Freedom: A Conversation with Dr. Raina León and Dr. Norma D. Thomas

Sophia Gutiérrez Vega: 

I wanted to begin with some introductions. Could you please tell us about your work as storytellers, poets, educators, activists, archivists, historians, podcasters, and freedom fighters?

Dr. Raina J. León:

[I am] in support of creative writers as a practitioner, but also an educator, through the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, [where] my mom and I [also led a] workshop on Freedom Narratives. My background as an academic is in Education with various degrees in that field, [including] Creative Writing, especially Poetry, but beyond that. In addition, I have identified as a storyteller since I was like eight. My mom would tell the story about when she gave me my first poetry book: I would write my first stories and I would show them to my mom and she’d be like, “Raina, these are wonderful, but why are they all so sad?” But from going into poetry to capturing stories as a Journalism major in college, [I am] also thinking about sharing stories and the importance of them in an educational context; as an educator and then as a teacher-educator. 

My mom and I have been in collaboration with a podcast called Generational Archives, in which we talk about one person in our family and the methods that we’ve taken to find out more about their stories. We have pieces, but in our process of research and storytelling, we discover a lot more. Hopefully sharing some of these methods with people who are in the waves of loss, [means] they can take them on and apply them to their own family history and their own community history.

I come from a legacy of folks who have been community oriented activists. One of the ways that I contribute to that history is in the creation of spaces that nurture communities that I’m a part of, whether as a faculty member or as the founding editor for The Acentos Review, which has published over a thousand Latinx voices in almost twenty years now. We started [The Acentos Review] at a time when even just one word of Spanish would get you kicked out of the submission queue. Definitely to this day, there’s not enough representation of Latinx voices, especially in the intersections of all our multiplicities and all our different identities in the field. And yet I think that Acentos has been part of the movement creating more spaces for and inspiring others to consider Latinx voices as important to the fabric of an American story, but [also] far beyond that, [more] like a global story.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Raina talks about coming from a line of activists. My mother was definitely an activist, but in terms of the writing side, I always attribute starting writing poetry to a Creative Writing teacher in high school who would give us tasks to do and mine always came out a poem. 

People that went to school with me thought I would be a journalist, but because of the community involvement of my family, my major was Social Work. All my degrees are in Social Work. I have a Bachelor's, a Master's, and a Doctorate in Social Work. So that part of me has always been an activist for folks who don’t have a voice because we are supposed to be their voice. 

I’ve always been that person in my career that was never afraid to buck the system.I always told people, the worst that could happen to me is I get fired. They couldn’t take my life, they couldn’t take my first born, they could just fire me. But I’ve been blessed that I’ve never been fired for speaking my mind. 

In terms of stories, I was always the one that soaked in the stories of family because my siblings always tell me they don’t remember the half of what I espoused to them. I’m like, “You were there, just like me.” But they don’t remember the stories, because they didn’t take those stories in. So I’ve always been the keeper of stories. I’ve always listened to stories. 

My career choice is Gerontology. I’ve always listened to older people and now I’m one of them. I wanted the world to be better for me when I got to be older. Part of the activism was not all altruistic. I wanted things to be better for me, as well as for the people I was called to serve. Then, at some point, I decided that it was important to share those stories, capsulize those stories, and write those stories down. It’s led to the African American History and Cultural Center, which is where we are now displaying a lot of history, telling stories, and talking to people about their stories. I’m [also] in the process of writing a book on the African American history of Fayette County, Pennsylvania. So, it’s all come full circle, honoring the memories of those folks who have come before. 

But again, my mother was definitely one of those activists who didn’t take anything from anybody, but was the nicest person in the world. But she was tough because she grew up in the segregated south, [where] you had to figure out a way to survive in that environment. She became part of that movement to deseg a lot of stuff that was not codified in the law, but we knew what we could and could not do.

