I grew up in the ministry. The Black ministry, which is of a whole other order. We didn’t just preach. It didn’t stop on Sundays. We lived the ministry day in and day out in the pushing toward civil rights. We didn’t just have heaven on our minds, we had injustice in our midst. I grew up seeing a government well versed in the exclusion, suppression, and extinction of a people it deemed a threat. Black men, especially those who spoke up, were regularly reminded their bodies were at risk. Black women were often the collateral damage. A decade ago, I met a woman named Nicole Daedone. Nicole had created a meditation practice called Orgasmic Meditation that was designed to liberate women. It took me one look to see she, like me, was a freedom fighter. “Chill,” I’d say to her, using my grandmother’s tongue to ease the pain of the message to follow, “Stay strong. They’ll be coming after you.” I understood what Nicole was doing from the day I met her. She was making a railroad to freedom, much like my people had done. Only Nicole’s railroad was for women. She saw women trapped from the very power source that would free us—our sexuality. Confused, thinking that somehow our sexuality was dangerous. It was too much. It was risky. Just like my black brothers and sisters, trapped, thinking somehow our strength is out there. Not realizing, no, we are the gold. We are the solution we have been seeking. Nicole was offering this to women, and I knew what happened to people who did that. The same machinery that has been used against blacks who rose up would be used against her. The system does not want us free. I vowed to her I would stand by her side. I became a minister to her, and I ministered to the staff at OneTaste, the organization that Nicole co-founded. I taught at their courses; I counseled those who were struggling. I shared about a Jesus I was introduced to as a child—one who understands that sometimes the gospel comes with a fight. As my grandmother would say, I know these people in my bones. Two years into ministering to Nicole, the first shot was fired in her direction. It was a media article with vague allegations of crimes that set off more articles and an FBI investigation. I knew then that all that civil rights work I had done I could bring to the fore. I could bring the courage and the spunk that was instilled in me and put some of it into her. “Hold on,” I told her. “I have seen this before. This is how they do it. They want you to fall, but I will not let you.” After a six-year investigation that destroyed the company she founded, she and our friend, Rachel Cherwitz, were indicted on a single-count conspiracy for forced labor. In other words, they say she conspired to enslave people. They say she has manipulated people, though they don’t say how. They want to put my two sisters in prison for twenty years. Words can’t describe the bitter irony that I feel that my government is trying to incarcerate my fellow freedom fighter by saying she is doing to others what was done to my people for generations. You might be able to fool the white people with this conspiracy charge because they have not borne witness to what happens when, merely by being who you are, you become offensive to the US government. This is what happens. It was not so long ago we found out that the government’s efforts to stifle black leaders fighting for freedom came from a playbook called “discredit, disrupt, and destroy.” So we in the black community have seen this before, and we know it when we see it. As a 40-year church minister and leader in my spiritual community, I can say that the idea that Nicole or our friend and her alleged “co-conspirator,” Rachel Cherwitz, ran some kind of prurient organization exploiting people goes against everything I know. They do what I do. We do the daily, dirty, thankless work of freeing people from systems of oppression that were built before we were born and, with luck, will be dismantled before we die. Whatever you say about them, you are saying about me. If they are accused of enslaving women, so have I enslaved women. If they are accused of trafficking women, so too have I trafficked women. So too did Harriet Tubman—because what was the Underground Railroad but a giant human trafficking operation? But these brave women trafficked in freedom and towards liberation. So too did Nicole. She brought women out of their enslaved plantation of dependency and learned helplessness, into the free state of self-ownership and true feminine power. Black power was pathologized, made to be seen as inherently criminal. As a culture, we allowed ourselves to believe, without always even knowing it, that the criminalization of our black brothers and sisters who dared embody that power was justified, or else they may rise up and fight. Their overt strength was exploited, cast as threatening. These strong, powerful, sexual women are being made to look dangerous and criminal. We must question the air we breathe and the messages we are being told. We live on the shoulders of the men and women, black and white, who did the work in front of us. We can all now choose to sit down somewhere we are not supposed to to say something that would put our mothers in serious political, even physical, danger for saying. We are the generation who receives the baton to bring forward the next leveling of our humanity. The post The Criminalization of Power appeared first on LA Weekly.