Mia Birdsong on Freedom, Equity, and Interdependence

As told to Alice Grandoit-Šutka & Isabel Flower

llustrations by Julia Lucey

What does freedom “look” like? What images and symbols are associated with this idea?

Let’s start with how it looks according to America’s dominant culture. The American flag, for example, is an iconic symbol of freedom. It might be hanging on a house or truck or building, or planted on the moon. Then there’s the white man in a cowboy hat, sitting on a horse in the distance, looking out over an open plain. He’s conquering both the land and the animal. He’s by himself. There’s nothing around him that he is in collaboration with. His freedom is about control and domination. Going back to the flag and the idea of freedom as domination, I think of the Marine Corps War Memorial, which is a statue based on a photo from World War Two. It’s a group of soldiers raising the American flag. In the photo, they are planting that flag on the island of Iwo Jima in Japan. The statue is a visual representation of American dominance, of conquering, of colonization wrapped up in the idea of freedom. For others, who may not see the flag as a symbol of freedom, and in fact see it as a symbol of oppression, sometimes the American ideas of what freedom is still hold, but might look more like the image of two Black hands, metal cuffs on each wrist, raised up in the air, pulling apart the chain that joins the cuffs.

All of those images represent the American idea that freedom is rooted in the individual and celebrate independence. Our mythology around the “self-made man” and our over-emphasis on personal responsibility and absolute self-agency all show up in this idea of freedom. It’s about achieving a status that allows you to do what you want, however you want, without having to answer to anyone. That may sound appealing on its face, but it rests on a harmful denial of what it really means to be human.

My understanding of freedom continues to evolve, but it fundamentally rests on our interdependence and intrinsic need for connection and community. It asks us to wrestle with holding our own agency and sense of autonomy, and also to understand, even celebrate, that we need other people and that we impact other people. A few pieces of writing helped me connect to an idea of freedom that was different from the American ideal I learned growing up. There’s a text called “Friendship is a root of freedom,” which was adapted from the book Joyful Militancy (2017) by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery. There’s also a bit from Liberty and Freedom (1989) by David Hackett Fischer.

What I learned from these writings challenged my understanding of freedom in ways that really aligned with what I felt. Freedom and friendship have the same etymological root, which means “beloved.” Back in the day, freedom was understood as being with and in connection to your kin. When someone was enslaved, part of why they were not free was because they were being kept from their people. When I think about slavery in America, I see that part of the foundational logic of that system was separation: kidnapping us from the African continent, our partners, parents, children, and siblings being sold away from us. The disregard for human attachment and relationship, the practice of terrorizing people with the threat of separation, was part of what made enslaved people not free.

“My understanding of freedom continues to evolve, but it fundamentally rests on our interdependence and intrinsic need for connection and community.”

From slavery to the Great Migration to the prison industrial complex, America has made concerted efforts to separate Black people from each other. And through all of it, we have insisted on finding each other, and on creating and recreating kinship with whomever is around us. That’s not to say that separation hasn’t produced horrific damage. But it is to say that once I understood the idea that we’re free when we’re with our people, it deepened my understanding of what Black people have been fighting for and what it is I’m really trying to build in my life and through my work.

Let's go back to your question of: What does freedom look like? With the foundation I currently have, I think about things like connection and love. I think about things like rest and leisure, which allow us to value ourselves outside of our labor and allow us time to build and tend to our relationships. I think of things like dinner tables and kitchens—because gatherings with food and meals and making food with each other are some of my absolute favorite things. I picture circles of people gathered around fires, around each other, hugging, the laying on of hands, snuggling in bed or on a couch. I also think about anything that suggests leisure and rest—hammocks, beds, couches, porch swings, swimming pools, beaches, lakes, ponds, gardens, and forests.

