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The Struggle for Black Liberation and Justice THOUGHTS ON

“To be human you must bear witness to justice. Justice is what love looks like in public—to be human is to love and be loved.” — Dr. Cornel West

Love is inherently political. When one is Black in America, to love is always followed by a ‘but’ or ‘in spite of.’ For example, on the individual level, loving is seen profoundly in acting against hegemonic standards: one can love their wide nose, larger lips, collier hair, in spite of standards of beauty that would not have it so. The love of self, the love of body, and even romantic love operate on meaningful, yet smaller scales.

If being Black and loving oneself is resistance against white supremacy, the tradition of resistance on a larger scale, such as in socio-political movements, requires an incorporation of the varied locations—history, class, physical appearance, gender—of its body politic. Resistance is sustained by a love that is outward-facing rather than inward-facing: a radical love for others rather than an individual love of self. A life rooted in radical love reorients us away from personal suffering and survival and turns us toward continuing a tradition of Black resistance to state-sanctioned or state-complicit oppression and subjugation.

This Black History Month marks half a year since the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and other solidarity movements took to the streets, the press, the classrooms, and the offices to demand an end to the normalization of Black mortality and death at the hands of the police. The name of the #BlackLivesMatter movement foreshadowed how it would grow beyond what should be recognized as the bare minimum: sanctity of life. For a life to matter, the culmination of a human being’s experiences must also matter—having economic opportunity to support one’s family, walking freely without fear of hostile surveillance or policing, having access to affordable medical care with equal health outcomes. One could look at Black social and political movements in America and argue that living on the brink of survival and scarcity produced civic engagement, but I would argue that these social movements can also be attributed to love as an ancestral practice.

The West created Blackness. There were no Black people, rather disparate tribes of individuals who perhaps shared melanated complexions. The concept of Blackness is reductive in flattening the nuances of language, ancestral history, and more of Black individuals. Nonetheless, the categorization has been repurposed from Blackness as synonymous to oppression to Blackness as empowerment, as seen with the Black Pride and Pan-Africanisms school of thoughts. Black people become ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ to one another. “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”—this famous song by James Brown characterizes the acceptance of the term “Black.” Against racism, love for one’s Blackness and for other Black communities became a source of power to combat racist individuals, ideologies, and institutions that would have Black people hate themselves.

Toni Morrison once wrote in The Bluest Eye, “...love is never any better than the lover… There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.” So, for people to remark that there is a lack of love in the world and that this deficiency has brought American society to such a polarized moment may appear to position love as an omnipotent recipe for change, as opposed to tangible legislation or policy in the interests of activists. When the lover ‘alone’ possesses their gift of love, their love is selfish and self-serving. One can love “black culture,” for example, and recite legendary rap songs and profess allegiance to their favorite Black athletes, but in the same breath chastise rappers or athletes for involving themselves with politics.

For their ambiguity and lack of direction, words such as love and kindness may be met with skepticism in social justice movements. They appear to be blankets thrown over the scantily covered, unburied, and limboed ghosts of American past. Black people, other marginalized communities, and white allies can’t suddenly join hands and proclaim, “We are the world.” All theory is incomplete and critiqueable, but in a month dedicated to uncovering critical developments within the Black community, radical love is a starting point to discuss what has already manifested in activist movements. Black activist movements tend to be romanticized, but in seeking the resonances of radical love within these movements, one can begin to imagine the potential for empathy within oppressed groups and between the oppressor and the oppressed. Make no mistake, radical love is far from an ode to peace or nonviolence. Radical love produces its own energy and conviction, derived from a tradition of resistance. Liberation is a collective fight and injustices are deeply linked.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher, who began to articulate radical love (although not in such express terms) in his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in 1968. Writing in political exile from Brazil for subversive teachings, he sought to characterize the relationship between the oppressed and oppressor. In it, Friere asserts that the

“To be human you must bear witness to justice. Justice is what love looks like in public—to be human is to love and be loved.” — Dr. Cornel West

oppressed do not incite violence: “It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves.” By unloved, Freire is referring to those the oppressors deem unworthy: disposable, dehumanized individuals only called upon when needed for extractive value. It is those already in power who realize their self interests through violence and coercion. The infamous images of a police dog set on a civil rights protest, of homes belonging to Black residents in Tulsa on fire, of Emmett Till’s disfigured body are the more visible stories in the long chapter of anti-Black violence in America. bell hooks, a Black feminist writer, described love as the practice of freedom. Conversely, she named the antithesis of love as a culture of domination—one that sustains itself on violence.

