Define Our Own Freedom Dominicca Washington

Define Our Own Freedom

Dominicca Washington

The more that I learn and grow as a woman and as a mother, the more that I question what I’ve learned, how I learned it and the importance of unlearning and controlling your own narrative. By no means do I believe in undoing what we’ve been made to know, but I think about unlearning as a sort of continuous improvement plan for our sense of being.

I find myself torn sometimes. Forever on the freedom journey, I’m often tempted to only focus on the future of black freedom because I wonder how much additional dwelling on the past will eventually stifle us. It’s to a point where we achieve something culturally, but the pain of the past makes us skeptical of and in some cases altogether in opposition to the strides of an individual representative of the culture. It feels like more slavery.

Mental fortitude as a survival mechanism for blacks is often rooted in fear as a result of our traumatic experience in this country. Sometimes it feels like we inadvertently re-enslave ourselves through our fears. We get lost in arming ourselves against evils beyond our control as opposed to writing our stories as we want them to be told. I don’t want to be written into the fear of the culture. That’s why I stay close to home. I don’t want the imposition of anyone’s fears on the freedom of my home and children. I don’t believe that we should navigate life ignorant of that past, but I do believe that it’s time to free ourselves from the pain of it. AND I don’t know what that looks like for us all. But I think that there is the beauty in it all.

Maybe we should stop looking for a textbook definition for freedom. The freedom to decide what freedom is and how your life will characterize it. Black history doesn’t stop at the crack epidemic or hip hop. Nor does it stop at the white house. So what personal responsibility do we feel in advancing the narrative? It’s time for black people to define their own freedom and characterize it as they see fit.