I’ve also come to think of freedom as a cyclical process. It is not a static thing or a destination that you reach some day. Part of what hinders the process is having certain limitations placed on you or your community. And just so we don’t get it twisted, I mean limitations that are about confinement or keeping you “in your place,” not limitations on individuals, or requirements of us that are for the wellbeing of the community—you know, like wearing a piece of fabric on your face to keep other people from dying. When individuals reject asks of themselves that keep their communities safe, that’s an example of holding a toxically individualistic understanding of freedom.

Anyway, so often we internalize the limitations we’re told exist and it confines our imagination and our understanding of what’s possible. So when I think about images of freedom that support our freedom process, I picture things that suggest expansiveness—a sky full of stars, or the view of clouds from an airplane. I think about wide open horizons, on land or on the ocean. These are images that show us the edges of our perception and can make us curious about what’s beyond that edge. Freedom similarly pushes the edges of our conventions, like the life path that says we go to school, get a job, work our way up a career ladder, get married, buy a house, have kids, and retire. Or things like the gender binary, the nuclear family, monogamy, or our expectations for what a body can or should look like or do. Our freedom process helps us figure out who we really are, what we really want to make of this life, and who we want to make it with.

What does equity “look”like? How might this idea be visualized?

If we are trying to get to liberation, we can’t stop at equity. There’s an illustration that is often used to represent equity. It shows three people of different heights standing in front of a fence and trying to see the baseball game on the other side. The image has three iterations. In the first, only the tallest person can see over the fence, and the two shorter people cannot. That’s inequality. In the second, all three receive the same-sized box to stand on, so now the tallest and middle person can see, but the shortest person still can’t. That’s equality because everyone has an equal-sized box. The third version shows the tallest person with no box, the middle person with a short box, and the shortest person with the tallest box. Now everyone is at the same level and can see. That’s equity.

If we’re trying to create systems or interventions that allow people to have equal access, we must realize that not everybody actually needs the same thing. We’re not physically the same, we don’t have the same experiences, we don’t have the same histories. So if the baseball game is, for example, a school system, you’d think about how kids are all different and need different supports to get the same learning about American history or science or algebra or whatever. However, if we’re talking about liberation, it may not even be about making sure everyone has equitable access to existing systems. If we’re not interrogating the thing we’re trying to give people access to, we’re still doing it wrong. Instead of making sure everyone has equitable access to school, we should be asking what education is for.

So many spaces have hierarchies dominated by white men. Take, for example, the design space. We may think,“How do we make sure that women and people of color have access to that space?” But is that really the question we need to answer? What about fundamentally changing the culture of the space so that we don’t have to make a concerted effort to let in people who are not white men? Or making an entirely new space or multiple spaces that aren’t subject to rules and norms seeped in white supremacy and patriarchy. Many white-dominated spaces will recognize their “diversity” problem, hire a few people of color, but do literally nothing to change the culture of the organization or institution so that people of color can be there, contribute fully, show up fully, and feel like they belong. Instead, they expect us to assimilate. That is not getting free.

We must always interrogate what we’re making and what we’re asking for. Do we want “a seat at the table” or do we want to build other tables? Do we even need tables at all? What if we had a treehouse instead, or perhaps a picnic with a cluster of blankets? Do we need to keep the structure or the system, or do we want to build something else?

Here’s another example. Black people are about 13% of the US population. And we know that Black people are disproportionately represented among poor people and under-represented among billionaires. Equity would mean that all identities were proportionally distributed among poor, middle class, and wealthy people. Do we want equitable distribution of race and ethnicity among poor people? Of course not. We want to not have poverty. Who wants equity within an unjust system?

Justice would be a world in which there are no billionaires, because being a billionaire is immoral. Justice would be a world in which there are no poor people, because allowing poverty to exist is also immoral.

“If we’re talking about liberation, it may not even be about making sure everyone has equitable access to existing systems. If we’re not interrogating the thing we’re trying to give people access to, we’re still doing it wrong. Instead of making sure everyone has equitable access to school, we should be asking what education is for.”

Why do common understandings of freedom tend to foreground an isolated individual condition over a broader social context?

