The American Dream was built on stolen land and enslaved labor, so true freedom means rejecting it and building a Liberation Economy rooted in repair and abundance.
You and I will always sit at a crossroads, surveying our options at the intersection of ancestral decisions and descendants’ possibilities. Fortunately, we decide our journey.
We inherited many stories about the U.S.: that we are united because all men are created equal. That the land is made for you and me. And even that the American Dream is achievable through hard work alone.
But what if there never was an us within America? What if we were to survey our collective history and decide on a new path, away from the storied horizon of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that those forefathers painted? Not because these are not noble aspirations, but because the story of fighting for independence from an oppressive ruling regime was not true then and could never be in practice. The version of America that emerged in those early colonies mimicked and even doubled down on the practices of its oppressors. And the colonizers continued to greatly depend on those oppressors.
Ancestors planted seeds of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in soil rife with white supremacy as an ideology, democracy for the few as a practice for governance, and racial capitalism (then known as mercantilism) that subjugated and objectified millions of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color. These soils have always been bereft of the nutrients needed for true liberation and freedom.
A Snapshot of 1776
By 1776, the colonies were 170 years into a simple business venture for the British Empire. The Virginia Company of London, established in 1606, was a joint-stock enterprise chartered to make money for its shareholders and establish an English colony on the eastern seashore of what is now the U.S. Financial success in mercantilism for individuals was measured by how much gold they could stockpile. Southern tobacco and cotton were the main cash crops.
In 1776, nearly 20-25% of approximately 3.5 million people living in the colonies were Africans enslaved by white people. White people ran businesses that depended on European financing to purchase and insure their human chattel. And plantation owners relied on British credit, financing, and exports to expand their production. In 1776, 1,000 miles of coastline had been stolen from Indigenous land stewards. “All told, from the late 1770s through 1815, U.S. forces (including state militias) burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida.”
And there was also a wealthy, elite class of men, including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, who were drawn together by a determination to protect “their right” to continue to profit from dispossessing Native people of land. By forcing African people into slavery, they were able to continue to build their coffers and further their power through governance.
When I imagine the soil my ancestors tilled in 1776, it was never meant to pave the way to freedom. Every row hoed sowed generationally oppressive stories of governance by an elite few, made-up claims of white supremacy, and stories that this economy was wholly dependent on the stealing of land, the killing and enslaving of people, and the extraction of natural resources. The aspirational myths of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness could never really be true in these soil conditions. Our ancestors tried to fortify the soil with constitutional amendments to clarify and broaden who gets to govern and over what domains. Unfortunately, we have not amended our social contract about how we collectively use our resources, i.e., what is our economy and whom is it meant to serve?
In these soil conditions, only an Oppression Economy could be reaped in those fields and colonized lands. What was planted has logically grown into an economy where the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown people fuels local revenues and prisoners fuel the production of local goods and the delivery of services; where Black people spend more time to be able to vote; where being poor means paying more for everything; where corporations determine policies for our social infrastructure, including but not limited to our health care, housing, infrastructure, and education.
Because of these truths, I have come to accept that the story of American independence was actually a business transaction, a declaration of the right to determine the oppression of others, and a resolution to propel racial capitalism. I choose not to celebrate the stories of 1776. Instead, through my work with Liberation in a Generation and with fellow narrative and cultural workers at the BLIS Collective, I focus on what it will take to amend this soil and plant new seed stories that build paths of true repair and freedom.
One Part Rejecting the Oppression Economy
When you and I disavow stories of meritocracy, we will be on a new road. You know the stories; maybe you’ve repeated them to your friends and family: if you work hard, you’ll succeed; we can achieve the “American Dream” and build wealth through homeownership, education, and business ownership; only wealthy people know how to govern.
Pervasive stories like these do not stay at the kitchen table; they turn into what we think our governments should and should not provide. And they turn into policies like requiring recipients of income assistance to work, even if jobs are purposely scarce. Policies that limit those same beneficiaries from saving their money, the very thing that would allow them to exit public welfare. To reject the Oppression Economy, we must disavow these stories, and the public policy they’ve become, while tending to and working towards the building of a new kind of economy.
Building a Liberation Economy
The Liberation Economy is an economy that serves the basic needs of people of color, where we find safety and security, and where people of color are valued. An economy in which our public, corporate, and non-profit institutions and the practices they build realize full economic citizenship. It demands that we actively build, govern, and sustain systems rooted in repair, pre- and redistribution, and collective well-being. But to build such an economy, we must confront the fact that most people have never been invited to truly understand how the economy works. We are forced to work within the logics of extraction, scarcity, and competition, or else our imaginations have been narrowed or devalued. This is why we must immerse ourselves in the economy to come.
To do this, Liberation in a Generation is supporting organizing groups in a methodology we are building out called “futurecasting.” In gathering small groups of community members in church basements, libraries, community centers, and the like, we are attempting to do three things in partnership with organizers. First, the gatherings allow us to awaken and sharpen our collective imagination as a form of agency against oppressions that assert and reinforce frameworks of resource scarcity, deservedness, and extraction. In these immersive, story-based discussions, we are giving shape to future realities where, for example, basic income is guaranteed, everyone deserves and gets quality housing, anyone can go to college without taking on debt, and we have delivered reparations to Black people.
Inevitably, these imaginaries spark important disagreement among community members, opening the opportunity to discuss which values will undergird these speculative futures. Who is this economy really for? Why is this particular possibility important? The purpose of these circles widens to include: offering space for wrestling with values, unresolved questions, and rebuilding relationships. These experiences are hopefully opening possibilities for different relationships with each other and with our future, which is anchored in a set of contested values. Strong relationships will be critical in forging a new economy.
These gatherings draw out the insights of everyday folks, which then shape our practices and policies in traditional policymaking spaces. Policymaking in the United States is understood as something done to people, not with them. If we are serious about building a Liberation Economy, then we must fundamentally shift who gets to imagine, define, and shape its future. We do this by flipping the dynamic of policymaking by prioritizing and amplifying what we hear from everyday folks about their dreams and ideas. Futurecasting aims to practice putting everyday people of color in the roles of experts and protagonists in tending to the soil and shaping a new path, one that we have forged, not one that has been handed to us.
We cannot build what we have never practiced. Transformative ideas fail not only because of political opposition, but because they remain unfamiliar in the minds of the people who can make them real. As such, rehearsing the future is an essential component of building a Liberation Economy. Meaning that we must grapple with future ideas that are both transformative in that they confront limiting stories of deservedness. Rehearsing the future, therefore, is not optional; it is a necessary practice to step outside the dominant logics of our current economy.
We don’t have to wait
Across this nation, resisters, caregivers, storytellers, advocates, organizers, and even an occasional politician are tending the soil of a new path. Toward a future where families have access to free early childcare, health care is affordable, and everyone has a home. Most of all, these future visions are created by our descendants and include people of color.
You and I can decide that the story of how WE are together — in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our counties, in our states — will be driven by belief in abundance, repair, security, and freedom to determine our futures. How WE are together right now is largely determined by economic policies that allow corporations to use an inordinate amount of our time and talents for the gain of a few; that deteriorate our trust in one another and our abilities to govern; and that have us believe there can’t possibly be enough resources for us all.
As we gather this summer, what conversations can you and I have about the paths we are trying to forge? What ancestral inspiration will we draw? I take heart that even though they were not official signatories on the declaration of “freedom” of this nation, countless ancestors, every day, co-signed a story of freedom for my descendants and me. Let us take the anniversary of this moment, 250 years later, to continue forging a path toward a Liberation Economy.
