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--- ---
title: "Liberationist 1: A prelude to liberation" title: "Liberationist 1: A prelude to liberation"
date: 2024-07-07T23:04:03-5 date: 2024-10-10T23:04:03-5
--- ---
# Liberationist 1: A prelude to liberation # Liberationist 1: A prelude to liberation
Between 2012 and 2013, I woke from a deep slumber. It's mostly three events which spur me. One: February 2012—George Zimmerman murders 17-year-old Black teen Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Two: June 2012—My mom and I visit our family in the Philippines for the first time in six years. Three: June 2013—Wendy Davis performs an 11-hour filibuster to block Texas Senate Bill 5, a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, which dies that night, but is revived and passed in a second special session in July. After these events, I take stances against police brutality and income inequality. I get into feminism and queer/trans issues. Throughout high school, I become more opinionated, and thus more politically distant from family. By 2015, I'm supporting Bernie Sanders' presidential bid, and I end up identifying myself as a “progressive.” Although I’d thought of politics when I was younger, I didn’t have a broader political awakening until I was about 13 or 14 years old. It was around that time I first diverged from my parents’ politics—diverge because I started observing things in the world which broke down the worldview I was raised with and exposed major contradictions between the narratives I believed and the values I held. For now, I’ll recount my political shifts from then until now, spanning 12 years of personal evolutions and everchanging perspectives.
It's 2016. I'm a first year at Texas Tech. Hillary Clinton has lost the election. Donald Trump's rise to the presidency betrays everything I thought I knew about American politics and culture. I don't feel all that welcome in Texas Tech's LGBTQ+ community, so in the coming years I get more involved in the feminist group on campus. We host The Vagina Monologues. We have talks on intersectionality theory and gender in pop culture and the media. We teach sex ed. We organize a few protests. We petition the university to do more about sexual assault. The word “radical” isn't so frightening anymore. ## My journey so far
2019 rolls around. I've joined a new university-backed organization called Council of Councils. We settle on Student Intersectional Leadership Council. It almost completely falls apart by November 2019 when, driven by impulse, I take on the task of restructuring and rebuilding it. By this point, I'm disillusioned with the institution and with other student leaders, who seem more preoccupied with clout and more interested in building their own resumes than building movements or making change. I learn what it means to build coalition. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the priorities of the day. I'm taking an interest in indigenous sovereignty and the Land Back movement. I keep doing feminist organizing, but racism on campus joins it at the front of my mind. It began in 2012 with a handful of events. First: George Zimmerman kills Trayvon Martin in February 2012, prompting a national outrage. This event, along with the later killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and others, culminate in what becomes the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a major awakening for me about race in America; it is when I realize that they weren’t killed merely by individuals but by a system—not simply by tragedy or accident, but by design. It breaks the tentative trust I had in the justice system, and it leads me to be more skeptical about whiteness.
By 2022, SILC has gone through two advisors. We've laid the groundwork and now we're getting connected to other student groups in a way that matters. The work has broadened—I learn to move fluidly from issue to issue, because that's what it demands. I'm getting critical of traditional ideas around leadership. I am in and out of school at this point. It's more and more clear just how deeply interconnected all the issues I've been thinking about are. I get into the Filipino student group, which brings a greater self-discovery about my cultural background. It brings more meaning to my activist tendencies. The struggles I'm involved in take on global implications. I don't feel like I'm always on the same page with other Filipino students though. By now, hierarchy feels like the biggest foe; I fancy myself an anarchist. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, my mom and I visit family in The Philippines, six years since our last visit. It is a sticky, hot June in Cebu. Rather than forget America in another place, I am reminded of it and for the first time I see the world as it exists *because* of America, not in spite of it. Faced with a different way of living, I feel just as alien there as I do in the United States, but I also feel incredibly loved there—our relatives and our neighbors treat me like one of them, even though normally I’m thousands of miles away. I recognize here that the big sister to six other siblings (who grew up on this island, rode the jeepney every day, helped with dishes and washing clothes by hand) and the caregiving nurse (who raised me, cut my hair, picked me up from school in her car, packed my lunch, and machine-washed my clothes) are the same person. It calls me to think more critically about what it means to immigrate, to be an immigrant.
Finally, it all comes full circle to today. This year, I came back to Lubbock to complete my degree once and for all. The atmosphere on campus is radically different. DEI programs are dead in Texas—quite possibly due in part to what we'd been doing with DEI at Texas Tech. I'm reckoning with forces which have been at play in American politics for over 40 years. Even the left-facing activists in our community seem to have internalized the effects. I can't stop noticing the same tendencies I observed among students and student leaders recurring in the community. It feels even worse now than it was. But at the same time, it feels like something is in the air. In June of 2013, Wendy Davis performs an 11-hour filibuster to block the Texas Senate from passing Senate Bill 5, a bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks with very little exception. I stay up late watching the livestream and reading the responses on social media. It brings my attention to how much the male perspective dominates in politics. When school starts that fall, I can’t help but notice how we talk about gender and sexuality. I see and face all kinds of normalized harassment. Girls at my high school start a feminist club and receive harassment and threats from students and even adults in the community. Although I’m initially hesitant to unpack what it means to be a man and the privileges which accompany that, I learn more and gain the confidence to call myself a feminist. Other issues arise—income inequality, more police brutality, LGBTQ+ rights, sex education, war in Gaza, just to name some—which deepen my feelings of tension and solidarity with others. By the time I graduate high school, I also start to call myself a “progressive.”
