Tayari Jones, novelist

In her poem, “Ella’s Song,” a tribute to Ella Baker, Bernice Johnson Reagan writes, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.”

Black freedom will result in a joyous explosion of creativity, but before that, there will be the rest that is the reward for centuries of struggle. Rest is a luxury. Rest is the time in which we will renew ourselves. It is our time to dream, to imagine. We do these things now, without the extravagance of real respite. Just imagine what we will dream up when we are not sleeping with one eye open.

I, for one, will love to see it.

Chris L. Terry, writer

When I leave a black space, I worry that everyone I encounter has done something to harm me or people like me, directly or indirectly. If they haven’t yet, I worry that they will. That worry takes up too much space in my brain. I want it to go away. Black Freedom is the ability to devote that space to the people and things that I love instead of the things that I fear.

Dee Rees, filmmaker

Black Freedom is the ability to take up space in Being and Becoming. It is to bring your whole self and to be only yourself without preamble, explanation, or apology.

Nicole Dennis-Benn, writer

Black freedom is being able to find a home in the world, comfortable and safe in my own skin; never having to explain myself or shrink myself to make others around me feel comfortable ; never having to be on guard for the hand that may reach out and touch my hair, my armor; never having to swallow my fire in order to appease anyone for the fear of being called angry or bitter; never having my talent and worth assessed as less than, but a worthy asset to the culture—be it now or for future generations of black queer women and men, and beyond.

Marley Dias, activist, author

I am tall, and black and have big hair. I love being black. And I don’t always feel free. Black freedom means not weaponizing my color, my gender, and/or my hair. Let me be.

Kiese Laymon, writer

We be breathing. I want to distinguish what Black freedom looks like from what Black freedom sounds like, tastes like, smells like, feels like. Black freedom, it feel good. It sound good. It taste good. It smell good. It love good. No “s” needed. Lots of double negatives. Lots of verbs in agreeable disagreement. Black freedom stay breaking rules that are mostly in place to make black freedom and black folk suffer. We be dying in this language, so we be trying to breathe. Black freedom don’t need no linking verbs as long as there’s a “be” around and a lonesome active verb available. We be breathing.

Imani Perry, professor, writer

Black freedom is a relationship, a mutual bond of respect and care, of seeing in others as they see in us: unapologetic grace. Black freedom is doing: it unravels the pernicious myths. It decries the violence of a centuries long global epoch in which we have been marked as inferior. It cherishes the ones marked as the least of these as the most precious of people. Black freedom is sustaining, spellbinding, breathing, sweating, creative being in the service of the living, the ancestors, and the ones who are coming to replace us.

Jonah Mixon-Webster, writer

Simple songs and minds free to decide. In freedom, I hear Roberta and Donny’s “Be Real Black For Me” and we be. In freedom, I hear Nina say, “It’s a feeling...it’s no fear!” In freedom, “safety” may not even cross the mind—it is nary a concern or worry, for there is no further use for the word “threat.” And who got time for “threat” or “fear” when you’re busy being free? In freedom, you are already in the sanctuary of your Black-ass self and the comforts of your own, belonging to no other occupations.

Tracy K. Smith, poet

Freedom is trust and being trusted. Freedom is being not merely seen, but recognized and welcomed in good faith. Freedom holds as sacred the limitless scope of my humanity. When Black freedom comes, it will lift from my mind the burden of scrutinizing myself for what others might misread, fear, or weaponize against me. Black freedom will feel like breath after long, slow, deep, clean, steady, unnumbered breath.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, writer

In my freedom, our worlds are defined by our limitless imaginations, not by whiteness, straightness, ableness, thinness, or their delusions of gender. Wealth is not a violence to hoard, but a space to fill with visions of pleasure, our own idiosyncratic dreams of taste, sound, smell, feel, fullness. In my freedom, we have the language we need to name our pleasures precisely, the resources to plan for their creation, and the love/life/heart and energy to share our pleasures with our people, whom we know, like breath, will still be here.

Jamey Hatley, writer, filmmaker

Black freedom will look however it wants to look when it comes. Black freedom is in itself completely ignorant of any outside gaze. Black freedom is. Black freedom does. Black freedom shapeshifts and recreates itself with ease. When Black freedom comes, it will be like the best victories of our beloved tricksters—in full bloom and complete—before the Devil even knows that we are free.

