Nicolas: The meaning of freedom – Montreal Gazette

Breadcrumb Trail Links

Ottawa occupiers and other protesters across this country have been misusing the word, Emilie Nicolas writes.

Author of the article:

Publishing date:

To be perfectly honest, I havent been feeling Black History Month this year.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Perhaps in part because two consecutive winters of cancelled indoor gatherings would take its toll on any kind of large celebrations. But mostly, Im finding it hard to detach my attention from rampant misuses of the word freedom by Ottawa occupiers and other protesters across this country.

Freedom being the most important rally cry for Black people on this continent across centuries, the so-called Freedom Convoy, with its occasional Confederate flags, is being distracting, to say the least.

When Haitians rebelled against French enslavers, freedom or death became one of the key mottos. It came about in a context where the living conditions for enslaved Africans were so utterly inhumane, that many chose to take their lives to affirm that although their bodies were in chains, their will remained free. Basically, the ancestors chose to live freely or die freely unfreedom being no life at all.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

After the revolution, a good part of the population chose to exercise that freedom by building agricultural villages on a model inspired by their West African roots. Freedom meant freedom to sustain oneself in communities built for supporting one another, freedom to practice your ancestral religion and culture, freedom to have a family, freedom of movement; the freedom to live, really.

In the United States and in the British empire (including Canada), abolition of slavery came later. And even when it did come, living as a racialized minority in settler-colonial states created other barriers to freedom. Several battles had to be fought. People had been emancipated, but without access to good land, and the means to sustain themselves, were they really free

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

If you are a sharecropper in the Old South, where youre not paid enough to not go into debt, and debt is punishable with prison, are you free? If you are a Black Loyalist denied employment in Nova Scotia, unable to feed your family, are you free? Over the decades, the old overtly racist practices that maintained degrees of unfreedom despite emancipation were replaced by the subtler yet very effective systemic inequalities we still see today.

Freedom is still fought for today because casual dehumanization still limits what people can aspire to, because organized intergenerational poverty still hinders people from sustaining themselves and supporting one another, because racial profiling and mass criminalization still threaten to put Black bodies in chains, and violently end lives in the name of the law.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Fighting for freedom today also means healing. It requires taking the time and space necessary to address intergenerational trauma, and the ways its been impacting communities. In short, its about freeing the mind from harmful ideas that still impact our mental health, self-esteem, and our ability to truly show up for one another. And the freedom to reconnect with the parts of our heritage that have been stigmatized or lost by decades if not centuries of prejudice and forced assimilation.

Which brings me back to the Freedom Convoy, a large portion of which has been fighting for the freedom to infect others with a potentially life-threatening virus. And in doing so, has chosen to exercise a freedom to deprive entire neighbourhoods of sleep and rest with non-stop dangerous level of noise, a freedom to harass and scare fellow citizens, freedom to desecrate a cenotaph and make a mockery of Indigenous ceremonies, freedom to urinate and defecate in the streets, freedom to yell homophobic and racist slurs, freedom to stack potentially explosive gas tanks in residential areas.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

I am not surprised, to be honest, that a significant group of people today would choose to define freedom, basically, as the freedom to harm others without consequences. Its been a recurrent feature on this continent. If it wasnt the case, Black history would look completely different.

For centuries, Black people have stood against freedom defined as the freedom to cause the unfreedom of others. Who else, this week, wants to actively, energetically join that fight?

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Sign up to receive daily headline news from the Montreal Gazette, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Montreal Gazette Headline News will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Visit link:

Nicolas: The meaning of freedom - Montreal Gazette