On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  We met with Hillary Clinton on two occasions: once before she became the nominee, on October 9, 2016, and again after. In the first meeting, she had not yet released her platform, so we took all of her public statements and essentially made a platform out of it so that everyone in the meeting would be prepared to ask questions that were informed by her previous public statements and stances. That meeting was unremarkable; she was noncommittal about most issues, noting that they would be addressed in her platform upon its eventual release. We’d spoken with her policy team prior to both meetings in order to influence the platform, too. But when we met with her in Cleveland after she’d become the nominee, she was the most candid I’d ever experienced her. It was just Brittany Packnett and me in this meeting; we’d asked Hillary’s team to record it so that we could broadcast it later and they’d agreed. One of the things we asked her about was the part of her platform that supported an increase in police training, and we said that while that is generally a good thing, the police do not need any more money. And she fully agreed. She then paused and explained that she knew that while the police needed more training, that the money could be diverted to community groups and other practitioners and that the police were already well-funded. She noted, and we agreed, that this might actually have an impact. I was surprised to hear her rationale and her candor. Despite assurances, her team did not release the video of the meeting. If they had allowed its release, I think people would have seen her in a completely different light. The entire conversation was illuminative in a way that I frankly didn’t expect. Hillary’s platform was tight and focused on large-scale solutions, and we kept pushing her to increase its range.

  That I fell short in running for office, or a president I admired fell short of the actions I sought, or even that the candidate I supported lost, does not dissuade me from the notion that engagement matters. We must not only tell the truth everywhere—in the ballot box, in city hall and in the White House, on social media, in the streets and in classrooms, and at the dinner table—we must also fight for that truth to be heard and acted upon.

  EIGHT

  I Can Remember Her Now Without Sadness

  And now, each night I count the stars,

  And each night I get the same number.

  And when they will not come to be counted,

  I count the holes they leave.

  —AMIRI BARAKA

  She left when I was three. And every time I see her now, I want to ask her why she left. I want to ask her if she thought about me as much as I felt her absence. I want to ask her if she loved us, because I’ve never thought about love as leaving, not this type of love. I want to tell her that a part of me began to prepare for people to choose to leave me one day, like she did. And that I stopped believing in unconditional love when she left. I want to tell her about how hard it was to hear people talk about their mothers, and to sit silently and not let the pain show on my face.

  But I’ve never asked her why she left. And I’ve never told her the things on my mind. Because I could always see the pain in her eyes. And I wouldn’t be another thing in this world that broke her, even if I was broken by her.

  It took me a while to learn not to respond to pain with pain. I think I’m still learning.

  I used to call her Mommy Joan when I was younger. I don’t remember exactly when I dropped the “Mommy” part and began to call her Joan, but I think it was when I was eight or so. It just didn’t feel honest any other way. And we never saw her anyway, so it wasn’t like I was going to get in trouble.

  It wasn’t until I was an adult that my father explained that her parents used to put her to sleep with alcohol. In some ways, addiction was chosen for her before she made any choices of her own. She’d been battling it her entire life and was in recovery when my older sister, TeRay, and I were born. Both of our parents were.

  But one night, one of my mother’s friends invited her to a party; she used, and never looked back. There was no custody battle; she left willingly. She told my father that we’d have a better life with him. And the rest, I guess, is history.

  She reentered my life when I was thirty. I had only seen her a few times around the holidays before then. I always remembered her as a slim woman, and over the years the drugs had taken her from slim to slight and sharp around the edges. But something was markedly different this time. She’d gained just the smallest amount of weight, negligible really, but what she lacked in pounds she seemed to have in pride as she told me, “I’m gaining weight.” Despite the many years that had passed between her moments of sobriety when I was a child, I could remember enough of what she was truly like to know that the person in front of me was done using. What I couldn’t decide was what her sobriety now meant to me. How do you make up for so much lost time? So many lost memories?

  I had many mothers in my life, but Joan was not one of them. Nanny, my great-grandmother, filled the biggest void, helping to raise me and TeRay from our earliest years until the beginning of middle school. I talked about Nanny with one of my friends recently, and I realized that I don’t talk about her much anymore. It’s not because she didn’t play an incredibly important role in my life, but precisely because she played such an important role in my life.

  When I was younger, I used to randomly wake up in tears, because I thought that Nanny was going to die. I have no clue where the idea came from, but I remember those nights waking up crying. And she would assure me that she’d be here tomorrow. Even as a kid I realized that she was much older than my father. And I think it was a combination of her frequent doctor visits and self-administered daily insulin shots that made me think she would die.