When I moved from doing active Social Work practice to being a Social Work Educator, my role always seemed to be the student advocate: to advocate for and push students to be the best that they could be. So that they could be the best in service to the clients we were called to serve. It’s not good enough to have the skills and go through the motions. If [the students] see that their services are lacking for clients, then their job is to go find and get those services, be it writing policy and procedures, be it challenging their administrators, be it going to testify at the state, local or national level. I’ve done all of those. I always tell them, “Yeah, it could seem scary, but we elect these people, so they’re supposed to listen to us. So go and tell them what they need to be doing, and in the end, you may be able to actually affect change.”

Dr. Raina J. León:

I will also add, because this is also what my mom just spoke to, paraphrasing Toni Morrison’s advice to creative writing practitioners: writers [who] get these little jobs, what are you going to do with that power that you have? Open up doors or shut them? The thing, too, of being an activist is not just organizing the protest, which is incredibly important, but it’s also asking the questions. In the meetings [where] your people aren’t there, but you are there, who’s being disempowered and whose voices have been pushed aside? How [do you] counter that through questioning, through action, as well as the small things, which are not small? My mom often will talk to me about having been a faculty member at a university where she was tenure-track and how she would sit in faculty meetings at the front of the room in African garb because she was one of one or one of two African Americans in the space. That’s a visual representation of diasporic identity in front of the whole room, calling attention to the lack of representation within the space.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

And the first time I did that, the white men who came to sit in the front, didn’t know what to do because I was dead center and they were used to being there. They kind of stood there not knowing what to do. I would wear the brightest African garb I had and sit there. And I thought it was just me. Then women started coming up to me, because it was also a very male space, and said, “Oh my God, we are so happy when we come to these meetings now.” Because I was the faculty secretary in the faculty senate. I got elected to that position. So they would be like, “You don’t know how great that [visual] is.” And I would be like, “Oh, I thought this was just me. This was for me.” But they were like, “No, this is for all of us. Because you just discombobulate these people. Every time you sit up front, they don’t know what to do.”

Sophia Gutiérrez Vega: 

In many cases, freedom is not free. Why do you think that is? Why do you think it requires so much work?

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Freedom is not free. Sometimes we take that for granted. But we are being hit in the face with why we cannot take that for granted. It’s starting to be more and more scary. One of the ways I had to separate from all the noise was to not look at news and not look at all this stuff, but that’s not real, because you need to know what’s going on in the world. 

I know this last week I found myself very overwhelmed by it and very scared by it. My husband and his brothers carry their passports now. I’ve never been one to curb what I say. I mean, I pick my battles. I am not disagreeable with what I say, but I can disagree. I am not argumentative, to a point. But it does give you pause for what you can say, where you can say it. For example, my African American History and Cultural Center does not yet have a sign on the front door, and it is because I don’t know if I identify this building, what the reaction will be. And that’s normally not me. But in this environment, it’s me. I have people who say, “Well, nothing will happen.” And then others will say, “Oh, you might be right.” So, we’re going to put a little sign and not a big sign. 

You find yourself thinking about all these things much more than you should, but you still want to be able to speak out and do what you need to do on behalf of not only yourself, but others who don’t have a voice. So, freedom is not free. We have to be mindful that when we do speak out and take those stances, there are some consequences that we may face.

Dr. Raina J. León:

No one is untouchable. When it comes to questions of freedom and agitation and activism, if it’s not the loss of one’s time, because it takes time to organize folks and it takes time to gather people together and it takes time away from other things, [then] folks are losing jobs. Folks [aren’t] putting signs on the building. Folks are losing lots. These days, you have to think about what you are willing to lose for what you will gain—the hope of a gain in collective freedom—and also recognizing what our lanes are. 

