spree: the building of prisons, the prison industrial complex, Snyder writes, and "wealth hoarding."
I remember those days during the horrors of the 1980s when even Blacks turned to real estate, capitalizing on the removal of economically poor Blacks on the South Side of Chicago. On the opposite of a "love" train, some in the Black middle class distanced themselves from the working class and economically poor but also moving far and away from the tradition of a Douglass or Truth's idea of freedom, they never made note of the wedge they allowed to form and become filled with opportunistic tyrants. Gentrification was on the lips of the not-long-ago victim of Jim Crow legislation and the practice of lynching. The Black middle class came to see themselves as exceptional .
In turn, I noted how few cared where the scattered Blacks from these now gentrified communities would land. How would their lives improve? Or will they be housed in the newly minted prisons? How far from Jim Crow or slavery, for that matter, had Black Americans come?
" When we think that we are exceptional in our devotion to freedom," writes Snyder, "our overconfidence makes us vulnerable to the propaganda of tyrants pitched at what we want to hear." It's "negative" freedom, he argues. And who won ultimately? "In 2016 the oligarchical American presidential candidate won, with Russian assistance."
Donald Trump, Snyder reminds us, is a "submissive client" of the Russian president Putin. Trump "is a hero of negative freedom, wealthy through undertaxed inheritance and comfortable denying everything." Here is Trump again, starting a new reign of fascism in the US, with the support of Putin and other dictators and fascists around the world.
And, I ask, what are we to do now ?
" All ways of 'knowing' in this country" are shaped by the histories of race and racism," writes Iman Perry in South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. As professor Joy James notes, in Shadow Boxing : Representatives of Black Feminist Politics , the consequences of civilization "is that 'African people are still known as people without logic, people without systems, people without concepts"'"
Think about freedom in the US. Think about slavery, as does Snyder in On Freedom when he writes of the bodies of the enslaved, bodies that didn't matter. Black people didn't matter because white Americans didn't see "the body of an African as a Leib , that is, a living human being. K ö rpers , yes. Corpses, already! Thinking that attempts to get at the root cause of racism is thinking that lingers at the intersectionality of "oppression and freedom" (James).
It's willful ignorance that insists on living in a state of denial. "White people in the United States know about race, but they suppress that knowledge in an everyday covenant of ostensible ignorance." What white people deny, however, worsens situations. After all, denial means to not think about the past and the meaning of freedom in turn. Or rather, it's easier to think on a "negative" freedom. Freedom, that is, as Snyder explains, for white Americans to own property-- even if that property is human. The government, in turn, wasn't to "interfere" with this right to own Black people.
Willful ignorance in order to be free ! Unlike the enslaved Blacks!
With this past comes a future in which white America thinks of itself "as self-sufficient, like plantation owners, with no need for government assistance." The Leib of the other still isn't recognized since white America's penchant is to reject the idea of sharing anything with Black people, writes Snyder. And this way of thinking, constantly rejecting the Leib of others, leads to "self-deception and unfreedom." I'm witnessing this slap in the face, this kick down the stairs: no DEI, no Affirmative Action, no Critical Race Theory students of the law to understand the intersectionality of race and law in the US, no race discussions period"
For white America, looking on at the bodies of others and seeing objects for exploitation or gaslighting means, Snyder observes, "we don't really understand our own bodies. In the end, we'll "end up giving away our own freedom and our own lives." The dehumanizing of others by suggesting Others don't have a history is, I would argue, a way not only to deny their humanity (and therefore the history), but also to make of white Americans an unfree collective.
K ö rpers , in other words.
When we think of freedom, we are actually thinking of corpses in need of revival-- if not too late. Otherwise, Americans, generation after generation, live only to embrace "the death principles."
Freedom is about trying to be right, writes Snyder. Trying to be right-- as opposed, I would think, to declaring oneself a "stable genius." Not so right at all!
What would Dr. King do?
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