9781626569768

Conclusion
Last summer, I sat on a hotel rooftop in Bahia, Brazil, with a gaggle of
raucous and revolutionary Black feminist change makers. Over the course
of three days these women, who were flung there from every corner of the
world, detonated my mind with their interminable brilliance and insight.
They were unquestionably some of the most bad-ass humans I had ever
met. Sipping caipirinhas and cackling into the blue-black sky, my favorite
rabble-rouser of the group, longtime activist and artist Kai (pronounced
Kai-ee), in her half-teasing, wholly provocative way, queried the group,
“We doing all this fighting for liberation. Any of y’all know what liberation
looks like?”
Kai slapped the question down on the table like a dead fish, and the
whole group was dumbstruck for a second. Quickly, answers began to
stammer out of mouths like closing-time drunkards. It appeared many of us
had never really given ourselves permission to ponder what a world rid of
oppression might look like. My friends and comrades who were deeply
involved in political movements from Ecuador to Houston, from
farmworkers’ rights to the Movement for Black Lives, wrestled with that
small knot of a question well into the early morning hours. For many of us,
the fight was so incessant, insisting on our every mental and emotional fiber
for our survival, that rarely had we been given a moment to think about
what might exist in our lives or on the planet when we finished fighting.
My answer was swift but silent. I said only to myself, “Radical selflove.”
Torn by what felt at once profoundly true and absurdly small,
insignificant up against the global powers of oppression, I kept my answer
inside. How could a concept so simple occupy the spaces that
marginalization and separation had seemed to fill for centuries? But I knew
that my follow-up question was a lie. My doubts were not about the
efficacy of radical self-love. My doubts were about me. How dare I believe
I have any answers for such complicated geopolitical and social
quandaries? Who am I to even speak to these issues? How quickly the voice
of self-doubt and deficiency ran in to fill the space in my head where