On the Other Side of Freedom Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2018 by DeRay Mckesson

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  Excerpt from S O S: POEMS 1961–2013, copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Amiri Baraka. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

  Excerpt from “Rifle II” from Helium by Rudy Francisco (Button Poetry, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Rudy Francisco. Reprinted with permission of the author.

  ISBN 9780525560326 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780525560333 (ebook)

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover design: Matt Dorfman

  Version_2

  for you

  for all of us

  We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

  —LANGSTON HUGHES

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  ONE

  On Hope

  TWO

  How Am I Supposed to Respond to Murder?

  THREE

  The Problem of the Police

  FOUR

  Bully and the Pulpit

  FIVE

  The Choreography of Whiteness

  SIX

  I Was Raised By Magic

  SEVEN

  Taking the Truth Everywhere

  EIGHT

  I Can Remember Her Now Without Sadness

  NINE

  The Friend That’s Always Awake

  TEN

  Out of the Quiet

  ELEVEN

  On Organizing

  TWELVE

  Letter to an Activist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Language is the first act. Obvious in retrospect, but something I’ve had to learn.

  I have not always had the words to describe, to unpack, to frame the world around me. None of us have. I have lived more than I can readily process aloud or in text. There are times when the words I have needed have been beyond my reach. Sometimes language is not my friend, not there when I need it, not yet ready to lend a helping hand or a challenge.

  There is something unnerving about this reality. It shook me—I started to think that the things I’d lived were not quite real because I did not have the words, the phrases, the stories to convey them in anything beyond my mind. And yet, deep down, I knew that these stories would find life one way or another.

  Yet there are other times when the words do come, when I am able to bring to life the things I’ve lived, the things I’ve hoped for and dreamt about, the things that scare me and that bring me joy. And when the words are close, but not ready to peek beyond the surface, not quite the ones we can use to do the work at hand, we are able to create new ones, to make new ways of giving life to the stories of the life we’ve lived, hoped for, and deserve.

  Language, the tool by which power is initially distributed and redistributed: it is in its hands that we find the gateway to liberation, to justice, to freedom. Violence was the first language of this country and is still the first language of many people, but it doesn’t have to be the language we teach our children or whose tempo guides our steps. I now know that our stories travel in more than the words we speak or write. Our bodies have carried messages too, of our sorrows and struggles, our demands for the world worthy of our breath, of our happiness and our cool. Our blood has soaked the fields and streets of this country, and it carries reminders of a terror that birthed a nation, destroyed families for generations, and built wealth unlike the world had ever seen. The stories of black folks are etched in the foundation of this America, from its Wall Street to its Market streets, in the buildings of the University of Virginia and Georgetown, in the music that continues to shape culture and society, and in the laws and practices that make the largest institutions sway. In Ferguson too I was reminded that our bodies are communicating as much as our words are, and always have been. That black bodies have always been seen in one way in this world, independent of the words and the noises and the heart.

  It is an important part of our work to uncover the stories around us, to understand the messages they carry and use their lessons to guide us in our journey.

  We have to name what we fight for, the world we want, a world we have not yet seen. In order to do this well, we have to be able to narrate how we got here, to describe the lives we’ve lived in order to unearth the things that we may have been too close to understand before. And we have to use our understanding of today to paint a picture of a tomorrow that will shine brighter for those who come behind us.

  I have learned too to think more deeply about the words and phrases that we use in the work of social justice to tell stories. I have heard people talk about the importance of community control and community input, but who only believe these things insofar as they get to define exactly who is a part of said community. I have heard people praise a hypothetical community, only to exclude anyone who disagrees with them from their definition of community. Our words and stories must live up to the ideals of the moment in which they are offered. When they do not, the work becomes less about liberation and more about self-service.

  I too think every day of the stories that ended too soon, the result of the lives cut before their time. I think of the damage caused by the people who chose to decorate black bodies with bullets instead of love, and how that pain ripples through generations.

  This is not the whole story—of my life, of Ferguson, of a movement. I could never tell the whole story of any of those things, as the story is never whole from a single perspective. I can no more tell the story of my growing up, knowing that my sister and my father and my loved ones have their own richness to add, than I can tell the story of the movement or the protests, knowing that all the other people who contributed and participated and were incarcerated have their own perspective to share.

