On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  We have no skinheads, no real KKK, and no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me. . . . Negroes have lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals [sic]. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior.

  Roof is echoing the conclusions of scientific racism, made popular by books like The Bell Curve, despite being disproven time and again.

  The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Dylann Roof was neither called a terrorist in the media nor was he charged with terrorism. Why? It would seem that white supremacy is not a political or social objective of the dominant culture.

  Language is the first act. It distributes and redistributes power. It carries the kernel of the ideas that shape how we think about the world. The dominant culture—that is, white people—suppressed the notion of a white terrorist because it is impossible to conceive of whiteness as evil, a space decidedly reserved for black and brown people.

  In a recent interview, Allison Williams, the actress who played Rose, a twentysomething daughter in the movie Get Out, spoke of surprising interactions she kept having with people reacting to the movie. Her character is charged with luring black people to her family’s home in the woods to be hypnotized and auctioned off to a group of older white buyers. Williams revealed that white people often ask her if her character was hypnotized, to which she replies, “No! She’s just evil. How hard is that to accept? She’s just bad. We gave you so many ways to know that she’s bad! She has photos of people’s lives she ended behind her! The minute she can, she hangs them back up on the wall behind her. That’s so crazy! And they’re still like, ‘But maybe she’s also a victim?’ and I’m like, ‘NO! No!’ And I will say, that it is one-hundred percent white people that say that to me.”*

  White people as a group cannot be thought of as evil or as executors of terror. Invocations of violence, terrorism, crime, and the like are all deeply connected to nonwhite groups. White is the default of what one thinks of when they think of human. So to call them bad would be, I suppose, to suggest that humanity itself is bad. It’s a popular idiom that when people of color commit crimes, it’s considered pathology, and when white people do it, it’s the errant actions of individual actors. In order to preserve this lie, terrorists like Dylann Roof, and whiteness writ large, benefit from being called anything but the precise term that holds them accountable.

  Post-truth culture, in which the emotionally resonant stories outweigh true stories, exists in more than our formal political sphere or the media. It exists in the fabric of many of our online and offline communities as well. It is a culture that would render objective facts as mere interpretations, critiques.

  But how did we get here? It’s one thing to dispute obvious untruths—arguments, policies, strategies that are built on a disregard for the truth or a knowing acceptance of a lie—these things we know to be problematic. And the call to address the willful manipulation of language that both reveals and props up white supremacy seems an equally straightforward priority. But in this post-truth moment, we are also experiencing the real-time construction of truth; we are participating in the formation of new ways of being in the world. When we tell our history, we are telling our truth—sometimes this truth may mirror an objective reality; other times it’s more subjective, the reality we think we experienced. These collections of words are constructed narratives, some more complicated than others. I think that often the most complicated narratives tend to be collapsed into myths—part fact, part fiction. These myths have traditionally helped us make sense of the world, pass on learning, and reinforce virtues we hold in high esteem.

  Yet in this moment we’re seeing the messy construction of truths in real time, the building of narratives, and the telling of myths around events that hold important meaning in and of themselves and that also serve as launch points of possibility for individuals both now and in the future. And so we must now grapple with which version of the truth we want to elevate, and the degree to which our truth should align more with facts or the good story.

  Details matter. When we write history, we must never cede the reality of what transpired to partial truths, even if what we gain is the more palatable story—indeed, especially when that is the case. We must bring every narrative to its greatest alignment with the truth, for when we fail to do so, we invite manipulation and erasure. And in this current moment, which builds on the rich history of the civil rights movement, we have only to look back to see this narrative making, and the consequences of it, in action.

  Bayard Rustin, the architect of nonviolent resistance as the primary strategy during the civil rights movement and an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was exiled from the mainstream organizing community because he was an openly gay black man. In a 1987 interview, George Chauncey Jr. asked Bayard Rustin how his sexuality affected his work in the civil rights movement, to which Rustin responded:

  There is no question in my mind that there was considerable prejudice amongst a number of people I worked with. But of course they would never admit they were prejudiced. They would say they were afraid that it might hurt the movement. The fact of the matter is, it was already known, it was nothing to hide. You can’t hurt the movement unless you have something to reveal.*

  Silence as an act of solidarity, they said. Telling the truth about his identity might do damage, they warned. We can acknowledge that attitudes and perceptions related to sexuality and identity have changed since then, and that to some, this type of compromise may have been justified in the context of the broader change that they were seeking. The argument for this approach has a certain simple logic: since the Civil Rights Act passed, we can look back on these strategies as necessary compromises. But Rustin reminds us that the only threat to movement work would be the withholding of information that could then be revealed, that the truth is its own power. And that the passing of the Civil Rights Act resulted less in a more just future than a more nuanced oppression. One can only wonder how strong, durable, and impactful the movement could have been if it had been a place where the freedom that was advocated for included as an explicit, unabashed goal the empowerment of black men and women regardless of creed, origin, or sexuality. Like Colvin’s and Robinson’s, Rustin’s story is a missing story.