Nalo Hopkinson, speculative fiction author

When freedom come, my belly won't be full of swallowed fear for all of us all the time, all the time, all the time. We will no longer live in a parallel—but nowhere near equal!—universe in which we're constantly under siege by a world which denies it is waging war on us and has been for centuries. Breathing, walking, living, loving while Black will no longer be an act of defiance, but one of celebration. And my answer to this question won't be defined by the negative space of what Black freedom is not.

Helon Habila, author, professor

Black freedom to me is to live wherever I want, however I want, and to watch my children live, without that nervousness described by Frantz Fanon.

Marlon James, novelist

I wonder if black freedom should also mean white freedom. I hesitate, because that centers the narrative on white people, but I think about the mental contortions required to support equality, but choose order over justice every time. The brain work it takes to come out against bigotry, but prop up and benefit from institutional racism. The effort to slide in the no-man’s land of class, which allows for a convenient stereotyping of redneck uncle Cletus, when it’s the Amy Coopers in the park that are trying to kill us. That thing in the back of their heads like a recurring cancer, where they are just waiting for the black woman to detonate her anger over nothing, or the black man to whip out his rape-hungry big dick. The bondage of never seeing whiteness beyond only two viewpoints, whether through the white supremacist outlook running through everything from the screams of Richard Spencer to the theories of Harold Bloom, or through the nonentity lens, a “dude, I don’t see colour” stance that routinely disables their ability to see the absence of it. It’s hard to look at what they are going through as real bondage because it comes with no suffering. That’s because all the suffering has been transferred to us. 

Monèt Noelle Marshall, director, playwright

You know that moment when Frankie Beverly sings “before I let you—” and the DJ drops the track out and you are swaddled in the sounds of the Black voices around and inside you, unplanned, unrehearsed, and yet prepared and pitch perfect? That is what Black freedom is like. A collective leap of trust into a delicious practice that is equal parts unknowing, unlearning, and remembering. Yeah. It’s like that.

Jennifer Newsom, artist, architect

Freedom means feeling the fullness of my body and intellect unbounded in space, following my own desires, and making my own way without restriction. I won’t have to explain, double-think, retreat, or shrink who I am to fit the world. Freedom comes now in fits and starts. It is there in our Black joy and the grace of our living through. Prepositional phrases. Imagining it as continuous and unbounded, for everyone, seems a goal reached only through aggregate gestures of care and an institutionalization of empathy. It is something everyone must build, together.

Teju Cole, writer, professor

Enslavers were particularly angry about “idleness,” and punished it mercilessly. Under Jim Crow, vagrancy laws proliferated. I’m Black and lazy, I like to wander for no good reason. Loitering, passing time. It’s a form of freedom I think about every day.

Nicholas Russell, writer

June Jordan writes in “Report from the Bahamas,” “It occurs to me that much organizational grief could be avoided if people understood that partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership for change. When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.” I have hope for the work to be done that results in a freedom from partnership in misery, one defined by active, aware, chosen, and generative solidarity in service of liberation, in all the ways that that word might frighten or enrage our oppressors. Black freedom comes when there is a clear delineation of what it might mean for these partnerships to last beyond zeitgeist or moments of guilt and fear. Such work drives us, whoever chooses the hard truth of what joining or maintaining “us” means day in and day out, toward blackness that isn’t mined, separated out, rifled through for parts, that is allowed to breathe without worry for the preciousness of something that might be stolen.

Demar Matthews, architect

Black freedom is having options. Such as, the option to wear my durag to a business meeting.

Tia-Simone Gardner, artist, educator

I don't sleep. At least not as much as I need. To rest is to gain the full capacity of our bodies and our minds. Rest allows us to be our sharpest, fullest, most loving, most ratchet selves. Black freedom for me is to be fully rested. We have seen what we can do when we are tired, half rested, weakened by this unrest, so when this freedom comes, the world would be revolutionized in totality because we could all bring our full capacities, our full Black intensities to the dance.

bridgette bianca, poet

Black Freedom means being able to imagine a future that doesn’t require you to bend and twist yourself into being more palatable and acceptable. Black Freedom means not only being accepted or tolerated, but being celebrated for your craft, your work, your existence, not just for the token role you play in someone’s attempts at diversity. And when it comes, we will feel it. I believe a weight will lift from our bodies, our spirits, our work. There will be joy and not just pain. Folks will listen to us, really, because they need what we have to say.