  When she died during my senior year in college, it felt like she took all the music in the world with her. She was one of the first people who I knew loved me. It was sometimes a tough love, a love rooted in rules and structure. But it was a love that I understood and that I knew was there to protect me. In the years since her death, I’ve realized that I don’t actively remember her as much as I once did. And the reason is partly that it’s a bit too painful sometimes to think about her absence, especially as so much in my world continues to change. I would’ve loved to call her about the protests and hear her tell me where she was during all of the events of the civil rights movement. I would’ve wanted her around to guide me through the relationships I’ve had or the plans that I’ve made, acting as a sounding board as I became more civically engaged. In her absence, I’ve chosen to simply focus on other things, to remember other things.

  My grandmother is another mother. She’s always called me D-R to distinguish my name from my sister’s. I can still hear her yelling “D-R!” from across that big house, asking me to get more ice for her water, to change the channel on the TV, or to go get the phone in the other room.

  And Robin became the mother I didn’t know I needed until she entered my life, being like a friend, mentor, and parent all in one. We met when I was a youth organizer with Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign, as a teenager, and she took me under her wing and both believed in me and challenged me in ways that few adults had done up to that point in my life. She always loved me like a hug—a little bit of love and a little bit of pressure.

  Even though I had other mothers, I had to learn not to be bitter on Mother’s Day, to still be joyful on a day when I couldn’t celebrate like everyone else. And over time the joy wasn’t necessarily feigned anymore. I was happy for the other kids and the other adults. I had come to peace with the what and how of our family. But now she’s back.

  When Joan returned, I wanted to just pick up from where we left off, build a new relationship and just move forward. I’m able to tell myself that there were other people who filled those voids, who were there for the birthdays and celebrations, who gave me encouragement when times were hard, who taught me the shapes and sizes of love. I’m still grappling with the tension between Joan’s absence and the suddenness of her presence, and
what my responsibility is, if any, as a son right now. Because I’ve always been her son, even if I felt like I didn’t actually have a mother. I think so, anyway.

  * * *

  —

  THE PAST IS what we call the actions and events that have already happened. Memory, however, is a choice. History is our re-membering, our literal rejoining of our memories, influenced by our biases, desires, and goals. It is our interpretation of everything that has taken place before the present, and the effects of those actions and events. Our interpretation and understanding of the past shape our choices in the present. Memory, and therefore history, is always an exercise in power and choice.

  To re-member is also a political act, a process that is informed by our own proximity to and away from power, and that shapes our proximity to and away from power. We often think of politics as a grand enterprise, rooted in elections and laws, but it often shows up in our homes, our communities, and our relationships in more mundane disguises.

  Politics is fundamentally about power, and it is always relational—that is, it can only be understood as something between people, systems, and interests. But politics is not simply about power in a traditional sense. Politics is about power through process: band together to elect a party to majority; elect an official to put forward a bill. Power is the ability to influence the decision-making process. But the relationship of politics to power is rooted in the more fundamental idea that individuals have their own innate power and that politics is really the exercise of many individuals’ collective power or an individual’s attempt to change the collective. Politics as we understand it now is just the most visible indication that people are participating in the community. Many people think they’ve never been involved in “politics” because they’ve been conditioned to think of the political process as beyond their abilities.

  So when we talk about “building power” it is shorthand for two things: first, helping people recognize that they can influence a given decision-making process to achieve a defined goal; and second, assembling a critical mass of people who are equipped to act in concert with each other. But the way that people think about their own power, about the power of their community, about the possibility of change, is influenced by how we remember the past.

  We tend to gravitate toward an understanding of the past divorced from the idea that individuals, or groups of individuals, at each critical moment made a series of decisions that shapes our present. It’s in this way that memory can be a tool for X or a weapon for Y, depending on how it is wielded and to what end.

  We make different decisions about what we remember, about how we tell the stories of the past and their impact, depending on whether the event is one of trauma or triumph, one of victory or defeat, one of joy or pain. We make different decisions, too, based on where we stood then—whether we had power or were fighting for power; whether we were thriving or surviving; fighting, fleeing, or standing our ground.

  The claim to an objective, comprehensive recollection of events is a ruse put forth by those who would have their version of events seen as the sole interpretation. But to pretend that there is only one interpretation of the past is to participate in fiction.

  We can remember the civil rights movement by focusing on prominent straight men, as has been done for decades. But we know that a more complete way to re-member it is to discuss the vital contributions of women and members of the LGBTQ community. And we can choose to do this. The same is true for other events in history. Take the Civil War, for example. When the school boards in Texas mandate that the Civil War be described as the “War Between the States,” and that textbooks should explicitly describe the motivation for the war as “protecting states’ rights,” that is a choice. They have chosen to remember the past in a way that ignores the impact and persistence of white supremacy as an organizing principle in the Confederacy and as a pretext for war.

