Affirmations of Black Being: Explicating the Potentialities of Self-Love in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

Research has chronicled the experiences of Black students transitioning into college and best practices for supporting Black students as they move through the collegiate context. The collegiate context is nested in white supremacy, and a microcosm of white culture. Thus, this study is rooted in the assumption that racism experienced within college is a reflection of its permanence, and sets the stage for the importance of examining Black students’ sense of self-love. In this paper, we utilize critical frameworks to examine how seven Black students conceptualize self-love within anti-Black environments. An analysis of testimonies and interviews generated by participants produced several considerations on the praxis of self-love in and beyond the educational context. Specifically, findings point to the ways Black students conceptualize self-love as affirmations of the Black being, manifesting as presence, knowing, feeling, seeing, doing, and regard.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-love
• Blackness
• holistic development
• embodiment
• self-definition
• affirmation
• higher education
• Black Studies
• anti-Blackness

Matters of the public sphere track into educational environments. The racialized violence that occurred between February 2020 and August 2020 (e.g., the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd) were experienced and intimately felt by Black students. These incidents of murder converge on what Rankine (2014) called the condition of Black life, whereas one’s existence must mediate the “daily strain of knowing” (p. 2) that one’s body can be broken without recourse. Black collegians are not immune to or protected from these high crimes of the mind, body, and spirit (Spillers, 1987). Higher education researchers (e. g. Harper, 2013; L. D. Patton & Njoku, 2019; Quaye et al., 2020; Tichavakunda, 2021) have studied and documented these complex racialized environments wherein Black collegians exist.

Additionally, Black students have illuminated the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness. Examples of these articulations can be located by the Twitter hashtag #Blackatpwi. According to Valandra et al. (2022), #Blackatpwi began on Twitter after white fraternity members reenacted the murder of George Floyd. Black students responded by posting the racial slurs, harassment, and violence they encountered within predominantly white institutions. The incidents that students shared highlighted not only systemic violence resulting in social and material death, but also a spiritual death, or disruption of the Black interior (Alexander, 2004). According to Alexander (2004), the Black interior references a complex inner self apart from the destructive spaces in which Black people exist. Anti-Blackness is not only a living and social death – it is, too, what is cultivated in excess.

Paradigmatically, we assume that anti-Blackness, as one lives and breathes, is endemic and irresolvable (Wilderson, 2010). As such, this study attempts to locate quotidian, everyday worldmaking methods in and against anti-Black regard which militates against Black people. One of the ways to intervene on this destruction that marks Black people as problematic (Baszile, 2018) is to prioritize self-love (Okello, 2020). Thus, this study contributes to the ongoing scholarship that explores the fullness of Black students’ humanity including positive emotions (Tichavakunda, 2021) such as self-love. Specifically, we examined self-love from the Black student experience because as research has shown, self-love is a powerful tool to address the harmful effects of anti-Blackness (Baszile, 2016; Gaines, 2018). In this way, conceptualizations of self-love can support Black students in developing a positive sense of self (Alexander, 2004). The Black collegiate experience is also a critical time to develop and enhance new skill sets as students prepare for life beyond college (Tichavakunda, 2021).

This study thinks with Black critical theories believing theories of race and racism do not possess the specificity to grapple with the condition of the Black (Dumas, 2016). Thus, to consider the holistic self over and against anti-Black disregard, we explicate how Black students understand self-love by deploying a mode of analysis, annotations and redactions, anchored in the specificity of Blackness/anti-Blackness. For Black people, self-love is both a concept and a multidimensional practice in which they seek positive relationships with self and others within anti-Black environments. Conceptually, self-love is a major theme of self-definition (Okello, 2018) which is a critically grounded, holistic approach to meaning making. Self-definition understands that Blackness is in a structurally antagonistic relationship with a western social and educational sphere that has proven itself incapable of loving Black bodies, spirits, and minds. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explore how Black students at a PWI conceptualize and practice self-love. The study is guided by two research questions:

1. How does loving Blackness look, feel, and sound?

2. What are the possibilities and limitations to loving Blackness?

To address these questions, we critically engage with existing literature in and beyond higher education. The findings reveal that Black students conceptualize self-love as affirmations of Black being, manifesting as presence, knowing, feeling, doing, and regard for the self. Practically, this study is useful for higher education professionals interested in supporting Black students toward a praxis of self-love. This study is also useful for Black students who desire to practice and nourish self-love.

An Entry

We write this from the place of Black kinship and communion (McGuire et al., 2023); a site where love is felt, seen, touched, and experienced. We are two Black scholars — a Black woman and a Black man, who have known and experienced love’s possibility. Thus, in between the lines of this paper, we are attempting to create an opening for noticing and affirming love’s potential, within and beyond academia’s imagination.

