Dare to Freedom Dream

Tourmaline, this year’s Cromwell Day keynote speaker, is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist renowned for her deep engagement with the histories of Black, queer, and trans communities. Ahead of the activities, workshops, panels, and other events on Tuesday, Nov. 12, Tourmaline shared her thoughts on different forms of activism, freedom dreaming, and where we go from last week’s presidential election.

How did you first get into organizing and activism?
I grew up in a house of organizers and activists. My mom worked her entire life as a union organizer with SEIU [Service Employees International Union], so she was organizing healthcare workers in Boston and then throughout the U.S. My dad was in the Black Freedom Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. He was part of this group called The Invaders in the sixties in Memphis and was really involved there. He was also a labor organizer in this group called ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now], and that’s how my parents met. I really grew up in a household where talking about a living wage and collective action and dreaming beyond what was handed to us and knowing our value and our history was an everyday part of the mix.

Talk about how your activism work began to include film, writing, music, and other art.
When I was working with this group called Critical Resistance—they still exist and do great work around the carceral state and imprisonment and police violence—one of the things that Angela Davis, one of the founders, talked a lot about was how activism is so necessary and urgent, but sometimes it doesn't get at our interior condition, how we feel about ourselves. And that is just such an important part to consider in how we change the world, to make sure that we’re also thinking about our interiority. Hearing that gave me this big a-ha moment. I was in this group called The Welfare Warriors, a group of us who were low-income LGBTQIA folks, mostly people of color, and we started to make a film about our lives. I'll never forget, we spent years working on it, and then finally we shared it with our community at the LGBT Center in New York City. There were maybe 40 people there, and it felt so transformative; it really got to what Angela Davis talks about with our interior condition. It changed how I felt about myself. It helped me move from a place of being ashamed about myself to knowing how beautiful and how powerful our community is and how I am. And so I was hooked on it. I was like, this is something that I really want to keep being a part of. So I started taking classes at the Art Students League, which is a very accessible art institution in New York City. I kept thinking, I want to make a film, another film, another film. I just took momentum from there.

You’ve often talked about the concept of “freedom dreaming.” What is that?
I was blessed to have a professor in college named Robin D.G. Kelley, who wrote a book about freedom dreaming. I was his research assistant for a couple years as he worked on another book, and he was my advisor. I used his framework of freedom dreaming as a concept and jumped off from it, but it's about looking at what is—both wanted and unwanted—and using that as a springboard to imagine and clarify what we really want.

Over and over and over again, we as people who are oppressed and marginalized, who are members of the LGBTQIA community, the Black community, many of us who are disabled, we do this every day, right? Like, oh, that interaction was not so nice; I want nicer. Or, oh, we are without this vital resource; we deserve it. Whether it's health care or welfare or housing, maybe without even realizing it, we look at our what is, and we use that as a jumping off point for what we want, what’s possible.

It’s powerful, that first step of imagining what we want to believe, that even though we don't have evidence of it yet, it’s possible. This has happened throughout time. There was a free Black community in New York in the 1800s that was created through Mutual Aid Society. They helped people who were living downtown in New York, which was really a hostile place for Black people. There were a number of anti-Black riots that were happening, the Abolitionist Riot, a Civil War draft riot, and so people freedom dreamed. They used this hostile, harsh condition to imagine beyond it and stayed so tuned into the possibility of it that they actually ended up with really impeccable timing. They were in the right place at the right time, and in a moment where no one was selling Black people land, they found the people who were and created this really powerful community uptown in New York. There’s just example after example of our people doing that.

What is it about Cromwell Day that made you want to accept the keynote speaker invitation?
I think [Cromwell Day celebrates] something similar to freedom dreaming: The belief that even when there weren’t other Black students at Smith, that [Otelia and Adelaide Cromwell] could make their marks. You think, I can be a student, I can graduate, or I can be a teacher here, and in the midst of it all, leave this beautiful legacy of possibility. That, to me, is really resonant. My sister also went to Smith; I remember going to see her run track here. It’s been somewhere that’s been in my life for a very long time.

The theme of this year’s Cromwell Day is Now What?: Liberation in the Midst of Uncertainty. In the wake of the election and what’s to come, how would you answer the question of now what? 
This is a really powerful moment to return to a practice like freedom dreaming, to return to a practice of looking at what is, getting clarity about what we want and tuning to our awareness that it's possible. We can create. We’re actually doing it all the time in a very powerful way.

That pivot to asking ourselves what we want is what I think stabilizes us in moments of uncertainty. Maybe in this moment, where people are navigating immense amounts of uncertainty and white supremacy and homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, maybe people aren’t in a place to dream up another Seneca Village. And that’s just right. Maybe the freedom dreams are about what kind of rest I can have tonight. What kind of replenishment, what kind of ways can I connect with a friend? How can I feel a little bit more grounded, a little bit more connected in my body, a little bit more connected to my breath, a little bit more of a sense of ease? And I think those are so important. Those small things, those everyday actions of rest and connection and support are actually the things that make up the large acts.