For example, I can’t go to every protest. I have three babies that need to be picked up from school. And I can’t watch all the news all the time when [my kids] don’t have the vocabulary or the contextual understanding to unpack it without feeling afraid. So for me, do I talk to my children about genocide? Yes, I do. But I do it in a way that I can pare it down to the simplest terms that children can understand, and understand that they, too, have the ability to protest. And life is also a protest. Collaborating with one another and talking about what’s happening within our world, that, too, is resistance. Part of my role in this time is yes, to sign, to donate, to go to the things that I can, to raise money, to fundraise, to publish in these different spaces, and to raise compassionate human beings. And that, too, takes time and community connection and thoughtfulness and processing my own feelings and the larger landscape of the world and saying, “How do I hold that and hold these babies?” 

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

And your bottom line question is, why do you think freedom is not free? Well, the reality is it’s not, and if we don’t fight to maintain a free and just society, then we won’t have it. We’re seeing in our time how authoritarianism becomes real. Because there’s a blueprint that was written in other times and now it’s our country, in our time, and that blueprint is playing itself out with the curtailing of free speech and rounding up people. All of that is what’s happened in other countries when authoritarian dictators become the leaders. We always wonder how it happens. Now we’re seeing exactly how it happens in our own country. We have to be able to push back on it, because if we don’t fight for that freedom, we will be under a dictatorship. We think it can’t happen, but it’s starting.

Dr. Raina J. León:

Well, and the other piece is, how do we define freedom? If freedom is the space to create and not have to engage in monetary exchange, and maybe it’s all sorts of different things [like], “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the robots did all the things for us and we could do whatever we want? Oh, we’ll develop AI to help the robots to do whatever we want. And now we’re in the matrix, or now the data centers are taking all the water so nobody can drink any water anymore. Now we have arid lands. Now we have forced migration because all the environmental resources have been used to power AI to answer a question of “What should I do today, AI?” right? 

So, what is the cost of freedom? And who defines that? Who has access to it? I don’t think we have a collective definition for that. It’s still in the space of “This is what my freedom should be.” The billionaire who buys one of the islands in Hawaii and got their bunkers, has a very different definition of what freedom is. I doubt that that data center is near their bunker. Their freedom is contingent on the suffering of others. 

My definition of freedom is around reciprocal nourishing and how we actually see one another to recognize that one person’s joy and thriving should not be at the cost of someone else’s suffering. This is Omelas right here, right? What can we learn too from the people who are not just in the space of speculative imagining, but profits? Both of them, too.

Sophia Gutiérrez Vega: 

As we are constantly witnessing and experiencing freedoms taken away from us and our loved ones, how do you balance a will to continue in this line of work with the mental care that your mind and body call for? And what advice do you have for others who might be battling with this?

Dr. Raina J. León:

I watch a lot of things on social media, and one recently was an interview with Cardi B. She was recounting how she knows her history, and she was like, “My grandmother had this many children, and worked in this way, and survived and thrived so that I could be here. And my other grandmother did this, had this many children, and went back to the farm to work and thrive and create this opportunity for me to be here. So who am I to not do what I can to take care of my babies and myself with the resources that I have? And I have all these resources.” Folks, I have a lot of respect for the honesty of Cardi B. She is who she is, and it’s very clear. And I think that example is good when we know our history, the people from whom we come, the communities that we come from and what they’ve done to get us to this moment. [Knowing] the struggles of the past, but also the strengths of the past, and what we can learn from both. When we situate ourselves in that way, in a cultural and historical context, then it changes how we move in this time and how we see things unfolding . We don’t see ourselves as unique, nor do we see it as something insurmountable. 

That said, it’s real scary. For me, I know that whatever I do, I do not do alone. I’m influenced by so many who came before me but are also with me right now. If I called one of my friends who I know from Germany ten plus years ago, I know Irene would have my back. I know this because I’ve nurtured those relationships over time. The time for being an individual is not now, and I don’t think it is anytime. We need one another. The sooner we recognize that, is when the spewing of hate across different understandings of truth and who should have power and so on changes. When you think about yourself as in relationship and contingent upon the wellbeing of someone else. When you’re like, “My wellbeing is tied up in yours and yours in mine,” then that changes how we talk to one another. 

