Formato de texto

This chapter begins with the lyrics to the song “Who Will Survive in America”

performed and written by Gil Scott Heron off of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The lyrics call into question just whose bodies are meant to survive in America, and

whose are not? In stating “The youngsters who were programmed, to continue fucking up, woke up one night digging Paul Revere and Nat Turner as the good guys…” Heron calls into question the very nature of national memory through the mechanization of age appropriate ways of knowing, seeing and believing. He is asking us, his listeners, to place the memory of two notable figures in American revolution/rebellion in conversation with one another. Paul Revere is a notable figure of the American Revolution because he publicly notified Bostonians of the

incoming British troops by riding through town shouting “the British are coming”. His role in the American Revolution is far more complicated than this, but popular memory maintains that he was instrumental in preparing colonist for the impending fight against British troops. American independence thus would not have been won without him. Paul Revere is already “dug” as a good guy. Social and historical memory relies upon the retelling of stories, but rarely ever demands re-memory – that is not just recollection but deconstruction. Re-memory is political, and a critical process in the establishment of decolonized power. The violence of freedom as liberty requires that there be a collective re-memory of the relationship between race – which in this instance is about whiteness’ “investment” in the maintenance of a particular notion of freedom, namely, freedom as liberty.

This chapter is concerned with the further examination the possibilities and necessities of freedom’s inclusion in political discussions of rights and humanity. What drives the nature of this conversation is that there are many moments throughout our collective human history where an individual’s actions were for them and often for their community liberatory, but were in some shape or form violent. I speak here of violent revolution from the French, American, Haitian revolution to the Nat Turner rebellion and the Arab Spring. There are serious implications for theorizing about the nature of freedom as if it were something detached and different from violence (Fanon 2005). Yet, freedom, in its Western manifestation, has not now, nor has it ever been conceived of as a violent thing. In fact, what we often see, in it is Western theorization, is that when violence is present, freedom immediately falls away. This is dependent, however, on how one conceives of violence; the American Revolution is in fact a violent endeavor, it is not, however, considered to be violent. Indeed, the American Revolution is considered to be one of the best examples of fights for freedom (shaped by one’s fight against tyranny), and is

exemplified best by the Boston Freedom Trail. When we move outside of proud white men and women fighting against a foreign power on both a domestic and international level, we find that decolonization, independence and Civil Rights Movements are not considered to be fights specifically for freedom as liberty or freedom in general, unless they are understood as non-violent. Many contemporary non-Western thinkers, however, have argued that violence is precisely the thing that allows for freedom to come to fruition – that is to say when freedom is sought violence is necessary (Fanon 2005; Cesaire 2001; Reddy 2011; Agathangelou 2014;

Davis). A Black sense of freedom is a thing that often requires some form of violence in order to be actualized. This is because our notions of violence situate all revolutionary and freedom seeking actions performed by Black bodies as violence – that is violence is sometimes not even

considered violence when it is performed by bodies deemed by the state to be fully deserving of full rights, dignity and humanity.

While the Boston Freedom Trail serves as the focal point of this chapter, this is not a chapter about this trail itself. This chapter exists as a means to establish what freedom means in a context of whiteness, and the politics of representation at work in performing freedom by

“proper” bodies. The BFT is a writing of the narrative freedom that demands white/state centric individualism. Freedom as liberty asks us to distance ourselves from the collective tensions of state formation – that is, the collective is allowed as long as it is for the purpose of supporting individuality. Thus, I find it necessary to reiterate and be clear, Front Porches and Freedom Trails is about Black liberation, and a search for a way to talk about freedom and freedom

struggles, which are directly tied to Black bodies. As is argued in Chapter III, Blackness does not have the luxury of being individualistic. A Black sense of freedom simultaneously does not have the luxury of being maintained and preserved in the same way that white freedom does. White freedom rests in archives; Black freedom stays in the soil, not covered, but still not read as belonging to the land it rests in.

In the midst of a national (and indeed global) call for the recognition of the humanity and general mattering of Black Lives, what does it mean to call into question the racialization of freedom as liberty? We find ourselves in the grips of an historical moment that is not any different from the many moments that came before it, in which Black bodies and their claims towards full and complete humanness have been denied this access. The quest for civil rights by non-white persons in the United States and around the globe, have been a quest for the inclusion of communities of color inside the narrative of self-determination and humanness. I continue to make references to the idea of the human because it is precisely this definition that has excluded

non-white peoples from claiming, articulating and practicing freedom. Among the things

required for the assertion of one’s humanity are access and recognition of one’s dignity, respect, liberty, freedom, and justice.