What do we actually mean when we talk about liberation?
Too often the word gets used to describe something closer to personal advancement. A person or a group gains power. Someone gets a seat at the table. A barrier breaks and new people are allowed to participate in systems that were once closed to them.
But that isn’t liberation. Replacing one group of powerful people with another group of powerful people does not dismantle the system that created inequality in the first place. It simply rearranges who benefits from it. This point has been made repeatedly by liberation thinkers across different movements.
bell hooks argued that feminism is not about women gaining power within systems of domination, but about ending domination itself. If a movement only seeks equality for those who are already relatively privileged, it stops being a liberatory movement and becomes a project of upward mobility.
The Combahee River Collective made similar arguments in their 1977 statement. Their claim was simple but profound: if Black women were free, everyone would have to be free, because all systems of oppression would have been dismantled.
In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire adds another important dimension. He warns that liberation cannot simply invert the roles of oppressor and oppressed. When people live inside systems of domination for long enough, those systems shape how power itself is understood. The oppressed may come to see freedom primarily as access to the position of the oppressor.
We can see this pattern often in modern political life. Liberation movements focus their ambitions on representation within existing institutions. The demand becomes inclusion in corporate leadership, access to elite professional spaces, or greater participation in political structures that remain fundamentally unchanged. A few barriers fall, and a few new people gain entry, but the hierarchy itself continues to operate. While this type of representation is justified, it actually redistributes opportunity rather than transforming the structure that produced inequality in the first place.
Freire believed that genuine liberation requires something more difficult. It requires transforming the relationships and systems that produce domination, not simply changing who holds authority within them.
Taken together, these thinkers point to a difficult truth: liberation is collective, or it is not liberation at all.
This might seem obvious, but it is a lesson that the political left still struggles to manage. Movements regularly fracture around questions of identity, hierarchy, and exclusion. Even within spaces that claim liberatory goals, it is common to see the same patterns of domination reappear in new forms.
If a liberatory project is not inclusive of racialized people, queer people, gender-diverse people, disabled people, young people, and others pushed to the margins, then what it is building is not liberation. It is simply a new arrangement of privilege that perpetuates the systemic logic and blueprints of inherently oppressive systems.
Freire argued that systems of domination survive not only in institutions but also inside the habits we carry with us. The logic of hierarchy can show up quietly in our everyday relationships.
Many people who advocate for racial justice still expect obedience and domination from their children.
Many people who advocate for gender equality still exclude or distrust trans people.
Many people who speak about collective liberation still assume authority over those younger than them, poorer than them, or less educated than them.
Spend some time reflecting on the places where your politics and your instincts may not yet align.
Write down a few identities or causes that you feel strongly committed to supporting. Then ask yourself:
Where do I still expect to be in control?
Whose autonomy do I still struggle to recognize?
Whose voices do I dismiss more quickly than others?
Where do I quietly assume that my experience is the norm?
These questions are uncomfortable, but they matter. Systems of supremacy persist because they are reproduced in ordinary behaviour—inside families, friendships, workplaces, and political spaces.
Liberation movements fail when they challenge domination in theory but continue to practice it in everyday life.
The work is not only to critique systems. It is also to notice where those systems still live within us, and to begin unlearning them in the relationships closest to us.
References
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/feminist-theory/
hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/feminism-is-for-everybody/
Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977.
Full text available via the African American Policy Forum: https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970. https://libcom.org/article/pedagogy-oppressed
