Befriending Liberation

How are you navigating 2025 so far? Where are you drawing strength? Where are you putting your energy?  How are you balancing rest and effort?

I recently gave a sermon on liberation and my book "Mindful Race Talk: Befriending literacy, fluency and agility" at the Princeton UU church.

Here is an excerpt:
I am the daughter of two Haitian immigrants.  They came to Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s and 1970s.  They taught me the importance of family, working hard, keeping your head down and not making a lot of waves unless absolutely necessary. I think liberation for my parents was integration,  to achieve the American dream, have financial and government stability, provide for their kids, send money back to Haiti and family members, travel, live in a nice home.  They passed that messaging down to me.  I became a psychologist 22 years ago. First member of my family to earn a doctoral degree.  I am so grateful for all their sacrifices and the strategies they used to survive xenophobia and racism. Safety and assimilation aren’t enough for me anymore.  With every year I claim and embody a little more liberation.
The Association of Black psychologists was created in 1968 with the purpose of liberating Black minds. These Black psychologists walked out of the annual psychological conference that year and decided to start something that focused on Black mental health and liberation. They wanted to break up with a paradigm that used Eurocentric principles to define health for black people. 

I feel that liberation is a nonlinear path. Full of paradoxes and contradictions. Progress and retreat. Letting go of comfort and safety for a time. 

A friend recently asked me do you consider yourself a Malcolm or a Martin?  That was a tough question for me.  I asked some clarifying questions, me as I am now or a younger version of me?  Younger Malcolm x or Malcolm near the end of his life? In the end I couldn’t really choose because I feel like they were each working for Black liberation and the liberation of all beings, just centering Black life, struggles and stories.  They had different strategies for accomplishing that. Perhaps one believed the system could be reformed and was an integrationist and another thought it was better for Black people to divest from whiteness and focus on Black nationalism. Both were vilified by mainstream culture while they were alive. there is still a tension in the many minoritized communities with the continuum of integration and abolition. My friend talked about the ways after the 1960s civil rights movements it seems like Black people as a collective took their feet off the gas. Stopped aggressively pushing for change. We seemed to settle for a little bit of integration. I told him how I noticed in recent years I have moved from liberal to progressive. I see how the whole system, both major parties are filled with racism and oppression. It is just that one is more obvious about it. He asked me what keeps you from being one of those extremist. I said I think the difference is my curiosity, my desire for collective liberation, my being able to hear the other perspective. I am rooting for everyone. 

There is an African proverb on the Association of Black Psychologists website “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about antiblackness being “vulnerability to premature death”. We can expand that to think about all policies that cause groups of people to be vulnerable to premature death. I invite you to think who is vulnerable to premature death with the current policies being supported.