At the end of our last session, we touched briefly on the themes of freedom and oppression. We now want to continue that conversation by exploring how we can most effectively struggle for freedom from racism.

Racist attitudes, ideas, policies, and structures appear to flourish in an environment where the freedom to engage in self-interested competition against others is encouraged. If this is true, then overcoming racism may require us to rethink the relationship between freedom and self-interest. Is society merely an arena of self-interested competition for scarce resources? Does freedom simply entail the competitive pursuit of one’s wants and needs or the wants and needs of one’s group, within such an arena? Or, can society be conceived as an interdependent social body in which every individual and group derives their well-being from the well-being of the whole? If so, should we not be concerned with the freedom of every individual and group to realize their latent potential to contribute to the well-being of the entire social body? If we accept the latter, then we can recognize that no individual or group is truly free unless all individuals and groups are also free.

As people of faith, we can also recognize that true freedom entails following the teachings of God, which liberate us from impulses and appetites of our lower nature and thus enable us to develop our latent spiritual potential. These teachings include principles that govern how to interact with others, including cooperation and harmony between diverse ideas and people, as well as a willingness to sacrifice that which is lower for a higher cause. This is the source of true freedom — the source of human nobility, dignity, and honor.

The struggle for liberation, then, requires us to reflect on two essential questions: Who are we now? And, who do we aspire to become? Reflecting on the first question requires us to understand why myriad expressions of injustice and oppression exist — where they came from, how they evolved, how they function today, and how this limits the freedom of individuals and communities to develop their latent potentialities. Reflecting on the second question requires us to consider the nature of those potentialities and the processes by which they can become manifest.

Developing an adequate understanding of who we are and what we aspire to become may also require development of more adequate language through which we can explore and express these things. For instance, though we need language that deepens our understanding of prevalent relations of power and domination, we also need language that enables us to explore and create the healthy and mature social relations we aspire to bring into being.