  These are the stories that I feel best equipped to tell, having been present in many spaces, in many cities, and experiencing things that I never thought I would, with people I am proud to now call friends and family. These stories are offered in the spirit of protest, in the tradition of those who revealed a part of themselves on paper in hopes that words on paper could help move us closer to justice and equity.

  I love my blackness. And yours.

  ONE

  On Hope

  The impossible is the least that one can demand.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  I learned hope the hard way.

  It was a hot day in St. Louis County in September 2014, and I’d spent the majority of the afternoon sitting
on the floor of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department headquarters. At nine o’clock in the morning, twenty of us had filed in and plopped down in four rows in the center of the station. The police began to gather around us as hundreds of our fellow protesters turned the corner and were now standing outside the building demanding to get in. When it looked like the officers might forcibly remove us, everyone began to link arms—everyone but me. It was my role to record and interpret as much as possible everywhere we protested so that we could consistently tell the truth to the outside world. So I sat in the front of our stacked rows, unlinked.

  I was trying to capture as much as I could on my phone and tweet about it in real time. I wanted to be able to tell the story of the only successful sit-in of a police department since the protests began. We were repeatedly told to move, and we refused. It wasn’t long before the officers’ growing impatience turned to action. I heard the screaming before I realized that we’d been completely surrounded. It all happened so fast. I looked over and saw a mother trying to stop an officer from driving his thumb into the pressure point behind her daughter’s ear. And when I looked up, there was an officer standing directly over me. She told us that we needed to leave immediately. Again, we refused to move. And then she rested her hand on her Taser. I’ll never forget how time stopped as I watched her move her hand from her waist to her Taser to her gun, almost like it happened in slow motion.

  Suddenly, I was on my back, gliding across the industrial floor as an officer dragged me to the entrance of the building by my ankles. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, as a second officer twisted my arm behind my back. His face fell flat, like he snapped out of the hostility, and instead of a verbal reply, he just let my arm go, picked me up, and pushed me out the door.

  It was one of two moments of late when death has felt near. And when death is near, so too is the question of how: How did I get myself into this situation? Should I have made a different choice?

  * * *

  —

  I LIVE OFF the beaten path in Baltimore City in a house that people don’t wander to. If you come to the house, you have made a decision to be at the house. I’ve been using ride-sharing apps since I totaled my car in the protests in October 2014, and I was using one on this day in 2017. I saw the car in the driveway, and I paused. But I was already home, so I felt like I had to get out of the car. And when I got out, the driver in the other car got out too. And in that moment, the calmness came over me, like it did in the St. Louis Metro Police Department.

  I’ve received many death threats over the years, the FBI has visited my house, my phone has been hacked, cities have hired surveillance companies that have deemed me a serious threat, and a movie theater was evacuated because I received a threat that I’d be shot during a screening. But none of those things shook me like that day when the car was in front of the house after work.

  The driver walked toward me, and I just stood still. I can’t even say that I was afraid in that moment. I was still and focused, a stillness and focus that I’ve known only a few times. I followed his hands and body with my eyes, waiting. Ready. Anxious. He reached out his hand and gave me a packet of papers. I looked down and realized that I’d just been served with a lawsuit. I was sued personally by five police officers: three in Dallas and two from Baton Rouge. I hadn’t been physically served in any of the lawsuits except this one, on the day the guy showed up in my driveway. After he handed me the papers he asked to take a photo, and with that, he was on his way.

  These moments forced me to think about the “why” of this work, the fundamental question of whether it is worth the costs. But we all know the risks of protesting, and we choose to meet them head-on. There were so many times in the early months that I was met with an almost paralyzing fear, but as I watched the officer in the police station, I realized that, for what felt like the first time, I wasn’t afraid.

  It was in losing the fear of death that I began to understand faith and hope.

  * * *

  —

  FAITH IS THE BELIEF that certain outcomes will happen and hope the belief that certain outcomes can happen. So when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” he is speaking from a place of faith. He is confident that justice is inevitable even if it may come in another lifetime. Faith is often rooted in the belief in a higher power, in God. Hope, on the other hand, would mean reframing this statement to say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, and it will bend toward justice if we bend it.” Faith is rooted in certainty; hope is rooted in possibility—and they both require their own different kinds of work.