That aside, folks [who] don’t recognize the intimate relationship, the entangled sense of who we are and our thriving, those people do have to lean on their community. How many people can say that they know their neighbors? That they have other people besides perhaps their immediate kin network that would pick up their kids? How many people can say that, if they didn’t have food, that they would know who to go to? 

In the course that we taught with y’all, “Freedom Narratives,” on the first day, I shared a clip from a choir that was singing a piece by Ysaye Barnwell, a Sweet Honey in the Rock piece, called “Will You Harbor Me?” And this idea of the person who is on the margins for whatever reason, perhaps you know them well, perhaps you don’t. Would you harbor them? Because if not for them, you, too, might need to be harbored. So would you harbor them? Create a space for them? I think this time requires that the answer be yes, and to think about what that looks like.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Raina said once, I don’t know if it was during the pandemic or when it was, that if you wanted to survive you needed to find an old person to be on your team.

Dr. Raina J. León:

Yeah, your zombie apocalypse team needs to have an elder.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Many of us do know how to survive and will help younger people figure out how to survive. Leaning on each other is very, very important in these critical times. I have a garden in the back, and I’m always giving away produce to friends and family because we can’t use it all. We have to be able to lean on each other because as Raina said, you can’t be an individual in these times. My husband is always saying, “Why don’t rich black people reach back and give money to this, that and the other?” Well, some of them do and they don’t talk about it, but they’re also rich. And there is a language among the very, very wealthy that once you get up to that point, often your priorities and your ways of thinking change, and you are more concerned with maintaining that wealth than you might be with how you distribute that wealth among the community.

So, how do you balance that will to continue? Knowing that it’s not just about you and it’s about the collective around you. Being able to impart to younger people that history and those lessons that they need to learn to maintain their ability to survive in hard times. African Americans, we always say, we’ve been here before and so we will survive all this. But we only survive all of this if somebody provides us with those lessons that we learned before. So that’s why it’s a cooperative. It’s not just young people and old people and people in the middle. It’s this collective body that has to learn to work together and not be pitted against each other. That is what is happening more and more right now. African Americans, as a collective, have kind of taken a stand that we’re not out protesting this time. That we are looking more inward to try to figure out how to take care of ourselves.To move our own institutions and protests economically where we need to, not so much in the streets right now. So that’s also a collective stance. If you see a lot of the big protests now, you don’t see a lot of African Americans out there, and that is what we have deemed a call from the ancestors. We have been at the forefront of everybody’s causes and maybe it’s time to think about how we survive and not get caught up in everyone else’s causes. 

So what advice? I don’t know. I mean it is scary and it is overwhelming. You have to take a break from social media. You have to take a break from the news because all the news, I don’t care if it’s the mainstream media or the podcasters, they all have their own agendas. They all have their own agendas, all have their own bents, and you can’t trust none of it. So you have to kind of take a pause and find out what’s most important and not let all of this steal your joy. That’s my biggest [advice]. You cannot let all this steal your joy. You have to find joy in the little things. Find something that gives you joy.

Dr. Raina J. León:

I wanted to add around this idea of rest, too. Of prioritizing rest. “Rest Is Resistance,” that’s by Tricia Hersey. And also, have a therapist! Have somebody to talk to that is not your friend you’re going to trauma dump on. Have somebody independent who’s going to hear you and help you process your thoughts so you can be clear and move forward rather than constantly stewing and being immobilized by anxieties and fears. 

