You tell me today is about independence, you with the suit, with the pen, with the bleached-white smile. You with the promise that tomorrow will always come, and that you will be safe, and the future is yours.
You tell me today is about independence. To be independent is to be what, I ask. Returning to the semantics of grade school. Independent. “Not dependent on something, or someone, else.” Can I really say that is so? Can we, as a country, preach this as truth?
I don’t value independence as much as I value liberation.
To be independent is to be individual, isolated, alone. Thinking about where our country is in the global pandemic, I fear that our individualism, our rugged, boot-straps mentality of white European-American immigrants, has kept us from seeing our interconnectedness. Our country has the highest cases of COVID in the world because we value our bars, drinking, social gatherings, and right to protest that this pandemic isn’t happening, while brothers and sisters here, and worldwide, suffer.
We have forgotten. We have forgotten that we need one another, across boundaries, across borders. We belong to one another.
When we focus on independence, we believe we are capable of doing anything we want by ourselves. This is a myth that is spoonfed to young white kids, like me, growing up in this country of opportunity. It is not fed to Black children, Latinx children, Asian children, children from Middle Eastern countries, indigenous children who are also here, on this soil, eating the food and tasting the chlorinated water. The diet of the American Dream, a grand marketing scheme, has built pathways forward for many, this is true, and it has also promised plenty to many and refused to deliver. Come here and make something of yourself, the story espouses.
But who are we if we forget where we come from, who cares about us, who lifts us up, who fights for us, and who we fight for?
We need one another. Even now, especially now. Independence is for the privileged; interdependence is for the human. As we move together, there is a collective mass that shifts the needle from independence towards liberation. Liberation. “The act of setting free from restraint or confinement.” Let us pause with this definition. Let us question: Who is still confined, and restrained, in this country? Who and how?
Black Americans are restrained by the weight of history that holds them chained to a lack of generational accumulation of resources. They are restrained by the binding to an embodied fear white people still hold, to this day, that Black people are dangerous, unintelligent, unworthy, and secondary. The stereotypes still abound. Angry Black women. Aggressive Black man. Loud Black people.
Until Black Americans and Black immigrants can walk down these streets without fear that their bodies, hearts and minds will be abused, judged, assaulted, and murdered, there is no liberation.
Indigenous folks who know the stories of this land in a way that I never will, indigenous peoples whose lands white people have stolen, repackaged and repurposed: can we say they are liberated from the whip of the white master? In the southwest, I see more reservations and native lands than I would on the east coast, and even then, the Navajo Nation does not include any of its four original peaks. Land is shrunken, dried. What does liberation for indigenous people look like?
Liberation for indigenous peoples in this country is more than a land acknowledgment; it’s a land restoration and reclamation.
In the book Ishmael, the wise gorilla of a teacher talks about the Leavers and the Takers. The Leavers are the ones who have, over time, learned the wisdom collected through the ages. The indigenous ones. La que sabe, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés would say. She who knows. The Takers, then, are the Cains to the Abels, are the farmers who seize land, are the colonizers who seize people. The indigenous knew that we humans could live in liberation, free from restraint, as long as we maintained harmony. There are laws that bind us humans to this earth, that restrain us to this home. These laws are necessary. One is the law of taking and leaving. Take only that which you need; leave that which you do not.
Imagine wealthy Americans only taking that which they needed, and leaving the rest for those who need it more. Liberation is leaving much so that others can also live.
The Earth cries for her own liberation. Bursting from the restraint of human weight. Freed from the prongs and needles that stab and suck her blood soil. Released from the smog that smothers her lungs, her Amazonian breaths, her fiery spirit. She, too, cries out. Her cries are pandemics and hurricanes, viruses and fever. Her cries are supreme. Ultimately, her liberation will be won, or she will die trying. This is a battle humans have already lost. The truth has been written for over four billion years.
And yet, we still move forward, writing words of liberation and independence, apparently forgetting how we cannot live independently of this earth. We, at least, the Takers, are a species of chosen amnesia.
Humans. Some of us, in this country, more so I imagine the successful immigrants, the ones who have found safety, the ones who descend from European Americans, we continue to spout and sputter that we are free. Independent. Celebrate. I sigh. A holiday does not a free people make.
Last night, I watched part of Hamilton and was amazed by the image of people of color paving and writing and determining this country. This play should be watched, now that it is accessible on TV, by all who want to reprogram the way we imagine American history and textbooks. Freedom, Alexander Hamilton and others demanded from the Brits. Freedom.
The irony is not lost, of course, as Black and Brown folks sing for the freedom that their ancestors, had they been in this country then, would not have had. They would have been the enslaved in the south. The indigenous people on east coast lands would have been murdered and displaced. Women, singing my biological lineage, could not have expected much more than a husband and a promise of freedom, if they were white, through him. Freedom, my white ancestors wrote in powerful pen.
Today I will continue to meditate on how freedom for some is not freedom for all. I’ll slide the term aside, replace it with liberation. I will keep the restraints that keep people in this country, in this world, from holding, singing, celebrating liberation.
There is much work to do. Freedom from the internalized fears and oppression, from the education systems that suffocate youth rather than breathing in life. Freedom from health care systems bloated with insurance costs, systems that treat some fairly while others are dismissed. Freedom from a history of lies. Freedom from the restraints that still bind me to the notion that part of my worth, as a woman, is tied to a partner and producing children. Freedom.
Holistically, I imagine freedom from the restraints of a capitalistic society where we actually prioritize the needs of Earth and of humans more so than the needs for a successful bottom line, bloated paychecks and products. I imagine freedom from the restraints that hold back my own mind: I am not enough, I do not belong, I will not do all that I hope to do in this lifetime.
Privileged as they are, this realm of possibilities, I also believe all humans need to know three truths: that we belong, that we have dignity and that we are safe.
Liberation. Talk about it today. Look around at the chains that are often invisible to the white gaze. Sink into the realization that though we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are interdependent, not independent. We are not all liberated. We are not all free from restraints. And until then, perhaps we should consider turning this day into a day of continued growth and change, rather than a day of fixed celebration.
