Freedom ain't free. Neither are we.

Dr. Martin Luther King jr. once said that “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability but comes through continuous struggle. And so, we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.” As someone whose freedoms have been bought and paid for with blood, sweat, tears, resistance, rebellion, grief, genius, and generations of struggle, to me the statement that “freedom ain’t free” for me, is also recognition that the “freedom” I have today was not gifted by the benevolence of America. They were fought for by people who were never supposed to survive, organize, vote, own land, build wealth, or belong to themselves.

Their suffering is soaked into the soil of this so-called “land of the free.” Their labor built the wealth of a nation that denied their humanity while profiting from their bodies. Their resistance made it possible for me to exist outside of physical chains today.

I will never forget. I will never be quiet about it.

And still, we are not free in a myriad of ways. Black people are not free. Indigenous people aren’t either. People with disabilities, queer and trans folk, and Immigrants are not free, tethered to laws and policies that exclude their access and opportunities. Poor people and workers are taxed and bound. Caregivers and people whose lives are treated as disposable are also not free. And because nobody is free until everyone is, none of us truly are. As human beings, our liberation is bound. We need each other to survive, even though we have been socialized into separation and silos as if disconnection is natural. It is not.

Many of us wake up each day and have to punch a clock to pay bills for housing, food, transportation, insurance, gas, utilities, healthcare, debt, childcare, and a host of other costs attached to the basic act of staying alive. Nothing is free. Everything has a fee.

Even food that grows from the ground and water that flows naturally have been commodified, packaged, branded, poisoned, privatized, and sold back to us. If you cannot pay, you suffer. Can’t afford health insurance or rent? Get another job, go back to school. Save more money in an awful economy, do better. It’s your fault.

Can’t afford rest? Too bad. Can’t afford to be sick, to grieve, to pause, to heal, to breathe? Oh well. Sucks for you. Paying to live comes at a greater cost than the made-up dollar that dictates so many of our lives. If you cannot pay, it can ultimately cost you your life… suddenly, or slowly, through stress, exhaustion, chronic illness, anxiety, depression, preventable disease, and the daily wearing down of the body, mind, and spirit. Who benefits, and who is burdened by this? How did we get here?

Pay or perish is not freedom.

Right now, this country is preparing to celebrate 250 years of itself, and this year, just like every year before it, I feel agitated wondering when we talk about freedom, freedom for whom? Independence how? Liberty where?

America’s idea of freedom has always been

complicated for me because Black people in this country were enslaved longer than we have been legally free and that history is foundational for me, not forgotten. The idea of “financial freedom” is especially interesting when the roots of this economic system were built on the backs of stolen people forced to work stolen land for the accumulation of wealth, power, property, and profit for those who turned human beings into products.

The organizational charts of many institutions today still carry eerie remnants of that same oppressive work structure: production over people, profit over care, power concentrated at the top, and those closest to the frontlines doing the most essential work while being compensated the least and burned out the most.

The titles have changed but hierarchy remains. The power paradigm is persistent.

Slave codes morphed into Black Codes. Black Codes gave way to Jim Crow. Jim Crow did not vanish; it was redesigned through redlining, segregation, voter suppression, school inequity, employment discrimination, policing, prisons, surveillance, debt, displacement, and the criminalization of poverty.

Enslavement became mass incarceration. Plantations became prisons. Exclusion is now policy and extraction is coded as “professionalism.” Exploitation has been normalized as “just the way things are.” The design was decided by a few, but it has held up over time because, as a country, we have never truly changed, just rearranged.

I often say history evolves, not dissolves. It adapts and adjusts, molding itself to the times. Its patterns are relentless unless they are interrupted significantly and consistently. The Jim Crow signs may have come down, but the racial and social arrangements attached to them are still being upheld. Sometimes through law, policy, and budgets. Other times through silence or who gets believed, protected, or who gets punished, and who gets paid.

Author James Baldwin said “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.” That history has a cost. And we all pay it, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Juneteenth is a yearly reminder that freedom has always been delayed, denied, distorted, and had to be demanded. That emancipation was not the same as liberation and news of freedom can arrive late… and still not arrive fully.

The Fourth of July is recognition that America has long celebrated freedom while excluding the very people whose labor, land, lives, and lineages made its declarations possible.

In this era of #America2Grifty, I’m not falling prey to empty patriotism, performative freedom, or red-white-and-blue revisionist history. I’m speaking truth. I’m not interested in the continued hoodwinkedness and bamboozlement. My only concern is liberation that can be felt in our bodies, homes, schools, workplaces, communities, policies, and possibilities.

Freedom is not just the absence of chains.

Freedom is the presence of choice and safety. It’s dignity that shouldn’t have to be earned and resting as a human right. Freedom is care and belonging. Its power that is shared, resources being redistributed, and the spectrum of difference that humanity provides, being fully valued. None of which should cost us our lives. And until that is true for all of us, we’ll never be free.

BEFORE YOU GO...

Check out my #America2Grifty collection at Finally PHREEE!

Preparations are well underway to package America 250 as a grand celebration of freedom, independence, democracy, and national pride, while many of us are living the receipts of a much older scam. A country can’t claim freedom as its brand while making survival so expensive, care as conditional, history that’s distorted, and liberation delayed. #IssaFraud!

#America2Grifty is a truth-telling interruption of #America250 and my refusal to let this country celebrate freedom while so many of us are still paying the price for survival.