I think every human service practitioner and creative in particular, because we all feel very deeply and we take the concerns of others as our own, needs a therapist. Whether that person’s got the credentials, and I think that they should, or there’s somebody within the community network that’s not your homie but someone who’s taken it upon themselves to hold space for others. But, everybody should have a therapist.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Generally, people in human services will always say, you should have a therapist. I echo. You should have somebody outside of even the people who love you, who “yes” you to death. Sometimes, you need the people who will just give you a very frank critical ear. Or those folks that’ll read your stuff and tear it apart. They’ll listen to your story and say that thinking is totally crazed and be honest about it. Because you need those people. You need a sounding board. Everybody needs a sounding board.

Dr. Raina J. León:

Yeah, freedom is honest.

Sophia Gutiérrez Vega: 

How do you find freedom for yourself when working with freedom narratives, and what constraints or challenges do you come across? And do you feel free in your career?

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Well, I’m going to equate my answer to connecting to all the various stories. As I said, I’ve listened to stories forever and come from a tradition of storytelling, but in terms of constraints, sometimes it’s hard to verify what those stories are. From the academic perspective, if you can’t verify it, then it doesn’t exist. Well, for many stories, the stories are oral and it’s an oral tradition. So you have to be able to mesh the research part and the story part. 

I’m writing this chapter on segregation in my area and I’m finding that there’s not a lot of recorded stuff about how we lived these segregated lives. So I realized that a lot of that’s going to rely on the lived experience, but also the stories of people who were older than me, and what we could and could not do in the area that I grew up in. Except for some discussions of the Ku Klux Klan, which they said died out in the thirties but is so not true since I live next to klan members, you can’t document everything. Sometimes, some of the challenge is realizing who these narratives are for. And sometimes, people who you want to provide these narratives to, don’t want to hear them because they’re not verified by the academic literature. I’ve run across that with a genealogist in my own family who will say, “Well, that’s not true, because you can’t verify it.” And I said, “It’s as true as anything else because it’s the story that everybody’s told from time immemorial. You can’t tell me that it’s not true just because you can’t find it in a book somewhere.” Those are some of the constraints. 

The other is that sometimes stories have joy and sometimes they don’t. Being able to listen to those freedom narratives can be very difficult and can weigh on you, especially when you understand what your family went through. Yes, that all makes you who you are, but it’s also the weight of hearing all these stories. I discovered one day that one of my great uncles was electrocuted in the electric chair, and his case went up to the Supreme Court. And that’s the uncle I never heard anything about. On that side of the family, he wasn’t talked about. But then his descendants wanted to find the story and it pops up on ancestry.com. So, to say that’s a little traumatic is an understatement. Yet you find the stories of the people who find you. Because you put your story out there and then all of a sudden they’re able to locate you. 

In terms of career, well, someone told me I will never be at any job long enough to get a gold watch. And they were very true, because I will do what I can for as long as I can. When I realize that the best approach is to be the outsider fighting in versus, the insider fighting inside, then that’s when I’ve left positions, I’ve started my own agency, I’ve done all that.There’s a point at which I have decided that I’ve done all I can do, and it’s time to move on. That I don’t have to stay at a place for the rest of my life. That there’s a point at which I feel satisfied that I’ve done what I can do, and now it’s time to go someplace else and do what I can do again. So yeah, I never got a gold watch. But I’ve stayed at a job for ten years. The one I loved the most was the agency I created with a partner, and we ran that for thirteen years.

Dr. Raina J. León:

And you can still see the joy in her face.

So, we had a Generational Archives episode my mom just referenced on John Logan, who was the great uncle that she didn’t know. I think [because of] the ancestral recovery work, of calling enough names, looking deeply enough, that our people reach out to us. They don’t want to be forgotten. They want to be remembered. In John Logan’s case, if you look at the records before he ended up incarcerated and killed in the electric chair, he was a successful businessman. He owned a mechanic shop, if I remember correctly. For the time period, the Prohibition Era, to be a black man in DC living with his family, two kids, wife, right next door to his wife’s family, and owned a mechanic shop, he was a very independent business person. And then this massive change happens, right? He’s shuffling bootleg liquor and everything changes from there. But he’s complex. He should be remembered, right? So yes, it’s hard to learn that this is one of the facets of our family, of our connection with the Supreme Court case that decides, can you be electrocuted? Can your life be taken if nobody knows who killed the officer? Yes, it can. So nobody knew if it was him who pulled the trigger, but he died regardless. What would we think about that law now? Should the cost of a life be another life at all? I think our answer would be different. I hope so. I hope so. But do we know anything else about that story anyway?