Jesmyn Ward, writer

Black freedom is my son, tall and broad, running through a cool future morning: he jogs without worrying that those in power will think him game. It is my daughter sitting on her couch in her home, eating cereal while laughing at an old sitcom: she laughs without worrying that police will ram her door and take her spoon for a weapon. It is my grandmother, healthy and whole, swimming through the deepest part of an amber river without pain: she swims without worrying that the deprivation that America has imposed on generations of us has turned her body against her, stressed her to illness, to death.

It is this; it is more. It is myriad as we.

Martha Southgate, novelist, playwright

For the last couple of months, I’ve been slowly re-reading Beloved. As you can imagine, it’s taken on a particular poignancy in the last few weeks. Believe it or not, earlier this very evening, the evening I am writing this, I came to this sentence, Paul D thinking about Sethe: “He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.” It feels like fate that I should have read these words tonight. It feels like (once again) Toni Morrison wrote the perfect words, words I never could have created, words that speak directly to my soul. It feels like those words were sent my way at a moment I needed to hear them again. It feels like freedom—the freedom Sethe killed for, the freedom so long fought for, the freedom so long out of reach—is coming this way.

Anna Holmes, writer, editor

Black freedom will be a wide smile; a sparkle within heavy-lidded, almond eyes; a deep chuckle, an easy laughter; a loosening of neck and a softening of shoulders. It will be a taste, a sound, a touch, a sight; perhaps even a scent. It will be the sloughing off of self-suppression or second-guessing; an assertion, without apology, of the extraordinary. Black freedom will be the exhalation of our ancestors and the exultation of our inheritors. It will be the next chapter in our long story of survival. It’s coming. It may almost be here.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, artist

Black Freedom looks like the ability to be whoever we are, and whoever we want to be, without any fear of harm. It's being able to move throughout the world lightly, softly, and with ease. I imagine Black Freedom to be a removal from the systems, people, and environments that cause us harm, and an investment in the people and environments that support us, love us, care for us, and let us lay down the heaviness and rest.

Cathy Thomas, writer, filmmaker

Black freedom will be a beautiful paradox that is bold enough to hold us and banal enough to last. When it comes, I hope it will not be the words of a future curator at the Museum of They Were a Credit to Their Race, who writes of our culled and parsed cell phone communications as a people “forced to film their own deaths during the Black Struggles Era.” When Black freedom comes, it will look like me not clicking on a link to: another 8:46 minutes; another Black woman attacked in her bed; another Black trans person beaten and forgotten; another make-up influencer turning themselves Black to sell my Blackness back to me; another petition for clean water in Flint, clean water in South Sudan, clean water in Syria; another text my sister sends about the “Karen” at her school clocking her moves; another text my best friend sends about the “Thomas Jefferson” at her hospital blocking her growth. It will be the texts I send out saying, “going for jog sis, call u in a bit” and when I do call, no future curator will care about that.

Lauren Michele Jackson, professor

When there is black freedom, there will be no need to call it such.

Sanderia Faye, writer

Freedom soars with the birds of the air and sways with the lilies of the field. No worrying. Freedom is black vernacular, the southern and the country. Freedom's in the coat of armor I leave at home. History books read the walls of systemic racism crumbled in 2020. I dance like there is no tomorrow, laugh out loud and love every thumpin' heart into freedom. I think of freedom and I’m weightless. Fly and flying. Whoever, whenever and wherever we want.

Ishion Hutchinson, poet, professor

I can’t frame it and desire no frame for it, sort of like the shape of a mouth or a snowflake that affirms or contradicts what it touches or does both at once or does nothing at all, but suffers no other consequence than a loving reciprocity.

Angela Flournoy, writer

There is a photo, taken in the 70’s, of my mother among her three blood sisters and three play-sisters, a laugh in everyone’s smile. There is a video of my mother and me, taken two years ago, doing the cha-cha to Luther Vandross, hips swinging. In both images you can discern the curve of freedom if you know where to look, the shape of weightlessness and joy. What I want is more time to cha-cha, more big, laugh-filled smiles. Freedom is more time to be here, healthy and whole on this planet, surrounded by safety and love.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, writer

Black freedom is when you put your head on the pillow knowing you sacrificed nothing more than you chose to sacrifice. Black freedom is that liberation dreamed of by our ancestors and secured for our children.

