Let This Radicalize You: Freedom Dreaming for Collective Liberation
Photo credit: Shedrick Pelt / @sdotpdotmedia
”An organizer is a social arsonist, who goes around lighting people on fire,” Fred Ross, the legendary labor organizer, once said.
Right now the world is quite literally on fire. Los Angeles is burning. We are witnessing genocides in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. We are in the throes of inflation while a neo-fascist is in the White House. I am here today, not to give you answers. I am here today, not to give you an easy word or a quick fix. I came here today to agitate. I come here today to radicalize you. Because I believe that the solution can be found through collective action. Through organizing.
In the Gospel of Matthew, John the Baptist cries out: “Repent, the end is near!” I'm going to contribute an addendum and say, organize, because the end is near.
The weekend before the presidential inauguration I was in Washington, DC for the People's March. This protest was organized by several individual movements working in coalition. I was invited by the Dream Defenders to sing protest songs, including the classic labor anthem “solidarity forever” as part of their People's Choir. What made this moment so powerful was that it was made possible through the collective power of a coalition of distinct movements rooted in a shared vision. Some of these progressive movements included: Movement for Black Lives, IfNotNow, Democratic Socialists of America, Rising Majority, Coalition of Labor Union Women, and Free Speech TV, just to name a few. A shared vision that included people from different political ideologies, race, class, gender, and cultural backgrounds–who came together with the shared vision to resist fascism while standing in solidarity for collective liberation for all. My question for us today is: How do we replicate large scale solidarity and collective action within our community at Union Theological Seminary and abroad?
(Photo credit: Pretty Cool Strangers for @thedreamdefenders @prettycoolstrangers)
Today, I want to talk to you about vision. My friend Jordan often talks about the day after the revolution. When we pass the aux cord, what's the playlist going to be? And how we must prepare for that moment now. What does it sound like? What does it look like? Maybe most importantly, what does it feel like? Dream Defenders offers a glimpse of what could be in their Freedom Papers. I would like to highlight a few of their freedom dreams today.
Freedom to Be: Each of us is bursting with life, brimming with magic, creativity, and uniqueness. We are not commodities, to be picked and sold to the highest bidder. We are not boxes or binaries. The freedom to be is about living a life beyond survival and coping; a life focused on fulfilling our wildest dreams and our most creative pursuits, rather than competing against one another for crumbs.
Freedom of Mind: Education is a liberator. Our Education system should be places where curiosity, creativity and critical thinking are encouraged to flourish.
Freedom from War and Violence: We are better than War. Every year millions of our children are slaughtered in faraway lands for this country, for our “freedoms.” Millions more come home to a broken country with broken minds and bodies. Wars happen when the wealthy determine it and we’re always the ones destroyed by them. We’re told that war is natural, that it’s simply “human nature”. War is about money, power, and land. We are the ones paying for these wars, in blood and billions. The violence devastates us all and normalizes the notion that violence between us is common and required.
Freedom from Environmental and Ecological Destruction: The climate disaster is a direct result of Western “civilization” and its insatiable greed. Billionaires are trashing this planet and betting on moving to Mars. Fossil fuel executives, the corporate class, and the military industrial complex gaslight us about its severity, all while severe weather shifts are actively killing people around the world, and causing populations to be displaced and nations to starve. All while Black and brown and poor and working class people are impacted the most.
Freedom from Poverty: In this country we exist to work. And our work makes them richer while we get pennies for giving them our lives. When we get sick, we pay the hospitals and insurance companies thousands. They raise our rent, we line the pockets of the developers. We pay for water and light and give our coins to people who never think about losing their power. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can have good lives now. We can have abundance now. No more generations need to be born to struggle, to make do. We can break generational curses, we just have to do it together. In movements, with unions, in organizations that want to break this cycle of gross inequality.
In the face of white supremacy, patriarchy, and settler colonialism that make up this late stage capitalist, dystopian nightmare, I have a few questions. For example, what is the role of art and culture in speaking truth to power and combating what womanist theologian Emilie Townes refers to as the fantastic hegemonic imagination?: How can I use my gifts to lift up a message of hope in times of despair? How does my creative vision involve the community and combat catastrophe?
I wrestle with these questions because I am an artist. All forms of expression are an integral part of my life, my organizing, and my scholarship. It is significant to note that not only does art and culture have the power to transform hearts and minds, but through the arts, we have the power and the capacity to imagine a new future. We need to use our art and our gifts to paint pictures of what things could be, because it doesn't have to be this way. Audre Lorde reminds us, “That is the work of the poet within each one of us, which is to envision what has not yet been and to work with every fiber of who we are, to make the reality pursuit of those visions irresistible.”
(Photo credit: Charon Hribar for Kairos Center @charonhribar @kairoscenternyc)
Additionally, movement organizer and abolitionist Mariame Kaba provides brilliant insights into this project. Kaba urges, “unraveling our fear of one another is a multilayered cultural project. We must also continue to create our own works of visual art, fiction, and poetry that drive people to envision cooperation and mutual aid as our primary responses to crises. And we must help people imagine a world in which we can rely on one another.”
In the spirit of Mariame Kaba, Audre Lorde, Robin D.G. Kelly and the Black radical imagination, I'm challenging you, urging you today to author a new dream. To sing a new song. To paint a new picture that portrays a new vision for our shared, collective future. The only way out of this abysmal moment is through, and I'm challenging each and every one of us to confront the catastrophic by living a life that is rooted in our diasporic ancestral values of truth, justice, and love. It was music that sustained us, Black people, as we waded in the water, as we ran for our freedom, as we ran from captivity. Be it Jim and Jane Crow, chattel slavery, police brutality, or current day labor exploitation at the workplace. It was the spirituals. It was gospel. It was the blues that sustained us. Music was and is the technology that we called upon, the technology that we used to disseminate messages of how to fight, the vision of what we are fighting for, who the enemy is, how to remain resilient, or where to go. It was the spiritual, ancestral, transcendent connection to the divine that sustained our hope. Our creativity painted a picture of what had not yet been, but what could be. It’s the works of Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin that motivated Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King jr., and continues to inspire generations today.
(Photo credit: Julia Sharpe-Levine @ailoojailooj)
Culture has a way of taking the intangible and making it tangible. As artists, we have the power to illustrate the divine, to illustrate liberation, because God is love. God is liberation. If we can materialize that “God energy”, that divine power into our collective fight for collective liberation then we are walking into our GOD Power. This power has the capacity to mobilize us and radicalize us. The time is NOW to organize because, quite frankly, our lives depend on it. What does it look like to move forward and live into the dream where everybody's needs are met and we heed the call of Karl Marx, who said “to each according to their need and from each according to their ability?” Let's live into that future now. Let's model that future right now. If our political imagination is limited to recreating structures, hierarchies, and cycles that just mirror the ones we're trying to get free from, then our political imagination needs vision. This moral imperative is echoed in the prophetic words of Slavo Zizek who said "It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism" My friends, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that it's going to be easy. But once we sit with these questions, we are paving the way forward towards a collective vision for collective liberation. The sobering truth is it's going to be uncomfortable. We're not going to figure it out overnight. In fact, it might take years or even decades. But here we are. The ball is in our court. The baton has been passed to us. It's incumbent upon us to do something. In a century we will all be dead and gone. The question is, what are you doing while you are still here? Who are your people at this moment, right now? And, which side are you on? My friends. I will leave you with these words from Black radical organizer and activist Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
This essay is an adaptation of a sermon given on 2/6/2025. You can watch it here.