Practicing Liberation

Practicing Liberation comprises of Bryce Love Fields, Omi Castro and Tatiana Guzman. We collectively have been in a lot of spaces, places, and tables and everywhere we turned - we started to see patterns everywhere. We started to ask ourselves what it would look like to practice liberation in a way that honors the experiences of individuals within harmful systems while also addressing the role that they play in upholding those systems. Systems can be harmful because of the expectation to uphold them without question, and people often do not feel liberated or empowered to move away from those expectations. So we have to be able to see systems of oppression and our role in them. But what is often missed is how our unconscious behaviors uphold those systems. So, we must be made aware of and deconstruct those behaviors; we must be aware of and deconstruct the systems; we must be empowered and skilled to liberate and imagine new ways of being and doing. 

So how do we see the work being done? We see it in a structured community of practice. We use many different frameworks – as all are needed. We don’t claim to know all the answers and we also hold knowing’s of our lived experiences and those who have come before us, are walking alongside us and lightyears ahead. But we do this work rooted in our experience and knowings – we each come from varying intersecting identities – and have taken it upon ourselves as individuals to personally and within various structured communities of practice to unlearn those things ourselves every moment along the way. Everything we ask others to do is apart of our practice and praxis. Along the way, we embrace mistakes as a form of learning the practices, hold each other accountable, and welcome accountability from the communities we are a part of. This is about replacing old behaviors by reimagining new behaviors – so that we can reach our highest humanity and have further reach together.