Jacqueline Woodson, writer

Black freedom looks like this page filled with brilliant Black voices from creative and academic fields coming together to demand that those brilliant Black voices get heard. When Black freedom comes, we can be this, without ever needing this site. Without ever again having to explain.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, writer professor

The dirt can be hard in eastern North Carolina. That dirt grows blood crops easier than it does flowers. Pretty things take work. But my great grandmother grew them, coaxing pink hydrangeas and Eastern blue stars from red clay and brown sand. Black life has grown this way, beautiful from unyielding soil. Black freedom will look like wildflowers; every field and concrete crack and forest fertile for Black flourishing. It will smell like library pages that know our full names. It will taste like clean water. It will sound like marches for no reason. It will feel like “of course.” Black freedom will be being like hydrangeas and Eastern blue stars, belonging everywhere we are.

Mitchell S. Jackson, writer

Black freedom is the space to imagine. It’s the space to make mistakes and not have them define the rest of you. It’s a sense of solidarity with the diaspora. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s a place of empowerment. Freedom is rarely given. It must be seized.

Kara Jackson, writer

Black freedom is the foundation of this earth. Consider the audacity of a seed who settles anywhere and the self-assured shore; every plant that persists is a suggestion of my personhood, of my own persistence. I don’t believe freedom is coming. I believe it has come, flew down just to fight beside us. Freedom is not a measurement of our movement, but a member. Freedom is among us.

Marlon Peterson, writer, creator

Black freedom is still. Black freedom is a moon over the still midnight ocean, and waves of a voluptuous beach. That freedom, I have experienced. Many of you have sat in the abundance of our divine melody. Black freedom is that song. Yes, that song. The one that makes you close your eyes and erase all inhibitions. White freedom is another thing. I do not know what their freedom requires. God bless them in their journey. What I do know, though, is, whether it be by the ballot or the bullet, everyone on this beautiful earth will live in the stillness and abundance of Black freedom. *Because at the end of the day we cannot take our Black freedom off; we cannot mask this freedom, ok. Everywhere we go our black freedom is admired. Our black freedom is envied whether we like it or not, but first off, I want white people to realize their fucking ignorance.

Because at the end of the day. We got the freedom. It is Black. It is still. It is everywhere.

*in memory of Oluwatoyin Salau, killed while exposing ignorance.

Carlos Sirah, writer

Liberation must be something called beyond. Called, far beyond the litany of enclosures here and heretocome. Called beyond authority. Autochthonous spirits. Calling. Beyond. Beyond. Being. Be—

Germane Barnes, architect, professor

Black freedom is the ability to be mediocre. One should not be required to be exceptional in order to be worthy of defense. To be worthy of living free. We will know that Black Freedom has arrived when every Black life is celeb—ebGermane Barnes, architect, professor

Black freedom is the ability to be mediocre. One should not be required to be exceptional in order to be worthy of defense. To be worthy of living free. We will know that Black Freedom has arrived when every Black life is celebrated, not only the ones that “made it.”

Julian Lucas, writer

Black freedom will be much more than Black enjoyment of what now passes for freedom in this country—though that would be a start. Like Black speech, Black music, and Black literature, Black freedom will break the rules and make new feelings possible, add a new tense to the grammar of human togetherness. (Call it the habitual free.) We will know it by the revelation of so much love, beauty, strength, and goodness now suppressed or misrecognized—a shout capable of leveling the world’s walls.

Jesse McCarthy, professor, writer

As Juneteenth has always proclaimed, through its colors, its flavors, its fabulous relish and embrace of everything that goes down in the sizzling summer heat—freedom was and is what no one could ever take away: each other. The secret of black freedom is that it is already here, bubbling up in all kinds of feared, repressed, and disallowed forms; it survived and thrived long before the news of Lincoln’s proclamation reached Texas. It never left the people in the first place. And you can know the truth of what I’m getting at by the shout, the one you’ll hear ringing high and loud through the dusk on June nineteenth and in all the days of all our struggles past and yet to come, the one that tells you all you need to know about where we came from, where we’re going, and how fiercely we mean it; that’s what it looks like, freedom, when it’s happening; or, better yet, what it sounds like, the love of it, when we do our joy together.