How do I find freedom for myself? I really love researching. I really love hearing stories. I can hold stories at a distance while also recognizing how it feels in my body. That is its own skillset, too; not having my own body or experience wholly changed by or tainted by a story, but rather informed, guiding my thought and my poetry. So freedom also comes through creating something new and countering erasure, which I think is empowering. 

Do I feel free in my career? Oh, these babies take over a lot, and I wish I had more time to work on things. And yes, I’m also going to DC next week to do some research that I’ve been so longing to do, but it’s been months on the way. I’m trying to lean into Jeannine A. Cook, [who says] “Everything is unfolding in perfect order.” When something happens, it will be the perfect time for it. This idea of being a little bit slower, relishing in the slowness, and delighting in the wonderful surprises and moments. Do I want to have done some research on my Aunt Doris and be writing some more poems? Absolutely. Do I treasure my kids climbing all over me, all three of them and talking about Minecraft? Yes, yes, I do. Do I think that my Aunt Doris might have treasured me recounting about my three kids? Probably. So I can be a little slow. I know that what is for me is for me, and it won’t miss me.

A thousand years ago, I was in a position where it was like I lived on an island with poison water. I didn’t know that it was poison water. You drink poison water long enough, you don’t realize that it’s poison. And then I had calls to leave the island, to go wander the world. The water was pure and it was good. And I was like, “Ooh, this water is tasty. I like this water. Oh, can I have more of this water? Oh, but I got to go back to that island. My house is there.” So I went back to my island and I tasted that water, I was like, “Ooh, this is brackish. This is really poison water.” It’s amazing what you realize, what you’ll deal with, as far as poison, because you don't realize it in the moment. And my body was telling me all sorts of things that I was ignoring. I was sick a lot. I was in a lot of pain. 

Over time, that shifted and my body was like, “Happy days! Happy days!” And when you start to get stressed out again, this is a reminder, “Poison water, leave that alone!” So I offer that allegory as a cautionary tale for people to attend to their bodies and the wisdom of it. Freedom is not just the freedom to do the thing that you love, but the freedom to be joyous. To feel affirmed and extended and bright in your work and in your life, because your life is not just your work.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

And that’s why they always said, I’d never get the gold watch. You get to the point that you believe you’ve done the best you can with as much as you can, and you start hating going to work. They say Monday is the day most people die of heart attacks, going to work to a job that they hate. Your skills and talents are best used someplace else if you’re not doing yourself any good. If you don’t do yourself any good, you cannot take care of other people. You cannot do other people any good if you don’t do good for yourself. So you got to recognize when it’s time to move on and not let people make you feel guilty. Folks have always tried to make me feel terribly guilty about when I’ve decided to move on, and I’ve done it anyway.

Dr. Raina J. León:

Yep. Freedom is not about the money, it’s about the joy, connection and delight. 

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

When we created our own agency, there was definitely no money, but we survived for thirteen years. God takes care of fools and babies.

Dr. Raina J. León:

The last thing I’ll say is that both of us have been very blessed in that we have integrity within our different practices and our collective work. Along the way, folks are like, “Here’s this wonderful opportunity that you should apply for,” or “I would love for you to do a workshop because we know this is within your area of expertise.” People are attending to us in the way that we have attended to others. It is a freedom where I don’t have to live in this scarcity mindset where I have to take care of everything and I have to search for everything, and it’s taking away from my life. No, our lives have led us to the point where we are in deep relationship and community. People know us and look out for us and we look out for them.

