In American society—one that is predicated on white-supremacy, male dominance, and class exploitation—it is hard to love. We are taught to hate ourselves and others. For example, many black folk have yet to unlearn the self-hate internalized from white supremacy. Men are often afraid to love because so much of masculinity within patriarchy depends on the ability to dominate, to be loveless. And some rich people fill the place in their hearts that would know love with the wealth and economic privilege afforded to them by capitalism.
Love escapes us, not because we lack the desire to love, but because systems of domination strip us of our ability to love ourselves and each other. To recover the ability to love—to attain the strength to love—is an act of resistance that restores our humanity and heals the wounds of oppression. It is the strength to love that empowers individuals and groups to persevere in the face of the hopelessness and despair that oppression facilitates. Indeed, it is the spirit of love that uplifts the collective spirit of the oppressed; to lug around hate and cynicism for one’s oppressors is self-defeating and only intensifies the destruction of self and community that injustice began.
In his 1963 book, Strength to Love, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used love to explain his non-violent approach to the civil rights movement. In it, he writes about the importance of loving, even in the presence of injustice. Drawing heavily from religious doctrine that teaches the importance of loving one’s neighbor as oneself, Dr. King encouraged black people to love their enemies, which was a particularly difficult task in the Jim Crow south.
While Dr. King rarely discussed the issue of self-love within the black community, the militant black power movement emphasized the importance of loving blackness through war cries like “Black is beautiful.” Although this movement dismissed Dr. King’s message of loving one’s enemies, it placed a necessary emphasis on alternative images of blackness that challenged the mainstream representations of black folks as immoral, incompetent, and inhuman.
Dr. King’s version of love as redemptive care and compassion runs in contrast with the dominant image of love in our society. Much of our culture teaches us that love is a feeling between two (normally heterosexual) people that makes them crazy for each other and incapable of rational thought. For example, in the movie The Notebook, Allie makes the decision to be with Noah, a poor working-class man, instead of her affluent fiance. She does this not because she consciously makes a choice to transgress against a caste system that would have predetermined her partner but because she is “madly” in love with him and can have it no other way.
Revolutionary love, the kind of love Dr. King promoted, requires choice and action. In no way does this message devalue romantic love, which requires choice and action too. However, those romantic relationships which are built upon a feeling solely are much more difficult to maintain than those built upon mutual trust, understanding, and a shared commitment in addition to those feelings. In the book All About Love: New Visions, revolutionary activist and dissident intellectual Bell Hooks offers a helpful definition of love as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” These elements are necessary for any loving relationship to flourish. Loving relationships can exist between partners, among political brothers and sisters, and even in the midst of a politically charged college campus.
Despite the lovelessness that plagues the larger society, we can work to build a loving community right here at Columbia in hopes of inspiring change elsewhere.
Let us be clear: nooses don’t hang in a loving community. People don’t rally with food and drink 50 feet from a hunger strike in a loving community. A loving community respects neighboring communities and doesn’t bulldoze, and by extension colonize, them. In a loving community, debate is replaced with dialogue and radical openness where ideas flow freely and no one is silenced.
When I think of the loveless atmosphere on campus, however, I am not crushed by despair—rather I am renewed in my struggle to extend love and care and compassion to all members of our community. I know there is hope as long as there are people like Marta Esquilin, associate director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, who works tirelessly to build community on this campus through initiatives like the multicultural, service-learning trip to New Orleans; or campus activists like Bryan Mercer, CC ’07 and Jenni Oki, CC ’07, who spend their entire college careers doing the work of love.
If we are to become a loving community, we must become one together. Our work must transcend the individual efforts noted above and be concentrated into a mass-based movement to end domination in all its forms. Only then will we be able to regain the strength to love, and recover our true selves to live and learn in the blessed, loving community of our dreams.
