Black Love and Liberation

For you, brethren, have been called to [liberation]; only do not use [liberation] as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. - Paul ("Galatians 5:13")

Making the choice to love can heal our wounded spirits and our body politic. It is the deepest revolution, the turning away from the world as we know it, toward the world we must make if we are to be one with the planet--one healing heart giving and sustaining life. Love is our hope and our salvation. - bell hooks (Salvation: Black People and Love)

I've been thinking about love a lot lately on it's various levels: the divine love of God, self-love, romantic love, familial love, friendship love, and communal love. My contemplations on this topic are born out of my own internal paradox. On one hand, God drowns me with infinite and undeserved love daily, and my family and friends constantly bless me with loving words and actions. Even co-workers and classmates humble me with love in the form of affirmation and encouragement.

Yet on the other hand I am stung by the absence of love in particular areas of my life and ethnic identity. As much as I would like to pray it or wish it a way, the longing to connect with a woman who would be my wife will not die; nor will my hunger for all black folk to embrace each other and be fully loved by the larger society be alleviated. In the documentary SoulMate, I learned that over 42% of African-American women have never been married, and like me, many suffer from the pang of loneliness. I was dismayed by the revelation that we had more two-parent households under slavery than we do now. I am distressed by the black self-hate (Jim Crow's most insidious and enduring fruit) that causes our artists to perpetuate images that come right out of the Ku Klux Klan propaganda book. Young African-American men destroy each other with bullets and brothers and sisters kill each other with words derived from the stereotypical seeds that were planted in our collective memories so many years ago. With so much negative energy turned inward and against each other, how can we fight the conditions that keep too many of us poor, ignorant and physically unhealthy?

We have to find the love again. We have to find the love that slavery and segregation could not extinguish. However, we failed to realize that the sin of white supremacy could not be fully exoricised by a change in laws and public policy; and while we were lulled to sleep by getting more crumbs from the master's table, our love was crucified. In no way do I seek to overly romanticize the unity of African-Americans in the past, but clearly when we look at the stark reality of our broken families and relationships - the antagonism between black men and women and the growing gulf between the black poor and working class and the more privileged members of our community, we can clearly see that much of the collective love we did have is simply gone.

Our particular problems have always been rooted in the soil of the larger plantation that is the United States of America. This love deficiency is certainly not unique to black folk, but is rather the thorn in the flesh of an entire nation that has claimed to be a land of liberation and equality for all people since its founding. Instead of serving one another, we have far too often oppressed one another. But, the love of God that gave the Israelites an Exodus out of Egypt and gave Africans in America salvation from chattel slavery, can also free us from the hate, conflict and division that plagues us today in our interpersonal relationships, community, our society - and in our religious congregations. If love has been crucified as it was over 2000 years ago, then it will be resurrected again, because the revolution of God has already lifted Love on high and the power of sin, spiritual and social, has already been defeated. The question is, will we continue to live in the darkness and deception of the old empire or the light and truth of the New Creation?