  When it comes to establishing the truth, we often rush toward the simplified version at the expense of the more complicated, more nuanced narrative. It is one thing to have a more accessible narrative that is a derivative of a more nuanced narrative. It is another thing entirely to replace a nuanced narrative with a more accessible one.

  I’ve always thought of Twitter as the friend that’s always awake. It was, and is, a platform that allowed us a way to record and bear witness to our own lives and story in real time and with each other. Often, in the streets, I was experiencing things that I needed to process with others, but there wasn’t always someone near for me to connect with. But Twitter, and social media more broadly, changed all of that. Like an ever present friend, I was always able to connect to a larger community and, as important, a larger black community. Black Twitter is as organized and powerful as any offline community, with its own norms, practices, style, and flow. In some ways, Black Twitter has amplified the voice of the individual, always reminding each individual that she exists within a larger whole.

  I had eight hundred Twitter followers when the protests began. I was focused on being in the streets, assisting in the planning of actions, and documenting the reality of the protests from the on-the-ground perspective in real time. I started a newsletter in August 2014 that initially had two hundred subscribers and over time grew to over twenty thousand subscribers. With the partnership o
f Brittany Packnett and Johnetta Elzie, it became a hub for information about events and meetings and news going out on a daily basis in the fall of 2014.

  Years before any of us would take to the streets, a college professor was affirming the importance of our lives. In August 2012, Marcus Anthony Hunter, a gay black man, and now the chair of African American Studies at UCLA, was studying black migration. As a professor he studies cities, and he was thinking of a way to challenge his students and others to think about blackness as defined not only by skin color but also by our relationship to and away from power, and to realize that when we consider blackness in that sense, we find that most people are politically black. Over time he had come into an awareness of an irrefutable truth: that black migration and movement is the defining characteristic of growth in cities and always has been—that what black lives choose to do matters significantly. And on August 20, 2012, he fired off a tweet: “check out amazing articles by @jean23bean and aldon morris new ed of @contextsmag #blacklivesmatter.”

  It was the first time that assemblage of words would ever be used on Twitter, and months later it would take on a life all its own.

  * * *

  —

  FERGUSON WAS A PHENOMENON. It was neither the logical nor inevitable conclusion of a particular wave of organizing or organization, nor the result of a small set of people gathering to start a movement. The truth of that phenomenon, how it started, what galvanized it, what sustained it, why it mattered to the world, and what its legacy is—those stories are finally being told now, by the people who lived them.

  The movement was born from the collective energy of a people, not at the direction of a small set of leaders. In the ten days after Mike Brown’s death, there were solidarity protests in over forty cities. And on August 14, five days after Mike Brown had been killed, the National Moment of Silence was held in 119 cities worldwide. Inspired by those protesters in St. Louis who came out on August 9 and never turned back, a movement was born and spread across the country.

  The suggestion that national organizations came to Ferguson and St. Louis to essentially save the protesters by providing order and direction is dismissive of all the people who did the work of sustaining the longest domestic racial-justice protest in this country’s history—longer than even the Montgomery bus boycott, which was the last protest to hold this distinction. It is true that many national organizations provided support, assisted with strategy, and created access to resources once the protests were under way. But the protests were organic; that was their strength and what created their staying power. Like Jo Ann Robinson and the flyers, in the absence of one organization or set of leaders to save everyone, the people themselves stepped up individually and collectively to birth, nurture, and sustain the movement.

  Hashtags are like digital paper clips—and #BlackLives Matter was a crisp clarion call, allowing for increased solidarity and for a common language to describe the protests that were sweeping the country, originating with those in Ferguson, Missouri. But the protests began with #Ferguson organically becoming the rallying cry and call to action. The study “Beyond the Hashtags,” published by the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University’s School of Communication, reviewed every tweet from June 1, 2014, to May 31, 2015, and noted that the most used hashtags during that time were #Ferguson (21,626,901), #MikeBrown (9,360,239), and then #BlackLivesMatter (4,312,599).* The study helped map when #BlackLivesMatter broke through to gain the widespread appeal that it has now, specifically highlighting November 24, 2014, the day of the nonindictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Mike Brown, as the first day that the hashtag achieved mass appeal.