  The work of faith is to actively surrender to forces unseen, to acknowledge that what is desired will come about, but by means that you may never know, and this is difficult. That faith is rooted in certainty does not mean that it never wavers. Indeed, it is not a static belief but one based on trust. And one’s trust is not easily conferred.

  Hope is the belief that our tomorrows can be better than our todays. Hope is not magic; hope is work. I am not certain that a new world, one of equity and justice, will emerge, but I am certain that it can emerge. I have heard people speak of hope in rather different ways. The first is with statements like, “I hope that we win,” or “I hope my loved one, diagnosed with incurable cancer, will somehow make it.” When we hope in this way, we choose optimism. We believe that perhaps the seemingly extraordinary miracle is within our reach, that it is yet possible. At times, though, when we hope in this manner, we surrender our agency to luck or divine intervention. We acknowledge our limitations in impacting the eventual outcome and rest on optimism as our key act, the primary tool in our toolkit.

  When we talk about being hopeful for a future in which black bodies are not considered weapons, it’s so easy to deride hope as a platitude, or a nice thought, or even as an enemy of progress. Yet there’s another side to hope. Hope can be a driving force. Consider the notion of hope in relation to the way that we use “dream”—a word with a similar dual use. On the one hand, a dream can be the fanciful whimsy of a child, free to explore any one of countless possible realities, completely unmoored from present-day circumstance. But dreams have another, more actionable meaning. Indeed, they can be a firm, dynamic vision of where you want to go. I think this is why we still celebrate the dream of Dr. King, and why parents urge their kids to dream.

  Hope is the precursor to strategy. It powers our vision of what roles we must play in bringing about a desired goal, and it amplifies our efforts. I am not surrendering to luck. I am not surrendering to a blind faith that things will just get better. I am reminded that to have faith that a world of equity and justice will emerge does not relinquish one’s role in helping it emerge. This is the way to use hope: as faith’s companion (and vice versa). When my faith is challenged, it is the belief that things can change that keeps me moving forward. And when hope feels futile, I rely on faith to push forward and help reclaim that certainty.

  I have heard critiques of the current wave of activism that are fundamentally critiques of faith—there are people deriding this notion that the world will be more just and that we will end white supremacy. It is those people who look back on the legacy of resistance that we have inherited and challenge its outcomes. The police are still killing people, the argument goes, and the racial wealth gap is as big as it has been since the 1920s. Furthermore, the public education systems have failed black and brown kids throughout the country. Thus the danger in believing in the inevitability of change cannot be overstated. The faith they critique—the belief in unnamed forces that will bring about change—is blind faith, and they are right to be critical. But that is not what animates our striving. Protest is the work of hope. Protest, at its core, is telling the truth in public. It is confrontation and disruption rooted in the acknowledgment of a future that has not yet come, but that is possible. The work at hand is hope-work.

 
I do not blame anyone who refuses to hold hope in their hands when justice has slipped through our fingers too many times. Many black and other marginalized people have expressed the unfairness of being asked to carry the “burden” of hope, that it’s come to feel compulsory for these groups to do so. To this I say that the absence of hope, not its presence, is a burden for people of color. If anything, blackness is a testament of hope: a people born in and of resistance, pushing against a tide meant to destroy, resting in a belief that this world is not the only one that can be.

  I think that faith is actually the burden that people have misnamed as the burden of hope. It is not our task to carry the burden of faith, but it is often our choice. My faith wavers often. I and others have fought and lost. I have seen people crushed by the weight of the opposition. I have seen the best of intentions transformed into self-interest or terror. And I have seen optimism blind people and keep them from addressing the realities of the horror they face. But when my faith wavers, my hope carries me through.

  I think that in some ways the hope of black people is the fuel for this nation; that it is the creativity and ingenuity of a people who have had every reason to choose resignation but have not that fuels both the culture and cadence of this American life.

  * * *

  —

  FREEDOM IS NOT only the absence of oppression, but is also the presence of justice and joy. We are fighting to bring about a world that we have not seen before. “Make America Great Again” is a familiar evocation of a mythical time of human flourishing in our nation’s history. What is posited as a time of “greatness” was, for many, a time of rampant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and sexism. We have never seen a world of equity, justice, and joy. We are trying to create something altogether new. And it is impossible to create something new in the absence of hope.