Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming flips the usual fantasy of liberation on its head: freedom isn’t a prize waiting at the end of struggle; it’s a discipline that has to be practiced into existence. The line “must be born” is doing double duty. It’s biological, almost brutal, implying pain and inevitability, but it’s also political: a new kind of person has to be made under the pressure of old conditions. That’s a provocation to movements that treat emancipation as a legal switch to be thrown once the right policy passes.

The subtext is a warning against outsourcing moral change to institutions. If you’re still rehearsing domination, humiliation, and contempt inside your own ranks, then “victory” just hands the megaphone to the same impulses in a different uniform. Deming’s choice of “free man” and “brotherly man” isn’t a macho flourish so much as a strategic target: the habits of masculinity, hierarchy, and possession that often sneak into liberation politics. Brotherhood isn’t a slogan; it’s a rewiring.

“Muscle and bone” grounds the idea in the body: solidarity isn’t performative virtue, it’s a physical routine, a way of moving through conflict without replicating the violence you oppose. That last clause - “trying to act it out” - lowers the bar from purity to practice. Deming, writing out of mid-century nonviolent and feminist currents, is insisting that the means aren’t a regrettable detour; they’re the only material you have to build the future. If you want a freer world, you have to start behaving like people who can live in it.