Don’t we have a bunch of slick niggas handpicked by white power, telling us what we must be doing in pursuit of freedom? Ain’t there a bunch of house negroes like Stephen with Monsieur Candie, who like “to make their phylacteries broad and enlarge the borders of their garments,” to fit all the letters of their numerous Black Bourgeois organizational memberships. “They love the best places at feasts, the best seats in the (community gatherings), greetings in the marketplaces, and to be called by men, ‘Reverend, Reverend.’ 

They told us what their masters told them: freedom came with the end of the Civil War. One hundred and fifty six years later, in 2021, they begged their masters to quench the burning fire and save the big house by reminding us of the freedom they gave us – declaring Juneteenth a National Holiday.

Freedom came to us niggas, they say. And so we seek freedom as it has been defined for us by those who denied us that freedom in the first place. We seek freedom according to their ever-shifting definitions of what freedom might be.

So what’s free?

“Free is when nobody else can tell us what to be.” So how, then, can we ever be free if our personal sovereignty has never been restored? And how can we imagine that our personal sovereignty has been restored, while living in an environment where “the negro has no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” unless we can afford to not care that Black lives do not matter in this land?

That legal precedent establishes the terms for how the State and the White people of this land can interact with us niggers. That legal precedent makes it clear that Black lives only matter if and when white power says so, and only to the degree on which white power settles.

So, what’s free?

Can you be free, niggas, if you simply function within the spheres allowed you by white power? Are you free if you overcome the obstacles put there to keep you down, so that you can excel in the world constructed and ruled by white power?

Black people, the victims of the slavery and colonialism who made Western hegemony possible, were never freed from bondage. And that is not a hyperbolic statement. For, every nigger/kaffir freed from slavery and/or colonialism had no choice but to remain subject to the economic and political structures established by those who denied their freedom. Every nigger/kaffir had no choice but to embrace political and economic systems that were designed with the intention of limiting Black access to the resources one needs in order to be free.

So, what’s free?

This is a critical question as we get deeper into this “Fourth Turning,” where white power expects an uprising of the white hordes and an upheaval of this society in which we find ourselves. Unless we find freedom that is truly free, we will have no choice but remain subject to a system in which we have no power, where those in power will establish the limits of our freedom.

How do we attain to freedom? How do we define freedom, in a way that is free from white power. How do we pursue a freedom that does not merely amount to “a greater degree of freedom, on the plantation?”

That’s been my search and pursuit. And that’s what I’m going to talk through in this long form article.

You ain’t free…

If you think you are free, while you still depend upon having the “right” Political Party in power, don’t read beyond this point. Yet if you know you ain’t free – and know that you need to find freedom in a dramatically different way, then let’s continue this journey together.