Since I became more involved in the feminist organizing space in 2018, my perspective that all these struggles are deeply intertwined has grown and grown. I've always seen everyone as connected—there's me in you, and there's you in me—and that's had lasting implications on how I live, how I show up in spaces, and how I work with others. But now, more than ever, it's become especially important to me to combine all these struggles together and take action on a broader spectrum. I take these politics with me into college, and like me they continue to grow, against the backdrop of the 2016 election and Trump’s presidency. The difficulty I face building a social circle for myself and integrating into the community at Texas Tech—whether in the engineering college, as a member of the Gay-Straight Alliance (now the Gender and Sexuality Association), or at crowded apartment parties—has a chilling effect on my outlook on identity politics, but I find camaraderie and connection in the Feminist Alliance and Women’s & Gender Studies. It is disillusioning to find that academia isn’t as inclusive or as positive an experience as I expected it to be; the institution unravels in my mind.
I came to “liberation,” collective liberation, as my word of choice because it binds together all these movements. Its basic definition is “the act and process of freeing oneself and others from captivity or oppression,” but it could also refer to the resulting state of being freed, or to the absence of oppression. This accurately characterizes my drive in every situation—to witness oppression and hierarchy at work, to fight against whatever forms they take, and to create something new which counteracts them. And more and more lately I find this a spiritual calling which connects all struggles for a better world and unites every effort I've undertaken. Into 2019, I enter the ambitious, but tumultuous space which eventually becomes Student Intersectional Leadership Council, with the goal of building stronger coalitions between student leaders and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. It falls apart and I help to build it back up. In this space, everything begins to feel much more connected. By 2022, the work broadens as we forge more relationships and develop our presence. I’m working with Filipino students to share our culture. I’m learning and teaching countercultural ideas about leadership.
When it comes to labelling myself as a liberationist, I don't want people to get the impression that I perceive everything I do as liberatory, but that in every moment I am striving to be better and strategizing around how I could take liberation a step further. I've warmed up to describing myself this way specifically because it's generic enough to provide a space for my politics to change, shift, and grow, but it's specific enough to identify my values—the love, hope, and vision I ground myself in and the collective solidarity and empowerment I'm seeking. It encompasses any movement which seeks to stop oppression, exploitation, or injustice—to disrupt and dismantle cycles, systems, structures, hierarchies, etc.—and any creative, constructive effort to support our collective and individual abilities to live as our fullest selves. By 2023, I’m going in and out of school. Organizers, friends, mentors, even I come and go, but I continue to study these ideas. Filipino culture. Leadership and community organizing. Leftism. Global struggle. Social change. BIPOC radical thought. And the more I work and learning I do, the more I see hierarchies everywhere I look, cycles which run for generations, and complicated networks of interlocking systems. It starts to feel more right to say that I am “radical.” An “anarchist.”
Being a liberationist is critical in this time where we've inherited a world on fire. We have to connect our struggles and build collective power because we can only survive together. It's not enough to have faith that things will get better, because things *won't* get better, not if we don't roll up our sleeves and collaborate to do something about it. I've chosen collective liberation because it feels like the only way a better world is going to happen. I don't just have hope the world will somehow inevitably get better, an empty hope which only promotes inaction, but rather I have hope and conviction that through our work we can *make* a better world. Finally, it comes full circle in 2024. I’ve come back to Lubbock on fire—worse than I remembered the year before. Now, it feels like forces over forty years in the making are coming to a head, seeking to erode community, undermining solidarity, and challenging our hope. A myriad of anxieties plague us: DEI programs dead across the state, bombs falling in Gaza, Democrats building the wall, Republicans gutting education and filling it with right-wing propaganda, and hurricanes and floods ravaging the Southeast and displacing millions. Concerns fixate on whether to vote or not vote, but there’s otherwise no plan, no coalition ready to act. Yet still, something is in the air, thick and like gasoline. Although what comes next is uncertain, everything in Lubbock feels just one spark away from ignition.
## I am a liberationist
It’s this space and time, this point in my journey, in which I’ve come to call myself “liberationist.” It is here I feel the greatest urgency to work across all these struggles and take action on a broader spectrum. Liberation is most basically understood as the act or process of freeing oneself and others from captivity or oppression, or the result of that process. Collective liberation is my chosen vessel for this work because in it I recognize our shared struggles and the deep-running connections between us all. It binds together all these movements and moments I’ve found myself in over the years. Within it, I’ve found a drive to be a witness to and organizer against oppression, hierarchy, injustice, and exploitation. I’ve also found the willpower to build something transformative which counteracts them and elevates all. More critically, I’ve found a spiritual calling to build a better world—to love wider and louder and join others in striving for change.
And that discovery doesn’t end here. When it comes to labeling myself a liberationist, it isn’t to say that my journey is “complete,” but to say that this is a new beginning. I will always have more work to do and more to learn and unlearn. I’ve only assumed this label (even despite what I normally say about labels) because it feels fitting of my desire to articulate connectedness. It also feels fitting to my values—love, hope, and vision especially—and goals—collective empowerment, radical transformation, and building a better world. It does this without necessarily limiting further evolution or driving out other perspectives of what liberation could be.
In a world on fire, liberation is crucial work. We have to connect our struggles, build collective power, and make change together because we can only survive together. Simply having faith that things will improve on their own isn’t enough because things *won’t* get better—not unless we roll up our sleeves and work together. We have to have a hope of active substance, not just an empty, passive one. We find that hope in liberation: that when *we* fight, we win. That when we fight, we can *make* a better world.