Nadia Ellis, professor, writer

Nina knew what it would feel like. She said she’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea and she’d sing. (She would sang.) That sounds about right to me. That, plus then this too: looking down from those skies at us earth-dwellers—the ones who like to land rove—we’d be roaming. Drifting, moving, wherever we want, in all our largesse. I’ll know freedom has come for us when our beautiful spaciousness can flow. When we can spread our wings and move from the bottom, both. I haven’t forgotten that we already do this. It’s that explosion of light; the swift, keen electricity of bodies, minds attuned to their brilliance, turned to their capacity. It’s the swooping thrill of it. It’ll be that, and more of it, and more. I marvel at the next reckoning. It will be like a hundred Sundays dancing on an ordinary day. It’ll be like bounty.

Jiréh Breon Holder, playwright

I close my eyes and envision-- my boyfriend and I adopting a beautiful black child who grows up to be whatever they want to be. Sure, they can be the president or a lawyer or a teacher, but they can also just be themself. And that will finally be enough. That’s the black freedom I’m fighting for.

Masande Ntshanga, author

Black freedom is the beginning of the world. It is total recovery and rehabilitation from existence inside all Systems. It is the first true introduction to the human being.

Christina Sharpe, professor, writer

At the Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland, July 3, 1976, Nina Simone plays the piano and sings in front of a fire-orange background. There are two songs that Ms. Simone sings that I have watched and listened to and taught with again and again: Feelings and I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free. In both, Ms. Simone is bending the notes toward and past freedom; she improvises, she tells us that she already knows how it feels to be free. On the eve of the U.S. celebrations of the bicentennial and almost 125 years after Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Nina Simone also knows that individual freedom—all freedom being inextricably tied to unfreedom—is still not enough. And we can hear that in and under the songs’ lyrics, in and under the notes she sings and plays. But, Black liberation? Now, that might be another thing altogether and Nina was singing us there.

Ayana Mathis, writer

In the current moment—in all of our moments in America—we have had to fight for things that should be givens: bodily safety, political voice, the recognition of our humanity. That we are still battling for these things is itself a kind of tyranny. Black freedom is the end of these struggles. And after? When the war is won? The freedom to simply be: to be exceptional or mediocre, to be brilliant or not. To live unremarked or remarkably. Freedom to live inside a reality that we create for ourselves, not one that has been imposed upon us. The freedom, finally, to stop having to imagine our freedom.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi, writer, scholar

In this time of the double pandemic of Covid-19 and racism, I find myself leaning more and more on revolutionary Afro-diasporic writers and thinkers such as Malcolm X and Maya Angelou and the hope they had that relationship between Africans and African Americans would be radical and political. And how heartening it has been to see demonstrations of solidarity by Africans. It is my hope that we will keep walking along the same—though always changing—Afro- diasporic revolutionary tracks they laid in the 1960’s.

Regina Porter, writer

Black Freedom to me means never having to second-guess my life, my work or myself because of societal biases and fears that have largely been projected onto people of color, people like me. Black freedom will mean not having to stop and explain what black freedom means after centuries, decades, years of our ancestors laboring, working for Civil Rights and equality, trying as the saying goes “to make a way out of no way” for their offspring, even as we have been lynched, raped, incarcerated in astounding numbers. Black freedom means financial stability—so we are neither the last ones hired nor the first ones fired, housing equality, upgrading public education so that black children have a fair shot at a sound education. All aspects of black freedom are tied into the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At the time of its writing, the Declaration of Independence was not written for us, but please understand, it was written for us. And in so much as it was written for us, for all American citizens, police accountability, indeed, police reform is intrinsic to every aspect of black freedom I have mentioned above.

Donna V. Jones, professor

Black freedom comes when we have full possession of our time—not just the time of my one black life, but of the lives of those black lives lost to time, and of the lives of generations to come. Time is life, and racism cuts life short. Time is life, and racism distracts us from living our lives fully.

Xaviera Simmons, visual artist

Black Freedom in the United States means total restructure at every level of this society. Black Freedom is reparations to the Descendants of American Slavery. Black Freedom is the abolition of the police state and a path towards a new vision of what it means to be American. Black Freedom is collective uplift and the abolition of white supremacy—- it also means whiteness losing control of its systemic grip. Black Freedom is a radical revisioning of resources whereby our material, spiritual, physical, and mental conditions are fundamentally, changed monumentally changed across the spectrum of these United States. Black Freedom is a path to wholeness after centuries of fracture. Black Freedom is the United States actually giving a damn about all of it’s Black Citizens:; those who descend from slavery, whose ancestors toiled for centuries, and those who have come after emancipation and continue to move through. Black freedom means all structures transformed.

