Been thinking about how, for me, imagining freedom requires self-implication and a deep refusal of so many of the institutions that have shaped me today. There’s no way to talk about dispossession without contending with the exploitation many of us have benefited from.

Those types of calculations are the substance of neoliberalism - naming poverty, policing and harm without naming the benefactors of poverty, policing and harm.

And the point isn’t to stop at self-implication, but it is to divest from parallel realities of refusing oppression and willfully engaging in it simultaneously....which happens too often. We need to make connections - to trace the networks that produce dispossession.

If there is a site to consider how many of us are implicated in harm even as we suffer other kinds of oppression it is the middle/upper class African home. Who generates these modes of domesticity? In what ways do your home’s mark social mobility you’ve gained/others have lost?

We need to reconsider what it means to live a dignified life. We need to move beyond ideas of “coming of age” of success, of LIVING, that are premised on the harm and dispossession of others. This means divesting from accumulation, class segregation, underpaying/unpaid labor

It means rerooting ourselves in community, refusing the alienation of the nuclear, classed family. It means refusing a zero-sum life. Remember as you dehumanize others you are also dehumanizing yourself!

(End of thread)