Re-Imagining Liberations: Adventist Philosophers Review “Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization” – 2
In partnership with the Society of Adventist Philosophers, Spectrum presents reflections by SAP scholars on Lewis R. Gordon’s Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization for our summer reading series. This is part two. Yi Shen Ma wrote part one. (Gordon will be the Londis Lectureship speaker on the SAP conference this fall.)
In chapter two, Lewis Gordon reflects on “Re-Imaging Liberations” after delivering a public lecture in 2018 at the Centre for Diversity Studies International Conference at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In this thought-provoking and moving chapter, Gordon argues that liberation requires shifting the focus from moral frameworks to political commitments that harness constructive power through decolonial and emancipatory practices.
Euromodernity created a world where whiteness gains advantages and license to have everything. Forms of violence through oppressive systems such as capitalism, colonialism, enslavement, racism, and sexism extracted wealth and value from non-white and non-Christian identities. These systems also established forms of exclusion and exploitation in order to deny people political agency, autonomy and the ability to influence social life. Throughout the chapter, Gordon explores the limitations and shortcomings of liberation from systems and the alternatively more creative process of seeking liberation as an objective, liberation for possible futures.
According to Gordon, neoliberals discuss politics as a set of moral obligations. Politics is the discussion of the individual’s duties and responsibilities in society. Using the example of racism, he explains how whiteness is given license to do harm and feel guilt and sorrow for the result; meanwhile, racism remains intact. Placing our attention on liberation from the interlocking systems of violence and oppression includes an analysis of asymmetries of power that leads us toward critical self-reflection. However, when we inherit power and privilege through birthright, feelings of guilt and shame rise to the surface. The challenge with this response is that neither my personal experiences, recognizing past wrongdoings, nor my increasing awareness that I am part of this history actually improve the living conditions for non-white people. In fact, Gordon points out that the individual who gains benefits from racism becomes a victim by virtue of not being responsible for a characteristic (race) they cannot change in themselves. The point Gordon makes throughout his discussion of liberation from is that we can speak extensively about the evils of these systems, how we are trapped in them and which solutions are more decolonial, without actually doing more than just identifying our moral obligations.
How can we move from discussing privilege to creating a more just and free existence? Gordon proposes we disinherit the license of white privilege by exercising our political commitment to act. Euromodern rule prevented politics through the harms of colonialism and epistemological dependency that subjugated, marginalized and disenfranchised various groups of non-whites. For Gordon, Politics is the activity and practice of citizenship (it’s everything!), where citizens govern their existence and have the power to do and be. He highlights citizenship as a phenomenon that emerges not just in urban centers but in places such as Damascus, Gaza, Mn Nfr, Ur, Urk, and Waset (21). The production of power takes on a positive conception when people are able to denounce the constraints of rule and law (the norms of established moral obligations) in favor of free speech and exercising one’s agency, which are examples of liberation as a goal. Gordon powerfully illustrates liberation for through the story of Harriet Bailey, Frederick Douglass’ mother.
Harriet Baily walked twelve miles in the evenings to see her son and returned every day to work on the plantation. Gordon clarifies two accounts of this story told in Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In the first narrative, Douglass emphasizes the violence and inhumanity of the slave system, which separated babies from their mothers at birth, commodifying human life and breaking apart communal bonds of love and affection. In the latter, Douglass illustrates what Gordon underscores regarding the power of desire, ala the French philosopher Simone Weil. Gordon quotes Weil, “A man loses? half his soul the day he becomes a slave.’ The question remains, what would she or he do with the other half? Some fight, others retreat and lose more. Others love” (25). Pulling a direct quote from Weil, Gordon notes how love and the desire for the other can lead to the violence of assimilation. However, desire can also express an “impossible desire” to be with someone who is geographically distant, and paradoxically, this longing can create a sense of closeness despite physical separation.
Douglass recounts the action of being close in the story of his mother, who visits him nightly, even one time saving him from the abuse of an enslaved cook. Though Douglass did not know her well, he came to know love and what it meant to be valued through her actions. However, Gordon says his mother’s love was not enough, “Frederick had to value that love” (28). Though brief in the arc of his life, these visits from his mother gave Douglass a relationship of belonging where he could begin to affirm his own value, the value of his mother’s action, and begin to imagine possible futures for himself. Gordon powerfully concludes, “The movement to Black consciousness requires valuing being valued by the damned of the earth” (29).
Summarizing the existential paradox of political commitment, Gordon highlights the unpredictability of enslaved Harriet Baily’s actions. She had no promise of what Douglass might do with his sense of value. Harriet Baily’s “actions could have produced an arrogant child who is shortly thereafter killed, or a fighting, committed spirit who suffers the same fate” (29). Gordon notes that our actions provide no assurance beyond the promise that others will be affected. Our action may turn out to benefit others very different from us and/or cause unintentional harm and suffering. The point being that we cannot imagine or predict how or who is affected. We practice loving “anonymous generations to come” (29) that will not guarantee we have a future in the futures our actions construct.
Over the last year, challenges to free speech and student protests over the Palestinian crisis and war on Gaza erupted on college campuses across the nation. Students questioning U.S. foreign policy, calling on their institutions to divest from companies profiting from war, and renouncing genocide are all political acts that reimagine the future. A key aspect of the educational process is being able to have vigorous debates and dialogues, which is compromised by censoring. While free speech and freedom of expression are First Amendment rights, private university campuses can make their own rules about when speech threatens or harasses other students and who is invited to speak. The focus on law and order is how a particular group gains power and control; this is precisely what the anti-imperialism student protests seek freedom from, for themselves and in solidarity with Palestinians.
As a pastoral theologian, I also read Gordon’s chapter thinking of the lives of the women I write about in Insurrectionist Wisdoms.1 Pastoral theologians use the term “eschatology” to refer to the longings of our souls, desire and possibilities of futures we might live into. These futures are made possible by the negotiation of present circumstances in order to open up possibilities for conservation, survival and human flourishing. In Insurrectionist Wisdoms, I explain how Maya mexicanas working on the assembly line of a multinational corporation affirm and protect their ancestors’ philosophical background and recover theory in their cosmovision by identifying as “primeramente madre” (mothers first). For these women, a decolonial feminism conceived in their context values balance, harmony and reciprocity. They practice “corazonando la vida… el poder sentirsaber-sentirpensar” (the power or ability to feel-know and to feel-think).2
To add to the etymology of words Gordon explores in the chapter, in Spanish, the word “poder” can be translated into English in one of two ways; poder is both “power” and also “the ability to do or to be.”3 Women tell me they engage in risk-taking actions in order to survive, but surviving is resisting death. While they do want to be alive, more than that, they seek a world free of violence against them and their communities. For this purpose, they speak up, ignore company policy, persist in demanding better working conditions and renounce responsibility for behaving in ways that meet the expectations of abusive systems. These women affirm Gordon’s central point that political action transcends established norms, demonstrating that freedom and justice are achieved through concrete actions.
About the author
- Marlene M. Ferreras, Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology, Environment and Religion in Feminist-Womanist, Queer, and Indigenous Perspectives(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022). ↩︎
- Juan López Inztín, “Ich’el ta muk’: La trama en la construcción del Lekil kuxlejal (vida plena-digna-justa),” in Senti-pensar el Género: Perspectivas desde los pueblos originarios, ed. Georgina Méndez Torres et al. (Guadalajara, México: La Casa del Mago, 2013), 78. ↩︎
- Mariana Mora, Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 19. ↩︎