  Memory serves as its own form of resistance, its own challenge to the forces that seduce us into romanticizing the past or overcelebrating progress and believing that it has unlocked the more just future.

  Each generation reckons with the past and the ways in which events from an earlier time inform their present. The poll tax likely felt progressive when compared to slavery. I remember seeing the images of water hoses aimed at children during the civil rights movement when I was in school. I remember seeing Rodney King being beaten on TV. I remember hearing my great-grandmother and grandparents talk about the unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder. I remember learning about Stonewall.

  We have been told that that America was in the past, that we had gotten beyond that America. I was told that the overt attitudes of white supremacy and racism were relics of another time. And when there wasn’t a mechanism to share information quickly that wasn’t filtered by a mainstream media source, it sometimes felt like the worst of days was in the past too.

  History is a potent tool and can be used to aid in the work of either domination or liberation, as it is both the proxy by which we gauge progress and the point of departure for learning and imagination. Those who use history as a tool for domination require ample distance between the past and the present in order to demonstrate progress; they will even artificially create this distance when necessary. Domination also remembers the past either as acts of innocence or necessity on behalf of those benefiting from domination, and as acts of defiance, inferiority, or pathology on behalf of the oppressed.

  Domination requires willful forgetting or deliberate misremembering, notably of the enduring nature of itself, and it exploits our collective desire for progress. It plays on our desire to make wins seem larger, more significant or permanent than they truly were, or to conflate sacrifice and effort with fundamental change.

  History is meant to guide, not prescribe. It is important that we not play into the I-know-history-therefore-I-know-the-future trope that I have encountered among people who professionally teach and study history or politics. I understand the sentiment: there are times when we quite rightly invoke history to challenge behavior that we suspect will be damaging, because, as the saying goes, we have been there before.

  The further we seem to move from a given event or way of life, the easier it is for us to believe that the distance from historically damaging events is itself progress. This, what I call the false distance of history, is the incremental progress spread out over decades that undercuts our efforts at radical progress measured out over years. The false distance of history aims to deceive us into believing that the trauma of racism and injustice is in our past. It plays on our desire for a memory of the past that makes sense and feels good. The false distance of history provides the vehicle for monuments celebrating traitors who rebelled in order to preserve the institution of slavery to be left standing.

  But those of us who live in this trauma know the difference between progress and distance. We know that no matter how much we want to satisfy our desire for progress, we must do the work of countering false claims of advancement that complicate our understanding of what true gains actually look like, and of highlighting the consistency between the past and present.

  The actions that have historically been markers of racism have changed. But the ideas that have allowed racism to flourish in whatever nuanced form it takes have remained. And the way we measure progress, namely by our proximity to or away from enslavement and lynching, allows racism to flourish further still. The absence of enslavement and lynching does not signal the presence of equality and justice.

  I, like many others, should not know the difference between pepper spray and pepper balls, the sting of Mace, the sharpness of tear gas, the pitch of sound cannons, or the impact of smoke bombs—but I do. I remember these not to glorify trauma, but simply because they happened. And I remember because forgetting may seduce me into believing in a progress that has not yet arrived.

  Those initial days of the movement, and of protest,
still show up in my dreams, still inform the ways in which I think about coalition building, about organizing, and about systemic change. I think they will always be with me. For a time they haunted me, but not anymore.

  We have a responsibility to remember—a responsibility to those who fought before us and a responsibility to understand progress as authentic growth.

  I think about Joan every day—not necessarily because I am thinking about her presence or absence, but because I am thinking about my worthiness and my ability to be loved. The choices she made have impacted the way I think about my own future and my own possibilities, my own worth and my own value. It took me a while to re-member her in a way that was not solely rooted in loss and lack, in a way that was not about absence but about the difficulty of making a decision that would forever impact the lives of two young children and her husband.

  I can now remember Joan without sadness. But that was a choice and it was a process to get here. I’ll have to ask her one day why she left. I need to build the courage to have the tough conversation about the past so that I can better understand how we can build a future together, if we are ever to have one. I think she wants to have a relationship now and I’m trying to make sense of that, to see how to make that happen in a way that doesn’t set me up to be hurt again.

  I am mindful that we re-member pain and trauma differently than we remember joy and triumph. When we remember pain, we are trying to protect ourselves and cope. We are trying to order the memories in ways that will allow us to make it to tomorrow and to the day after tomorrow. In trauma, we often traffic in denial—not in an attempt to be subversive, but because it is a way to ease the pain, to simply act as if something didn’t happen. There were times when I’d convinced myself that Joan hadn’t left, that something else happened. And when that didn’t keep, I convinced myself that I had other “mothers.” But I can’t run from the fact that the woman who gave birth to me chose to leave. This is simply a fact.