A. Igoni Barrett, writer

The phrase “All men are created equal” was written by a white man who is today believed to have kept his own multiracial children in slavery. Black freedom is knowing this fact and what it reveals about the perversions of privilege; it is also about seeing the interconnections between Sally Hemings and Breonna Taylor, Paul Bogle, and Patrice Lumumba. To quote Ken Saro-Wiwa, we all stand before history.

Rivers Solomon, writer

Black freedom is Black joy, Black expression, Black intellect, Black radiance, Black futures, Black accents, Black dance, Black resistance, Black art, Black complexity, Black humanity, Black rebellion, Black sex, Black food, Black song, Black poetry, Black language, Black love. It is Blackness as a descriptor of diverse peoples bound together by a relationship to a great continent and not as a mark of alterity inside white colonial cisheteropatriachal rule. It is Blackness as only a memory of oppression, its legacy a call to arms against all forms of domination. Black freedom is the end of whiteness and the birth of human liberation.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poet, professor

A complete and utter indifference to the endless distractions of racism and white supremacy in all of their forms, like watching a jingling ice cream truck go by from the peace of your front porch and paying it no mind as it goes mute in the distance, is what Black freedom looks like to me.

Arielle Julia Brown, artist

Black freedom was and is and is to come. It is a prophetic call from the wilderness. It is young, old, fresh and wet all at once. It is easeful birthing, living and dying. It is wealthy and in so being it makes us wealthy. We need and want for nothing.

Jason Reynolds, writer

For me, I’ve seen Black freedom. As a matter of fact, I see it all the time in our children. In the way they throw themselves at the world. In their laughter and fairness. In their jokes and imaginations. In their ability to turn shoulder, and knee, and clapping hands into hallelujahs. But I’m old enough to know that the freedom they feel in their bodies is fleeting. That with each passing year, that innocent reverie becomes more and more of a necessary rebellion. It often transforms into a mechanism to push back on an oppressive world. And over time, so much of that honest desire is whittled. Turned into axe. But imagine if they could grow up to be whim and not weapon?

Danielle Evans, writer

Black freedom is all the things I might do with the time I’ve spent advocating on behalf of my own or someone else’s basic humanity. Black freedom is the possibility of one day letting anxiety be a burden and not a necessary survival instinct. Black freedom goes out at night and is joyful and safe and doesn’t come home until after the sun is up, and Black freedom is also getting a whole night’s sleep. Black freedom is laughing when it means to laugh and crying when it means to cry and not blinking when other people are confused that it loves itself. Black freedom is unbothered and unruly and unrespectable and unavailable for debates regarding its right to exist.

Charisma Acey, scholar

Our great American poet Langston Hughes, wrote, “That Justice is a blind goddess/ Is a thing to which we black are wise:/ Her bandage hides two festering sores/ That once perhaps were eyes.” To me, freedom is when those bandages are forever stripped from her eyes and she is forced to see.

Terry McMillan, writer

Black freedom will only be visible to us because we will know when we look at each other that we don’t  feel the need to explain who we are, why we are valuable, brilliant, beautiful, resilient, strong, and fearless, because it will be understood. But a wink would or could validate that we know we have arrived.

Paloma McGregor, choreographer

Black Freedom look like my daughter floating in home waters surrounded by ancestors' wisdom whispers... she, without an internalized need to prove/ harden/ relent/ scream, to constantly negotiate saving her own life... no... none of this... she, simply floating, her dreams, hopes, visions and, importantly, her luxurious present buoyed by our great love, with nothing above her but sky.

Shani Jamila, artist, podcast host

It’s bookmarked pages and open windows and the slow walk of wind across our sun- sprinkled skin. It is the movement of breath that relaxes our shoulders and inflates our bellies full. It looks like travel across oceans and across time. It’s realized potential and everyday laughter and dimples that deepen when we see us and a radical joy that radiates through more and more and more years of healthy and happy Black life.

Clarisse Baleja Saidi, Writer

Black freedom means living in a world I can navigate without outsized fear. The works/words of our writers reinforce this notion, that as black people, migrants, womxn, LGBTQ folk, people of all or no religions, indigenes et al., the world ought to be ours, no matter the intricacies of our societies and identities. A global black freedom will come when that safety takes shape around me, not just in a bold act of thought, but when I can be me anywhere—bien dans ma peau. I wish this for myself “et al”; myself and others.