Our common understanding of freedom, conceptually, tends to be grounded in an isolated, hyper-individual condition. The way America practices capitalism and the way our cultural guidelines are set up—encapsulated in the American dream—is about individual achievement. It is about winning. Capitalism depends on us believing in scarcity. It depends on us fighting with each other to hoard resources. This is why billionaires and multi-millionaires exist—they are hoarding wealth. They have an obscene excess of wealth at the same time that there are thousands of people who do not have basic human rights like shelter and food and access to healthcare. In a free society, no one would not have their basic human rights met and no one would even want to exploit the labor of others so they could accumulate more resources than they could possibly use.

When we have conversations about, for example, universal healthcare, it’s so uncomfortable for some folks to get behind the idea that everyone should have access to it—regardless of what effort they make or what kind of person they are—because inherent deservingness is antithetical to how we, as Americans, think about how you get literally anything, including basic human rights. The idea that people could or should have access to food, shelter, education, or healthcare without trying troubles the American psyche. But I believe fiercely that our personal and collective liberation is inextricably connected to expanding beyond our edges, and acknowledging . . . no, embracing and celebrating, our interdependence.

Our interdependence includes our non-human relations, like other animals, insects, plants, and trees. I care for two dogs, chickens, and a beehive—I’m in relationship with those lives. I’m part of a coven that specifically honors redwoods and eucalyptus as our elders. We spend time with them and are working to remember how we listen to and learn from these elders. American and Western thinking has taught us that we are separate from nature. We think we can “go back to the land” as if we are ever not part of it, as if it is not the place from which all life exists and emerges. I think that understanding and reconnecting to the reality that we are in relationship with the land and landscape—with the rocks and the mountains and the ocean and the rivers and all the life in those spaces—is also how we move closer to liberation. We will not get free unless we challenge the ways in which some people hold power and privilege and others don’t. We won’t get free until we stop accepting the degradation of the earth. We won’t get free until we build systems, relationships, practices, and rituals that value and care for all of us.

What is your personal relationship between individual freedom and mutual interdependence?

The people who have taught me the most about how to practice and build both my personal and connected sense of freedom are Black women. In a sense, and contrary to external logic, the freest people I personally know are all Black women. I think it’s because so many of the Black women I know are actually doing the work—both the individual work and collective work—of freeing ourselves from the limitations of our experiences, our reactions, our upbringings, and our internalized oppression.

There’s an aspect of our freedom that does not, thank goodness, depend on eliminating white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It depends on us excavating our own internal narratives and beliefs that have us living like we are not free. If white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism ended tomorrow, we would still have work to do because we’ve grown up under those systems and they’ve burrowed their way inside of us. So part of my freedom journey has been unearthing the things racism, sexism, and capitalism taught me—about who I am and what I’m capable of, what’s for me and what I can expect—and banishing them from my spirit and from my psyche. Of course, I still go out in the world and encounter fuckery and nonsense. I’m sure my life would be very different if I didn’t have to deal with white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, and for many people like me these circumstances are debilitating and deadly. But, in the meantime, I’m not waiting for white people or men or wealth hoarders to get their shit together. I need to figure out my freedom for myself, but I definitely don’t do that by myself. There is nothing more satisfying, nourishing, and joyful than the time I spend with other Black women when we are simply being ourselves, together. It’s everything.●

Mia Birdsong is a pathfinder, writer, and facilitator. Mia is the author of How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, the Founder and Steward of Next River: An Institute For Practicing the Future, and a Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project. She lives in Oakland, CA on the land of the Chochenyo Ohlone people where she tends to bees, chickens, plants, and people.

Mia also contributed a workbook in the form of a series of interactive prompts to help envision what freedom looks like for each of us. Find the opening spread here and the complete workbook in print. 

To complement Mia Birdsong’s Issue Three contribution on freedom, equity, and interdependence and its accompanying interactive workbook, she has created a unique guided meditation and journaling exercise that explores our senses of freedom and belonging. We hope that you will take 45-60 minutes and find a comfortable place to sit, reflect, and engage with this offering.