  I remember the week that we decided to start transitioning from #Ferguson to #BlackLivesMatter as a key tag for our tweets. The trolls, the coordinated online harassment accounts, had begun to flood #Ferguson, and we also needed a hashtag that would be more inclusive of the other cities in protest. The study also noted that “while social media may have played a critical role in helping activists push police violence to the forefront of public consciousness, this was by no means an automatic process. The mere presence of articles about police killings on social media was not enough: a critical mass of concerned parties had to decide to aggregate their anger into a movement.” The authors are right—Twitter was an important vehicle because it amplified the work on the ground and allowed us to be truth tellers about our experience.

  I never imagined that a story of the “founding” would emerge or that there would be an attempt to define a set of people as the “founders” of the movement. That some are labeled as such and accept it surprises me. That the founding is credited to me and others despite our making no claim to and actively rejecting the title of “founder” makes me realize that the easy-to-understand story is more palatable than the complicated reality. The founders of the movement were the protesters in the streets.

  We were called to the street because of Mike Brown’s death, and the beauty of it was that all were welcome—anyone ready to do the work of fighting for justice and accountability. You did not need to pledge allegiance to an organization or have a special degree, certification, or training; you just needed to be ready to do whatever work was necessary. Because no organization started this movement, and no organization sustained this movement.

  In retrospect, we can name why Rosa Parks was chosen and not Claudette Colvin. That does not render Rosa’s sacrifice unimportant—it does, though, mean our story was only half told. It is because of respectability politics. When we look back, we can name why Jo Ann Robinson was erased, because in a patriarchal society power could not be seen to rest with a woman in this way. It is clear now too that Bayard Rustin was shifted away because of a combination of homophobia and respectability politics. This is something I feel we all have an obligation to disrupt to the best of our abilities by telling the truth about the contributions—of labor and thought—of those in the queer community and of women.

  My hope is it will not take decades for us to investigate why it was useful to erase Marcus Anthony Hunter from his labor and thought. The consequences of acquiescing to these myths are real. When we erase Marcus, we lose an understanding of the origin of a phrase that has helped steer an international conversation, and we re-create the patterns of erasure that we work intentionally to disrupt in our work every day. When we say that an organization birthed a movement we send signals, intentionally or unintentionally, that we need to wait for a corps to create the catalyst for change—and we erase thousands of nameless people who sacrificed everything for the movement we see today. We can, and must, develop a deeper ability to describe the phenomena of collective action that accounts for the contributions of the many without falling into the trap of a hierarchy as an organizing structure.

  We fight these acts of erasure because they reduce our collective power and the strength of the movement. We are stronger, more capable of achieving our aims, when we tell the full truth, even if it is a more complicated narrative than the half-truth, even if it is a simpler narrative. We can simultaneously acknowledge the work of those who have chosen to lead within organizations focused on justice work, just as we can celebrate the roles of all the people who came out, night after night, as citizens ready to be a part of something bigger than themselves, because they knew that their city needed them. We can do this without allowing our bias toward organizations to erase the labor and contributions of people who might not have access to platforms but who often have done the heaviest and hardest lifting. These truths can coexist alongside the truth that the movement itself was born in the streets and sustained over time through the collective actions of organizations, informal groups, collections of friends, and individuals. We can celebrate the original author of the hashtag, and its intended meaning, without diminishing the role of the hashtag as a rallying point for this renewed focus on freedom and justice.

  This matters because our stories shape what we believe
to be possible. Our stories inspire. Every activist should revel in her ability to take a stand like Claudette Colvin. Every person who sees an injustice should feel empowered to change history like Jo Ann Robinson. And every person—man, woman, or child—should realize that they can join a movement through organizations or through the power of a phone call to a legislator, and they can start a movement by building community in the streets, without having to wait for an organizer. We know that we can make our signs. We know that we can be present in any space. We know that we don’t always need a bullhorn to make our voices heard.

  I now understand that history is usually a series of the small, repeated acts of individuals or groups that have impact. Movements are an ecosystem of actions, rarely ever islands of singular leadership. In remembering the displaced narratives of Claudette Colvin, Jo Ann Robinson, and Bayard Rustin, I have begun to think more about narrative sacrifice, about the missing stories, the stories withheld by choice and design. I have also begun to think more deeply about the power and impact of the stories that are told and about the language used to tell them—about those who participate in false narratives to serve political aims, those who use language as a shield from inquiry, and those whose tales become a game of hide-and-seek with the truth.

  TEN

  Out of the Quiet

  The difference between

  a garden and a graveyard

  is only what we choose

  to put in the ground.

  —RUDY FRANCISCO

  Sometimes, when you don’t see yourself in the world, you start to think that you don’t exist.