Practicing Freedom: An Auto-ethnographic Account of a Liberation Praxis

Black Americans and Black folks across the globe continue to proclaim variousunfreedoms we experience specifically due to our Blackness. As we struggle against and survive through the unfair structures, ways of being, and conditions that are killing us, we have been creating new survival strategies for living. One of our primary arguments is that state entities and the anti-Black carcerality embedded in them (e.g., policing, prisons, hospitals, welfare systems, military, the foster care system educational institutions etc.) are the primary arbitrators weaponizing violence, injustice, and unfreedom in our lives. Since the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2013 due to the murder of Trayvon Martin, leading up to the largest global uprising in 2020 due to the murder of George Floyd, and the ongoing activism around anti-Black police violence, we who are organizers and activists have found ourselves seeking out alternative ways to be principled in our struggles for abolition, transformative justice, and Black liberation. A part of being in principled struggle is building a praxis (when theory meets practice) of how to conduct oneself in community with others, and with the state in a way that is aligned with stated values and beliefs. Much of the organizing work geared towards eradicating anti-Black violence pulls from the theoretical and practiced interventions of the Black radical tradition, Black feminist thought, and abolitionism(s) to inform their praxis. This dissertation will seek out a Black radical queer feminist praxis by conducting an auto- ethnography using critical art-based Black feminist-womanist storytelling to measure data collected from my lived experiences as an organizer and activist to uplift the liberation strategies of an era.