Expanding Freedom

“The function of freedom is to free somebody else.”
— Toni Morrison

In the summer of 1942, documentary photographer Gordon Parks photographed the daily life of government custodian and mother Ella Watson in Washington, D.C. One of the images, "American Gothic," captures the duality of freedom in the United States.

A Black woman stands beneath the symbol of American promise, holding the tools of economic toil. The black and white portrait calls us to consider that freedom proclaimed at the symbolic level has failed to materialize in the lives of many of our fellow citizens. As economic inequality continues to rise and opportunity declines, more people find themselves with less freedom than promised by the credo of the American Dream.

American culture and politics often invoke freedom as a kind of insulation that protects us to pursue our individual ends untouched by the needs or claims of others. In this conception, we can only extend freedom and opportunity by giving up some of our own. This singular notion of freedom reduces our democracy to a zero-sum contest between competing interests. When freedom is exclusive, our democracy becomes insular and brittle.

Novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison offers a more compelling vision of freedom: "The function of freedom is to free somebody else." Our freedom is not realized until it becomes relational and enlarges the possibilities of those around us. Freedom, rightly understood, is generative. It multiplies for all when shared.

When we use our freedom to expand freedom and justice for others, they then have stability and security that gives us more freedom. When our exercise of freedom limits the freedom of others it requires a system and authorities to enforce it, and those systems inevitably expand to make us all less free.

Freedom is an individual right and something we share with others. It must be both.

1. Toni Morrison, remarks in "Conversations with Toni Morrison," (1994).
2. Gordon Parks, "American Gothic," (1942).