LaToya Watkins, writer

When I was a girl, my mother trained me to “behave” in public. Don’t look at nobody. Don’t touch nothing. Don’t say nothing. Don’t ask for nothing. And whatever you do, don’t leave my side. By the time I became a mother, I understood her fear and found myself listing out similar demands to my children. And I’d watch them, the unseen, watch the seen children run and play and make noise in public. I’ve always been sorry that I couldn’t allow them that. Freedom is being seen and heard and still being safe.

Emily Raboteau, writer

Black freedom is the verb of us busting out of the box that branded us. Black freedom is us being us without them telling us what we ain’t, what we can’t, what we won’t or never will. Black freedom is us doing as we do, playing as we played since back in the day we first became We, bending the notes to a scale of our own design, even with a goddamn knee on our neck. Black freedom is the sound of a train with all of us on it.

Darnell Moore, writer

There are no weights to carry. No burden to bend ourselves into the cage that is the white imagination. No fear. No lingering pain. No perpetual dance with a trauma not of our own making. There is unrepentant joy. Peace. Unfettered livelihoods. More joy. And radical creativity. There are worlds and words, dreams and desires, kindled and unleashed. More laughter. More love. More of a focus on us, on the we. This is what Black freedom feels like. It feels as real and light and permeating as air.

Kaitlyn Greenidge, writer

What Black people did upon Emancipation—we made newspapers and schools and we made cemeteries to memorialize our dead. And we married—not from a desire to acquire property (we had none) but to affirm the families we made for ourselves. Freedom for us, historically, has meant creating community, with our living and our dead, and describing our worlds to ourselves.

Joshua Bennett, professor, author

My grandparents met in a strawberry field. They were teenagers, sharecroppers, Black human beings living under the weight of unthinkable duress. Black freedom is in the futures they dreamt, and the abundant lives they pulled from the air. Black freedom is in the stewardship of the earth, and an ongoing commitment to its flourishing. It is the abolition of the carceral continuum: the police, the prisons, and the schools that limit our life chances, call our beauty nothingness. Black freedom is found in the rigorous questions of children, the space we leave for their courage to transform us. Black freedom is Black affirmation. Black love. And thus the inauguration of another way. Black freedom, at its core, is an everyday, collective undertaking in the face of our own unmaking. As Aimé Césaire reminds us, it is nothing less than the end of the world. As Sylvia Wynter proclaims, it is the rewriting of knowledge itself. It is a hope the world did not give. And the world can’t take it away.

Morgan Jerkins, author, editor

Black freedom to me is the ability to simply exist in any space that we enter without the threat of displacement, violence, and death. I’m still trying to figure out what Black freedom may look like (reparations? Police abolition? No more voter suppression?). All of these things could work! But I have a better sense of what black freedom will feel like. It will be devoid of exhaustion. It will be full of relief. It will feel like we are finally coming home.

Evie Shockley, Poet

Black freedom is me, you, and every Black person waking up in the morning and deciding what Black freedom is going to be that day. Then spending the day making that freedom freely, with our hands, tongues, voices, minds, legs, and hearts—with our whole bodies—and any instrument within reach. Freely, in chosen solitude. Freely, in collaboration with chosen others. And at the end of the day, sharing our ideas, practices, and artifacts of freedom with each other, freely. Then sleeping, free to dream about something other than freedom, because in the morning we will wake up and live it again.

De’Shawn Charles Winslow, fiction writer

Black freedom is not worrying whether or not our names, the ways we speak, the many ways we may dress, or our sheer determination, will keep us from the respect and happiness we deserve.

Violet Allen, writer

Freedom is dreaming about yesterday without being overwhelmed by grief and about tomorrow without being overwhelmed by dread. Freedom is taking precious things—a full stomach and a beating heart—for granted, because no one is ever trying to take them away from you. Freedom is being able to bend your imagination towards whatever you wish and never worrying that maybe if you thought a little harder, spent more time on it and got more serious, that you could put together a sequence of words that would somehow, miraculously, save all of us.

Dawnie Walton, writer

Black freedom feels closest to the times my family down South comes together in summer, on somebody’s big and private plot of land, to eat, laugh, sing, dance, dream, and talk very loud trash with a backing chorus of Mmmm-hmmms or You know you wrongs... It feels like my stomach unclenching and my shoulders relaxing; it looks like when I smile with full teeth. It feels like showing everything that I am, relieved of the pressures and burdens of clinical or assumptive gazes. It feels like actual confidence, like tingles of imagination and ambition, like legacy. I don’t know the extent of what’s possible outside these spaces where we are most loved; I don’t know what I will live to see. So I hold on to us, and cherish the freedom we find in each other.

