Freedom is not liberation

“Social justice doula” Lutzi Segu speaks on the work Black people still owe ourselves  

“Anything we have won in this country is because we worked together,” says social justice doula Lutzi Segu.

Lutzi Segu, describes herself as a ‘social justice doula:’ She accompanies people and organizations through difficult processes of change without pretending that she can do the changing for them. Her work with leaders, organizations and movements involves holding space, asking uncomfortable questions, curating the conditions in which transformation can happen, and helping people move, as she puts it, “from theory to practice.”  She is also a first-generation Haitian American organizer, social worker, doctoral researcher and consultant whose work crosses LGBTQ movements, reproductive justice, sexual and gender-based violence, organizational anti-racism and Black feminism. 

Black people can earn degrees, acquire wealth, enter elite institutions and achieve extraordinary visibility without fundamentally changing the conditions confronting other Black people, and we can also carry the logic of oppressive systems into those newly acquired spaces.

Attending the Black Caucus dinner at the Equality Federation Leadership Conference in July, I had dinner with her.  Our conversation moved beyond the familiar terrain of what America has done to Black people and toward the considerably more uncomfortable question of what oppression has taught Black people to do to ourselves and one another.  Since that dinner, questions lingered within me. 

What if Black people achieve freedom and discover that we still need to learn how to be liberated? In circles of movements and Black resistance, we have become accustomed to using words like "freedom" and "liberation" interchangeably. as though freedom inevitably produces liberation, and liberation is simply the more radical-sounding name for freedom. I ask Segu about this. 

“Freedom is about one’s relationship to the state,” she told me, pointing toward the laws, policies and conditions determining whether people can live with dignity, but she argues that American political culture has developed an incomplete understanding even of that freedom. “We’re very rabidly obsessed with the freedom to,” Segu said, “but we don’t think about the ‘freedom from.’” 

We celebrate freedom of speech, freedom to vote and freedom to participate, while speaking less urgently about freedom from hunger, poverty, violence and the economic precarity that makes theoretical rights difficult to exercise in practice. Liberation, meanwhile, is “more of an interpersonal, inside individual job,” concerned with what oppression has deposited inside us after the legislation has been passed and the election has been won. “Do we feel liberated enough to redefine ourselves for ourselves, whatever that self is?” she asked. “Do we feel liberated enough to see ourselves as loving, lovable beings, and to be loving, lovable beings to one another?” 

I have come to understand freedom similarly, as the conquest of external factors of oppression, while liberation requires the conquest of internal factors of regression: colonized thinking, inherited hierarchy and the failures of collectivity that cannot always be blamed on a statute even when oppressive systems helped create them. Segu does not believe Black people can meaningfully choose between the two, because dismantling oppression externally means little if its logic continues governing our intimate lives. 

“What is the work that we need to do to contend with the systems of oppression that actually find their way inside of ourselves,” she asked, “that actually breaks down our ability to love myself, to love you, and to be in community with other people?” This is where liberation becomes more uncomfortable than freedom, because freedom allows us to identify an external oppressor, while liberation eventually demands a mirror, and asks whether white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, colorism, classism and anti-Blackness have taught us ways of being that we now reproduce without anyone forcing us to do so. That mirror became personal for Segu when she examined her relationship with Blackness as the daughter of Haitian immigrants. 

“My love for myself and my love for Black people didn’t get very serious until I got serious about confronting the anti-Black Americanness that I was raised with as a first-generation Haitian American,” she said. That reckoning produced a question she believes Black people should ask ourselves: “Who are the Black people who we feel automatic affinity with? And who are the Black people that we’re like, ‘Mm, yeah, that Black love is more theoretical. I don’t quite feel it in my heart and in my body’?” Blackness contains enormous differences of nationality, class, sexuality, gender, disability, immigration history and experience, and Segu, who calls Audre Lorde her “ancestral auntie,” argues that recognizing those distinctions does not require turning them into new hierarchies. “Anything we have won in this country is because we worked together,” she told me. “Individualism is not gonna save anybody, but it definitely is not gonna save Black people.”That individualism, Segu believes, has also made it possible to confuse individual Black achievement with collective liberation. America trains us to ask whether I am secure, whether my household is comfortable and whether I have accumulated enough resources to protect myself, even as the community around me remains vulnerable. “As long as I’m good, as long as I’m okay, as long as the people under my domicile are good and okay, we will be good and okay,” Segu said, describing the logic before dismissing it plainly: 

“That’s not true.” Black people can earn degrees, acquire wealth, enter elite institutions and achieve extraordinary visibility without fundamentally changing the conditions confronting other Black people, and we can also carry the logic of oppressive systems into those newly acquired spaces. For Segu, the invitation is learning when “that capital I” must become “a lowercase I,” not by erasing individuality, but by remembering that liberation is fundamentally relational and that individual access cannot become our substitute for collective transformation. 

The most provocative part of our conversation came when I asked where Black people are failing to hold ourselves accountable, because while there is no shortage of evidence documenting what white supremacy has done to us, liberation cannot require everyone except us to engage in self-examination. Segu answered with a deceptively simple question: 

“Do we love Black people? Do we love Blackness?” She distinguishes loving Black people from enjoying the cultural currency Blackness can provide, particularly in an era when identity itself can be branded, monetized and performed. 

“For a lot of Black people, yes, we are very, perhaps too skilled in talking about white supremacy and how it shows up in us,” Segu said. “But do we give enough airtime to, out of my pro-Blackness, what do I do?” Black feminism, which Segu describes as her “civic spiritual practice,” forced that question deeper for her. “Theory saved my life,” she said, but theory also compelled her to ask, “What is my self-abolition work that I need to do?” 

Self-abolition, in Segu’s formulation, is where politics becomes practice, because knowing the vocabulary of oppression is not the same as refusing to reproduce it. “Because I love Black people and I love Blackness, what is the work that I need to do to ensure that I am a safe place romantically, platonically, sexually and professionally to Black people?” she asked. That means confronting colorism when it benefits us, classism after we acquire money or credentials, anti-fatness, misogyny, transphobia and the ways Black women sometimes extend endless opportunities for repair to romantic partners while treating friendships with other Black women as disposable. Segu imagines Black community instead as a “safe harbor,” one where “all Black life is dignified and is worthy,” but where love also carries obligations to one another. 

“You can’t talk to my sister in no kind of way,” she said. “You can’t love her in a raggedy way, and then no one is gonna say and do anything.”