Liberation, at its most basic, is the act and process of freeing oneself and others from oppression. It is also its own outcome: the state of being liberated.
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.”
## How I extend liberation's definition
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.
For myself, liberation involves deconstructing cycles, systems, and structures which perpetuate violence against and exploitation of the oppressed and prevent people (oppressed *or* oppressor) in communities and broader society from living as their fullest selves. Liberation includes the pursuit healing, social justice, and collective actualization.
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.
Love is a core value to my liberation politic because liberation, to me, is love at its loudest. In a world on fire, love calls us to liberation. I heavily adapted my perspective on love from bell hooks, who offered this definition by M. Scott Peck: “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”[^1]
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.
This love, in which we extend ourselves for nurturing spiritual growth, is inherently liberatory. Liberation fulfills love. Liberation work is a sacred labor which allows us to manifest love. It encompasses collective action to build power across dimensions of the political, cultural, social, economic, psychological, spiritual, and so forth.
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.
Liberation also takes hope and creative vision. In the work and words of Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hays, rather than throwing in the towel and giving in to despair, we choose to hope—to believe that a better world and a greater love are possible. Following Mariame and Kelly, we also embrace that liberation involves “creating connection, possibility, and potential [which is] creative work.” We have to imagine what we want to build, to dream of what liberation is or will be, and we must trust our collective power to realize these visions. It is true that we can’t exactly know what the future holds, but we must “greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that *we do not know enough to be pessimistic*.”[^2]
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.
[^1]: M. Scott Peck, *The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth* (Simon & Schuster, 1978).
[^2]: Hazel Henderson, *The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics* (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Double Day, 1981), 411. Quoted from Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, *Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care* (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023).
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.
## Why I strive for liberation
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.
A list of reasons why I strive for liberation:
- Because “we have inherited a world on fire.” In the words of Mariame Kaba, I have chosen to “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” I want to fight for this world, to keep it. I want to fight for our collective survival.
- Because I seek freedom and justice. I want to create connection, potential, and possibility. I want to build a better world and to build a greater love. I want to do this creative work with others.
- Because I want us—everyone—to be able to grow and live as their fullest selves.
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.
Today I have a small update to the site: I've added a footnote plugin and a header anchor plugin to the site's Markdown parsing. Not a noticeable difference, but it'll help when I start publishing more stuff here.
I've also changed permalinks for journal entries to include the year, and I updated how datestamps are formatted across the site.
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