EbonyJanice - The Womanist

EbonyJanice - The Womanist

EbonyJanice Moore is a womanist scholar, author, and activist doing community-organizing work, most specifically around black women’s body ownership as a justice issue, black women’s access to ease, joy, and play, and Hip Hop as a tool for sociopolitical and spiritual/religious movement making. She has created curriculum for leadership development for high school-aged girls in Kenya and South Africa, developed programming for teenagers in housing projects in Decatur, Georgia giving them exposure to culture, STEM programs, and the arts, and she supports the tuition of several girl students at PACE High School in Nyahururu, Kenya – towards her passion to ensure gender parity in spaces considered “the least of these.”

What is your definition of freedom? What does it look and feel like to you? And how do you cultivate it daily?

Freedom, to me, is the self-permission to take a deep breath, release my shoulders, close my eyes, and relax into myself. I will know I am free when I can make a habit out of experiencing the day without feeling the tension in my bones and in my body that comes from the overwhelming discomfort of living in a society that is aggressively against me actually being myself. 

That journey can often look like waking up and easing into my day with deep breathing, writing in my journal and interrogating any discomfort - asking it to reveal its source, listening to gentle music (most recently it has been Jhene Aiko's "Trigger Protection Mantra") on repeat, and standing in the mirror quoting a friend who once heard me criticizing my body and said, "Be kind to yourself EbonyJanice."

How have your thoughts, perception, and understanding of freedom evolved with time? What was it before and what is it now?

I use to have zero capacity to think myself free without considering the strategy for every single one of us. Then I was thinking about Harriet Tubman getting to freedom, first, so that when she decided to go back and free all the other folk she helped get free -- she knew the way. I want to know the way. 

I was doing something for myself on my birthday this year and I started sobbing in the midst of the experience because I had a vision of my grandmother present with me in that experience and I knew that was her affirmation for me to relax into the joy and ease in my body. My freedom IS her freedom. Freedom is a sociopolitical term but there is something very spiritual about personal freedom that is the center of my living, now. I suspect I am doing my best collective freedom work because I have some pockets of knowing what it feels like to really be free.

Freedom can feel like something we’re all seeking, but may have trouble grasping. What's one piece of advice or some words of wisdom you can offer to this community as they look to "get free"?

Getting free is a series of choices. But making those choices every single day can be hard. So, we must create habits (rituals) of those choices so that no matter how much resistance we get or how fearful we feel about continuing in that direction -- we can remember this small, consistent action has the capacity to change our lives and maybe even the world. It feels important for me to put emphasis on how this seemingly small, counter-cultural action can be revolutionary, for self and for us all!

Share an anecdote, memory, or practice in your life that embodies freedom in every way.

I frequently give myself permission to be an expert on subjects that have anything to do with me. I laughed when I said that because I thought of that Chapelle skit where the customers ask for the manager and the character yells in their face, "I am the manager!" Basically, when things come up and there's an assumption that anyone else in the room is expert, authority, or somehow more credible than me - something inside of me whispers, "I Am The Manager!"

I'm open to what would happen if I gave myself permission to lead the discussion rather than allowing myself to be consumed by other folks' assumptions and language for me - especially when the content of the discussion impacts my various marginalized identities in potentially harmful ways.

Freedom, woman and black are often three words we don’t marry together. Yet, as a woman of color and as a womanist, freedom is your super power. You understand it as your birthright and have reclaimed it as so. How has this recognition helped you to reclaim other things that are inherently your birthright?

The recognition that freedom is my birthright is an ongoing process. That my whole spirit, soul, and body should have liberation is a knowing that keeps revealing itself to me in surprising, profound, and audacious ways. One thing that has had a huge impact on me over the last several years is that my body is really my own. I know we talk about liberation as very political language and the political is often defined in a communal ways. But my body is simultaneously political and not at all because even though black women’s body ownership is a justice issue, “I am my own before I am anyone else’s” (Nayirrah Waheed, Salt, 2013). By very nature of being born, being my own and for myself, first, must be a given or I will never be whole and I will never be holy or free.

What is one song that helps you get free?

Jhene Aiko’s “Trigger Protection Mantra” has most recently been the song that has been healing me and keeping me rooted and free from the heaviness and anxiety that tries to daily burden me as a black|woman|in America. I’m not being hyperbolic by saying I listen to it all day long. If it’s not turned up as an intentional thing I’m listening to, it’s on a very low volume being subliminal - even throughout the night!

What is one book that has helped you reclaim your freedom?

I have read “Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do,” and “Babylon Sisters” by Pearl Cleage (both fiction) too many times to count because discovering these characters in my early 20’s gave me a visual of the kind of free black woman I was destined to be. I’ve been so inspired by the characters Cleage writes into existence that for years when people asked me what I wanted to do with my life I would always always say, “I want to live a Pearl Cleage character life.” These “Free women” were always self sufficient, always creative, always building projects or programs that mattered to their community, always loved, always soft, always seen by their men, always protected, always in deep sisterhood relationships - always. I can’t think of another book or set of characters that have given me more sufficient language for what I want my freedom to look and feel like than my favorite Pearl Cleage characters!