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

And freedom is the opportunity not to do things. I used to be known for doing all these cultural diversity and DEI kinds of workshops. And there was a point I realized that in some instances I was checking a box for people. So I started to say no. If there was not something meaningful, that this was the first step to a meaningful outcome of change, then I’m not doing this anymore. I’ve turned down lots of money by just saying no. They’re not using me to do that anymore. 

I put in a proposal for this elaborate workshop that would’ve been great. And then they wanted me to change all this stuff to water it down. Are you kidding me? They’re telling me it’s the best proposal, it’s the best bid. “This is wonderful, but change all of it.” No, I’m not doing it. And they never did [the workshop], so clearly it was to check a box.

Sophia Gutiérrez Vega: 

As educators, how do you endorse freedom with your students? For example, the freedom to choose your own reading materials as you two did in your “Freedom Narratives” class. And how do you encourage people to fight for freedom? 

Dr. Norma D. Thomas:

Unfortunately, in Social Work curriculum that’s governed by the Council on Social Work Education, some of it is scripted. I’m teaching now with something that’s real scripted, but it doesn’t say that I can’t bring in additional material and I can’t add from my experience and my knowledge. There are occasions when, for example, I look at the syllabus, which is already prepared for me, and the material is old as Methuselah. It’s not relevant. So I will say to folks, “Okay, here’s the stuff you have to read. However, here’s all this other stuff that you might want to take a look at. Here’s some reference material because I’ll acknowledge this stuff is old.” All I can do is complain to the powers that be, but this is the syllabus the way it is. I can’t change that, but I can provide you with additional information. 

As a social worker, my charge is to ensure the outcome of the students that I teach will be advocates for the people that they’re called to serve, whether they’re clinical practitioners, whether they’re policymakers, whether they wind up in administration. That whatever they do, they have to keep in mind that their job is more than a job. We can all just do a job and check a box. But where they see injustice, whether it be their own agency or policies or the lack of services, their job is to fight to reverse all of that. 

They don’t have to think about it in terms of changing the whole world because then that becomes something overwhelming. I always say to them, you can change where you sit. So, if you see injustice where you sit, then you deal with it where you sit. If you get involved in bigger policy and the state/national stuff, that’s wonderful. But if that’s too much for you, and you see it in how your supervisor treats your coworkers or how the clients don’t have the service, because the service doesn’t exist, then you all have to figure out how to make that happen. And however you do it, you have to make that happen. You have to be willing to take stands. That’s not so easy to impart to students because people are fearful. They’re fearful about losing. And it’s easy for me to say, so what? But I say it to them because you can’t work in a place where you see injustice and not think that that’s going to impact you. It’s going to give you high blood pressure and diabetes, and you’re just not going to feel good about what you’re doing. If for no other reason than how it will impact you mentally and physically, you have to do something or you go where you can do something. 

But people are fearful. They’re very fearful, and these times make people very fearful. They don’t want to speak out. So it’s my role to continuously use myself as an example. I always say to them, “People have threatened to fire me, and I’ve dared them to go ahead and try.” I mean, I’ve been asked to sign my name to stuff that I didn’t believe in, to falsify records. I’ve been asked to do so many things, and I always say, “You can do what you want, but I’m not. And if you do it, it’s not going to be hidden. I will make sure folks know you did it, but I’m not doing it and you can’t make me. There’s just nothing you can do to me to make me.” And so I’ve just not ever gotten fired. 

But you could, because integrity doesn’t make you immune from backlash. It just doesn’t. I warn my students that this could happen, but you are bound by our ethical code. And if this bothers you, then please don’t go into my profession. There are other professions you could go into and you will do very well. But don’t be a social worker. I always tell my students if they do well, and if I hear all the good stuff they do, I take a piece of that. I own it. And if they do bad, I don’t know who you are. I have never met you. Don’t say you’re a student of mine. Please don’t say you’re a student of mine, because obviously I had no impact on you.

