An Invitation to My Friends Who Are Not Black
Don’t take this personally, unless it’s personal to you.
You’re hurting, you know that your Black fam is hurting. You may be feeling into how your Black fam HAS BEEN hurting all along. And it’s daunting. It seems too big, too diffuse, too entrenched for any individual to change anything.
When you don’t know what to do to help, the best thing to do is listen and follow the lead of those who have had their sleeves rolled up. The people who have been doing the work and learning the work.
The prison industrial complex may be too vague and amorphous to understand how to let it die, but it’s death allows the seedlings of harm reduction and transformative justice and embodied liberation to finally catch the sun’s rays and grow.
There are those, however, who have been working to build alternatives, embodying those alternatives, putting them into practice. For generations. We build on the freedom dreams of every runaway, every maroon colony, every abolitionist, every radical, every poet and painter and dancer and emcee, every horn player or ivory tickler, every liberation theologist, free breakfast facilitator, street medic, and barbershop.
You’ve maybe never seen or heard of or experienced a modality of being that favors healing over punishment. Maybe you’ve never been part of a collective, just an individual in a group of individuals, working not toward some common dream of freedom, but toward an individual escape from the grind-to-die work week and indentured student loan servitude. I understand how this alienates and isolates you as you spend 40, 60, 72 hours a week in your chosen *field* of labor.
But abolitionists know a thing or two about field labor. Mothers know a thing or two about labor. And if you listen, you will know a thing or two, too.
The hard part: you will be challenged. Your understanding of liberation will be challenged by new narratives, new definitions. You will have to give up the certainty that reality conforms to your reading. You will have to give up the certainty that your analysis is real and that those who dream of freedom are naive idealists. You will have to give up your stubborn insistence in American Innocence and sit with a new narrative, written not only in the lyrics of Brooks or Hughs or Kweli, but in the scars of Whipped Peter/Gordon, the spilled blood of Trayvon, the bullet holes in Breonna’s wall, the forged correspondence of COINTELPRO, and the disappearance of generations of Black people into gulags, many of them for innovative entrepreneurialism in the field of herbal medicine or at least reality-numbing distraction.
You will ultimately find yourself at a point of decision. Will you believe the narrative of American Innocence, that the savages of Earth are better for having encountered “Civilization,” and the unwillingness to integrate on the part of some individuals leads to their tragic, mistaken deaths. Or, will you believe another narrative, one that does not make excuses for culmination of all crimes: the genocide of the people of this hemisphere and the forced migration, labor, and dehumanization of 13 million Africans and the plunder and destruction across Asia. One that sees that more inhumanity is not the solution to inhumanity.
You’re going to want to focus on “achievable goals” and for that reason, you will want to quiet or discredit or ignore abolition and collective action. There is no power there, if power lies only in the franchise and the law and the dollar. All of these are deities, elevated as such by the power you concede to them.
You cannot run to freedom if you do not know in what direction is lies. You will not know where it lies if you do not hear the freedom songs. You will not hear the freedom songs if all you do is listen, nor if you choose not to listen. Run with us. WITH us. You are not entitled to leadership nor final arbitration of truth in narrative.
I invite you to be humble. I invite you to follow if you know not where to lead. I invite you to freedom with us.