This is one of the greatest challenges of radical love: violence. How can one write about solidarity, love, and resilience in the face of direct violence that seeks to create a never-ending pit of oppression, devastation, and inequity? I find answers to the question of violence when looking at this summer’s activist movements. People put their lives on the line as police officers used excessive force to drag and tear them off, and how, within minutes, bail funds would appear for those detained. With rising unemployment rates and relatively unstable income for hourly wage employees, Black and brown persons in the wake of the pandemic shared mutual aid funds circulated on social media. They exchanged monetary resources and information to provide income, housing, food, and basic necessities to individuals who were virtually strangers. In a pandemic that exacerbated the vulnerabilities of each person, it is radical love to extend the little one has to familiar and foreign communities. The principal strategy of the oppressor (white, landowning men) in America was to splinter the formation of radical love amongst marginalized communities. In America’s labor movements, race often prevented the coalescing of poor white and poor Black communities seeking higher economic opportunity. White laboring classes bought into white elites’ marketing that Black people were to blame for their financial woes. In the feminist movements of the 1970s, white women feminists such as Gloria Steinmen discouraged Shirley Chisholm, a Black woman politician, from seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. The irony being that the organization Chisholm co-founded, the National Women’s Caucus, endorsed a white man over her because he seemed more viable to win. Even within the Black community, there are fractures in visions of how the Black community organizes its demands: should we be relying on public assistance? Should we prove our autonomy and self-organizing capacity? Are these diametrically opposed ideas?

These movements broke down with individuals seeking out paths to preserve their respective goals. However, most notably in the #BLM protests of Summer 2020, both Black and non-black individuals radically loved by redistributing economic or social privileges that put them at an advantage. There was direct intervention into improving the quality of life for others by using oneself as a springboard. Radical love as a framework for future social movements can be thought of as sustaining cultures of interdependent care. Solidarity and allyship are a precursor to this culture, but instead of standing by or empathizing with the struggles of another, interdependent care is toiling and struggling together. Solidarity compels action. A thought process grounded in solidarity here would be: ‘because I believe an injustice is occurring to another, I must act.’ However, solidarity is complicated by what are artificially-construed competing interests of time and energy: Which issue is more dire? The concept also falls short where individuals over-emphasize reciprocity. If I go to your march, you must come to mine. However, solidarity need not be swapped out for radical love. When placing the two concepts in contrast, radical love is an acknowledgment of varied solidarities and a constant striving outside of the inner.

Friere’s quote shows that love is incomplete if it cannot be extended to others. It is an expansion of your knowledge, resources, and empathy. Social movements grounded in experience create a patchwork of distinct stories—an ever-expanding fabric draped around protests, dialogue, and civic action. It is emotive; take one away and the fabric begins to unravel. Radical love is sustained by collective, community-bound engagement. When liberation and justice seem too ambitious to attain or too far after years of inaction, the community continues the struggle for those who cannot.

On a larger scale, practicing radical love is what gives society our humanity. If bearing witness to justice is an act of love, as Dr. Cornel West alludes to, then to ignore opportunities to fight for justice or to turn a blind eye to injustice is a lack of love. Seen through another lens, turning a blind eye is like the love of only oneself that Paulo Freire referenced. Radical love need not culminate in a productive or a readily translated piece of action. Rather, the journey itself of imagining one’s struggles (or lack of) as intimately connected to the struggles of others brings about a more conscious humanity. However, the desire to constantly improve upon the conditions of precarity for marginalized communities is the raison d’etre of socio-political movements. bell hooks further articulates this imagined world: “[Devoid of radical love] longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self centered longing for change.” What makes love so radical is intervention in a struggle beyond one’s own. In the movements of last summer, while the focus was on freeing Black individuals from the oppression of the carceral state, there was the reverberating reminder of those who could not march in tandem or show up in present—those whose plights were rendered invisible: trans folks afraid of violence at protests, persons with disabilities, and incarcerated folks.

With that said, radical love cannot become a form of governance, for the institutionalization of such ethos divorces it from the feelings and experiences that contribute to its realization. Instead of assigning radical love a cumulative or productive end, perhaps radical love in the Black liberation struggle is an acknowledgement of the sacrifices Black individuals and allies made to secure one’s own rights and a commitment to continue this legacy. It is a turn from the self to the world that crosses not only space, but time. Through demonstrating this love, Blackness is humanized against a backdrop that has used Black bodies as a canvas for experimentation, exploitation, and extraction. In the face of an objectified Blackness, radical love brings dignity and humanity back into Black life. If even the most subjugated members of our society are given back their humanity and dignity via radical love, then all members of our society, interdependent, can become human together. As Dr. Cornel West says, “To be human is to love and to be loved.”

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 is rooting for everybody Black (credit to Issa Rae at the 2017 Emmys).