When I mention the Social Work Code of Ethics, there is more than one code of ethics. There’s a National Association of Social Work Code of Ethics, which folks have to follow. But there’s also the National Association of Black Social Workers. There’s also the Radical Social Work Code of Ethics. So I make sure my students know everybody’s code of ethics. They’re close, but not quite. If you’re an African-American social worker, then we’re called to definitely work on the collective. To volunteer our time. To, in lieu of payment, do community work. So there’s some expansiveness on the different codes of ethics, and I make sure my students understand all the codes of ethics. It’s not just the National Association of Social Workers.

Dr. Raina J. León:

Shifting very drastically, but going to the questions in my own special way: endorsing freedom with my students. Oh, you want to pick your own readings? Wonderful! Are they all the same sort of category? Are they all able-bodied white men, and it’s all in English and from this particular region? No, no. I’m going to block that one. I’m going to ask folks to be more expansive in what their driving interests are. I don’t require folks to read a particular canon or a set list of things. I myself have read very widely and want people to read very widely. I also want people to experiment across form, whatever genre they’re working in. So the idea of, “I’m a poet and I write only left-lineated couplets.” That’s nice, that’s cute. Try something else and experiment and fail. If you haven’t failed, then you are not trying. And the same thing with any genre. If someone is writing in fiction, following the rules of historical fiction, what about something that’s in the speculative space that draws on some of the historical? Or para fiction? How can we experiment? How can we try something new? Freedom is not a box. We push back against the borders of the box. Explode it into sparkles, into glitter. 

My students are creative practitioners, but they’re also educators oftentime. So creating spaces for their students to also exercise freedom of expression, and their ability to be their whole selves as educators can be fraught, right? If you’re a queer educator in a particular context, do you tell folks about your partner? Will that make you subject to a different kind of pressure and possibly being pushed out by parents or other teachers? How do you understand what your rights are as an educator, as an English educator, as a practitioner? How do you also hold space for the identities of all your kids? How do you become the trusted person to hold space for folks who are vulnerable? I think that that overlaps between education and creative practice. These are key questions that people should be considering in their work. 

How do you encourage people to join the fight for freedom? One of the ways is through creating spaces for folks to interrogate what freedom is and how to agitate and move as a collective. On Sunday, for example, I have a reading series that I co-founded with Sarah Browning, who’s one of the founders of Split This Rock. The series is called Wild Indigo, and it’s based here in Philadelphia. We’re celebrating our first anniversary on Sunday with Tongo Eisen-Martin and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. And that organization is in partnership with a community organization called Young American Cider and Tasting Room; they provide the space. Reclaim Philadelphia is an organization that calls attention to social issues affecting Philadelphians, but also on the national stage. So, when one of our community members was picked up by ICE at work, the reading series became a site of poems about social justice issues, also a space to create a letter writing campaign in support of him and his family, and a place of organizing for folks who wanted to go to the local detention center and protest even its existence in the nearby community. So, a space that some might say is an art space, actually lives at the intersection of social justice, activism, work and arts practice.

That’s one way that encouraging people to join is pushing back against the flurry that leads to numbness. “Oh, there’s so much happening. I don’t know what to do. I felt so deeply for this thing and I was so scared, but now I don’t feel anything.” That’s strategic. The flurry of executive orders, all these court cases, is strategic. It’s to overwhelm us to the point that we isolate and just try to survive.

The poetry becomes a site of activation, to feel. That is the first root thing that we can do is feel. That leads us to act. Because when we can’t feel anymore, then we stay in our houses and we don’t do anything. So that’s one of the ways that I’m holding the space. Such that every month we’re wall-to-wall packed, and we do check-ins with one another as our neighbors. Like, “Hello neighbor, what’s your name? How are you today? What do you focus on? What do you care about?” That's a part of our reading practice. 

An art space can be a space of freedom. Of fighting for freedom.