By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. – Lilla Watson
America turns 250 this year.
But before the fireworks go up, somebody in the Black community needs to ask a hard question — not only about what America owes us, but also about what we owe each other.
Here it is: Have we turned the freedom for which we struggled and bled into a members-only club?
Before you roll your eyes, suck your teeth, and smack your lips, I have the standing to ask this. I was born and raised in the Black Church led by my grandfather. It is the community that shaped me, the tradition that formed me and whose music and theology are in my bloodstream.
This is not a subject I studied from the outside — I hold a terminal academic degree in Leadership and Organizational Change, with a concentration in the Black Church. My credentials are not the kind you buy, borrow or receive at a banquet. They are a terminal degree from a regionally accredited institution — one recognized by the federal government and every legitimate university in this country.
So here is the truth.
America’s founding sin was not just slavery. It was what I call the “privatization of freedom,” turning the universal language of liberty into a members-only club. All men are created equal meant some men. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness meant certain lives. The Declaration of Independence was the greatest private club ever written.
And for 250 years, the Black freedom tradition has been the most powerful voice in America, demanding that the club open its doors.
But something is happening inside that tradition that needs to be said out loud.
Call it what it is — the privatization of freedom. This occurs when a community once dedicated to universal liberation begins to limit that liberation to its own members. It uses the language of rights, dignity and God-given humanity to justify protecting its interests, even as it quietly excludes others. This shift is not always intentional or obvious, which makes it especially dangerous. The privatization of freedom always feels justified to those within the group.
It looks like this.
It looks like demanding the First Amendment when it protects us and dismissing it when it protects someone we disagree with. That is not a principled position. That is convenience.
It looks like invoking the name of the Black Church — the institution that sat at the center of every freedom struggle — in support of positions that it spent generations fighting against. Lilla Watson called it out a long time ago — if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together. But if you are just here to use my numbers, go home.
It looks like the Black church — the institution that knows better than anyone in America what it costs to be told your humanity is conditional — then turning around and using that same conditional logic on somebody else’s community. We do that all the time in the Black Church to those who don’t fit “our aesthetic” — from excluding women from the pulpit, the formerly incarcerated, the addicted, the poor, and to those who love God with everything they have and are told that who they love makes them less than whole.
Theologian Angela Parker argues that America has never been able to apply its own revolutionary logic to Black and Brown bodies. She is right. But her insight does not stop at America’s door. It walks right through and into the doors of the Black Church.
Yet, Frederick Douglass refused to stop talking about women’s rights when people told him to stay in his lane. Fannie Lou Hamer would not let her freedom be partial. King said you could not fight one injustice while ignoring the others.
And then we do the very thing these icons of freedom spent their lives fighting against.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org