Liberation and Freedom

In general terms, Freedom refers to the condition or the state of being free of all external control and influence.

Liberation generally refers to the specific efforts one undertakes towards an unshackled existence.  For instance, we can have a war of liberation—armed resistance--as a part of a broader struggle for freedom for a nation. In the United States, legal victories such as The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were liberatory moments in the larger struggle to achieve the promise of equality that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died for.  

For all practical purposes, however, freedom and liberation are inseparable! They mean the same and have the same aspirations. They emanate from the same well: throwing off the yoke of oppression. 

Humanity has demonstrated the capacity to love and hate in equal measure; it has also created cultural hierarchies and tensions to maintain unbalanced political systems.  Anytime these power relations get off course, the fight for freedom and liberation ensues.

This is what happened in the middle of the Fifteenth Century when Europe, in seeking its economic imperatives—'gold’—imposed its cultural control— ‘god’—on the world, thereby appropriating for its ‘glory’ huge landmasses worldwide.

This era was built based on perhaps the greatest lie ever told, that Africa and Africans are less than human, without history, and without any civilizations to speak of.  They are to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

And so for 400 years, Europe violently competed among itself, taking over large territories of land around the world, in the process creating large empires that fed its growth, development, and power.

In what became the United States of America, it was the culture of enslavement that provided the economic boost which powered the new country’s march towards becoming a global powerhouse. The enslaved Africans became the central players in this story, even as the new nation struggled with its paradoxes, especially the one that paid lip service to equality but effectively passed laws that dehumanized the enslaved.

Chaos was inevitable, and it came in the form of a Civil War that was fought between 1861 and 1865.  In the war’s aftermath, in the era of Reconstruction, another attempt was made to move America towards its pledge of equality for all. The 13^th Amendment abolished slavery; and the 14^th Amendment was enacted to ensure citizenship for all, especially the 4 million newly freed Black people. It also promised equal protection of the laws and due process for all.

 However, the centuries-old idea of African inferiority was so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that by 1877, slave-like conditions roared back with a vengeance, in the form of legal racial segregation, popularly called Jim Crow. The Jim Crow era was brutal and nasty. It spawned the Pan African movement worldwide; instigated the Harlem renaissance and gave rise to the modern Civil Rights movements.

After decades of taking baby steps forward in the continuing quest to fulfill America’s promise, we have, in the Twenty First Century, taken giant steps backward, from the gutting of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act to a United State Supreme Court that now is taking away rights.

Dr. King believed that these concrete legal victories were necessary but not sufficient to attain the community he dreamed about, what he termed the Beloved Community that rested on freedom and liberation.