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A Free Perspective
- The University of North Carolina Press
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234 A Free Perspective Patrice Quinn I am the middle daughter of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, an activist and community organizer (like President Obama, I like to say!). My mother was the founder of the West Side Community Alliance and the West 80th Street Day Care Center in New York City. From the age of six months until I went away on scholarship to prep school, I was educated and cared for through community-controlled day care, community schools, and after-school and summer programs organized and run by my mother and the people of our community. My father was white, from Ireland; my mother, black, from the rural South. This made me a mixed-race African American, as were many of my classmates at our community schools. Interracial marriage was a real social taboo when my parents were married in 1963, and their relationship reflected the depth of commitment to the ideal of equality held by many people involved in the freedom movements at that time. In our neighborhood in the middle of Manhattan, there were families who had emigrated from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean as well as white and black families from along the East Coast. We were an extremely diverse community—racially, ethnically, culturally, and economically. Within several blocks of my mother’s day care center lived some of the wealthiest people in the country, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Among my classmates on the Upper West Side were children from every position on the economic spectrum—from “old money” rich to recipients of state welfare. Most of the families at the center, however, were poor and underserved. In fact, the day care facility, first started in our apartment, was located for several years in the basement of a local welfare hotel. Many of the teachers and organizers at the center were parents, family members, and neighbors. Some of the parents were single mothers, but many of the fathers were out of work. In 1969, Gloria Steinem, a dear friend of my mother’s and, like my mother, one of the lights in my life, wrote beautifully in New York A Free Perspective 235 magazine about my mother and her work. The article describes how a “neighborhood” became a “community” through the vision and organizational genius of a young black woman from the South who brought together people who had been strangers to one another in a troubled New York neighborhood (now one of its most exclusive) and got them to work under the simple, just proposal that our real needs should and could be met. To my mother’s mind, the need for food, shelter, child care, education, meaningful work at fair wages, and relationships that acknowledge and affirm the truth and fullness our being were the birthright of all people and perfectly within our means to achieve. If the day care and community center had had a motto, it could easily have been Free to Be . . . You and Me. These must be six of the most powerful words in the universe. They not only represent the consciousness promoted by the album and television special but also reflect the ideas behind the civil rights, Black Power, antipoverty, and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the Occupy resistance movement spreading across the world today. Here, I offer my personal reflections on what it means to have grown up in an environment where the entire emphasis was on the importance of being “free to be.” As I peruse my Facebook news stream and talk with people about the most recent movement for freedom from corporate repression and domination, I am struck by how difficult it seems for many people to understand why economic parity is central to the very idea of freedom . Perhaps it relates to our society’s general unwillingness to face and talk about the facts, the legacy, and the pervasiveness of its opposite : slavery. Over the years, I have often felt as if I were from another planet. And in a way, I am. People often can feel and point to the mechanisms of their enslavement , whether it’s rooted in racism, sexism, classism, consumerism, or other factors. But many people seem to have a harder time identifying what it means to be “free.” I believe that you don’t really know freedom until you experience it. And true freedom doesn’t really exist if it’s only for some...