Brandon Callender, professor, writer

I’ve long felt a kind of freedom in Angela Bofill’s song, “Under the Moon and Over the Sky.” Whenever that song plays, it makes black freedom into a somewhere that is so robust yet so precise. “The universe is waiting for you to live a life that’s happy and free,” Bofill sings, and everybody coos, clucks, and chants right alongside her, letting the universe know that black folks are on our way. Voices become birds, become instruments, become spacecrafts, and right when the song ends, Bofill’s voice doesn’t fade so much as saucer its way outwards to the point of vanishing. Whenever I hear that great riot of sound, I think of how long the universe will have been waiting for us, and how long it has been denied the pleasure of our company. All those hard and beautiful sounds we’ll have invented on our way to that place… what archive could ever hold them?

Carvell Wallace, author, podcaster

Freedom is the ability to enjoy life, love, family, community, without the fear that it will be taken from me by my own country, my own government. Freedom is the ability to enjoy my own heart, my own feelings, my own love of beauty without the fear that it will be destroyed by coming across a video of someone being murdered in my country for looking just like me. Freedom is the ability to make art about what moves me rather than what traumatizes me, about what I exalt in, rather than that which seeks to destroy me.

Namwali Serpell, writer

Toni Morrison once said: “All of my life is doing something for somebody else. Whether I’m being a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good lover, a good teacher—and that’s all that. The only thing I do for me is writing. That’s really the real free place where I don’t have to answer.” I yearn for that specific, human, black, female freedom: to not have to be “good,” to not have to answer to anybody but me. To write as I wish, to feel at ease to do me, for me.

Tanisha C. Ford, writer, professor

As a girl, of maybe four, I used to play in my aunt’s backyard, running and tumbling until my shorts were grass-stained and my armpits musty. This was before I understood that to be Black and woman in this world meant that I’d have a coercively intimate relationship with racism, sexual abuse, colorism, job discrimination, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. When I need to remember that I am free, I climb up into that slice of memory and allow it to cradle me, to bathe me, so I can emerge with the courage to face another day. I think of my foremothers who had to do the same…. Freedom to me is a world where ALL Black women, Black girls, and non-binary femmes can feel safe and protected in their homes and on the street. A world where we can dream and laugh and create and build—without barriers or burdens. Oh, what a lovely, precious dream!

Akima Brackeen, architect, interior designer

I’ve experienced freedom. It’s the tiny morsels of recognition that I am present and valued. But it’s rare, it’s fleeting. I long for the extension of those moments past a small flicker.

I fear that I will not see Black freedom in my lifetime. So in the interim I will savor the echoes of liberation that my parents and their parents before them have placed in my heart.

Jamie Robertson, visual artist, educator

I’ve been meditating on the writing of Suzanne Césaire these past few weeks; particularly her essays The Malaise of Civilization and The Great Camouflage. Césaire’s writings of dissent from the 1940s challenge me to dream of a world of our own volition. Black Liberation is a world reborn from the ashes of this one. It is a world in which we become fully who we are meant to be. Marvelous and bright. In the words of Césaire “it is about becoming conscious of the incredible store of varied energies until now locked up within us. We must now deploy them to the maximum without deviation, without falsification. Too bad for those who consider us mere dreamers. The most unsettling reality is our own. We shall act. This land, ours, can only be what we want it to be.” Black Liberation is the forging of our own reality.

Brittney Nicole Washington, social practice artist

Black freedom is standing barefoot in the yard, looking up at the star-filled sky, feeling wrapped by the humid night, like a blanket. I don’t feel anxious about the coming day, weeks, years. I don’t feel weighed down by my work, I don’t feel responsible for anybody’s learning or salvation, there’s just my garden, my craft, our needs met, our earth respected, our self-determined lives lived. I feel—we feel—full, held, blossoming. There is abundance.

Chinelo Okparanta, writer, professor

When it comes, Black freedom will mean having the space to exist in all our diverse forms, divine beings that we are. Black freedom will mean taking up all the space that we desire, never worrying that we might soon be forced to gasp for air. Black freedom will mean not having to fight for every right. Black freedom will mean having the privilege to be able to disengage from the legacies of slavery and colonialism.