Freedom should be free. Over the past few days I’ve found myself coming back to this statement, a phrase that drives the work of The Bail Project. Freedom should be free. Freedom to not be held in jail cell without bail because of a system that has been intentionally designed to keep you there. Freedom to exist in a world where you can simply purchase something from a store without being harassed. Freedom to be able to take a jog and with full confidence assume you’ll return home as you’ve done a thousand times before. Freedom to be able to exist within what should be your safest place on earth, your home, but now is the place where numerous of Black women have taken their last breath. Freedom should be free.
As a Black person, I think a lot about what freedom means to me and it means everything. Freedom should be free, but…it isn’t. We’ve lost thousands of Black people, may of whose names we will never know, to those who are in power. Freedom should allow each person to receive the justice that they deserve and only after ,what seems like Black death on camera , have we started acknowledge that this justice doesn’t come for those of us who have dark skin.
Freedom should be free and I, while mourning the lives of all Black people who have died due to state violence or even COVID-19, remain hopeful that we will start to believe this phrase in my lifetime. To Mr. George Floyd, Ms. Breonna Taylor, Mr. Ahmaud Arbery, and to those of you whose names I do not know, I am sorry that we have failed you and taken that freedom away from you. You deserved to be able to take part in the most scared of moments of life and you were robbed of that. Keeping those Black lives at the front of my mind, we must uplift and acknowledge that we must do better and we must call on each other to do so.
Freedom being free starts with us.
-Ciyadh
How to Make Change:
Learn more about The Bail Project here: The Bail Project | Freedom should be free.
You can buy the sweatshirt I’m wearing in this photo here: The Bail Project | Bonfire
Please join me in supporting the Minnesota Freedom Fund and organizations in their community doing important work here: Minnesota Freedom Fund
For more resources: Listening to Black Voices Amid Murder, Violence, Protest, and Pandemic
I wore this to the Margins Guitar Collective launch event. The Margins Guitar Collective is an organization that I founded in 2018 to create and support a diverse and guitar community.