Self-love: a conceptual framework

Love and a sense of belonging are fundamental needs for all humans including students (Maslow, 1943). As anti-Blackness is embedded in the foundation of higher education, and, too, persists ideologically (Dancy et al., 2018; Stewart, 2019; Wilder, 2013), loving Blackness for Black students becomes an essential meaning-making maneuver to assist them in navigating these hostile sites (Okello, 2020). According to Bransen (2015), self-love is the basis for self-knowledge, and one must have a motivation to love themselves and understand themselves fully as human beings. Similarly, Nash (2013) asserted that self-love is essential and the only love that must always exist. However, anti-Blackness and colonialism have interrupted this basic human need in the lives of Black people.

As mentioned previously, Black self-love in higher education is both a concept and a multidimensional practice in which Black people seek positive relationships with self and others within anti-Black environments. Self-love emerges from “an active working on the self, preparing it for the labor of social engagement, and for the task of advocating for the survival and wholeness of entire people” (Nash, 2013, p. 10). Self-love understands that challenging self-hatred, marked by “the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different” (Fanon, 1965, p. 6). Self-love, according to Baszile (2016), is an act of struggle against spirit-murder that pulls on legacies of “strength, resilience, and determination of Black women to keep on keeping on despite the exploitation, misrepresentation, and invisibility that often defined their lives” (p. 6).

Beatty et al. (2020) understood loving Blackness is about conceptually recognizing the plight of structural anti-Black racism, while also encouraging Black students and educators to practice self-care, build community, and seek justice. Baszile (2018) emphasized educators need to center Black self-love because it is often “undervalued and misunderstood, yet necessary as a redemptive counter-narrative” (p. 270). Overall, educators and practitioners can encourage Black self-love by putting into action care and healing for the mind, bodies, and spirits of Black people who labor against anti-Blackness within higher education.

Practices of self-love for Black students include loving oneself regardless of outside influences by “recognizing the goodness in Black bodies” (Jones, 2018, p. 229) as an act of “embodied agency that seeks to restore one’s esteem and personhood” (Okello & White, 2019, p. 155). Black self-love should also include rejecting media stereotypes which are demeaning to Black bodies and that could cause harm to one’s self- esteem (Adams-Bass et al., 2014), and ultimately practicing a self-love that transcends one person and flows to Black communities at large (Hopkins, 2002). Okello (2020) grapples with self-love, an expression of self-definition (Okello, 2018), as an embodied ethic on the premise that anti-Black histories, current realities, and desires are exacted on Black bodies and minds, which demands a praxis of well-being that should build from that condition. Conclusively, self-love is needed and longed for within a society, and structure of schooling, that views Black people as inferior.

Relevant literature

To guide the study, we engage with existing literature within and outside of higher education that frame Black student life. Although higher education scholarship that traces Black student experiences with anti-Black racism is necessary (e. g. Harper, 2013; L. D. Patton & Njoku, 2019; Quaye et al., 2020), we attend to the ways the discipline can support Black students toward self-love. Therefore, we draw upon literature from disciplines such as history, psychology, and sociology to understand the socio-historical connections between anti-Blackness and how it impacts Black students’ sense of self. Therefore, the literature review provides a brief historical overview of anti-Blackness in higher education, its impact on Black students’ experiences, its effects on post-graduate life, and the overall need for self-love. Below we provide context regarding the urgency of self-love.

The necessity of self-love

The urgency of self-love finds its root in the logics of anti-Blackness and coloniality (Fanon, 1952; Wynter, 2003). These historical and contemporary projects function to define the limits of humanness as determined by Eurocentric imperialism, and who can exist within the bounds of full citizen (Fanon, 1952; Wynter, 2003). Black people, in a western, United States context, have always existed on the outside of this categorization (Fanon, 1965; Spillers, 1987), stripped of sovereignty and self-possession. In the making of the human-nonhuman paradigm, sovereignty and self-possession were rights extended to whiteness and by extension white people. In this way, Black people were made to exist as fungible — exploitable, exchangeable, products with trade value (Spillers, 1987; Wynter, 2003), with unrecognized interiority. Moreover, Black people, framed in the colonial project as the antithesis and incapacity of whiteness, had no legal rights to own themselves, or the humanistic capacities assigned to self-ownership and being. Put simply, in the colonial frame, it was believed that Black people could not love themselves or be loved by others. Meaning making for Black people, thus, must compete with the manifestations of coloniality that are seeded in white institutions that reinforce the logics of coloniality.

Coloniality and anti-Blackness in higher education

To understand the interconnectedness of anti-Blackness and coloniality within higher education, one must understand the history of institutional racism and white supremacy. Wilder (2013) effectively demonstrated these connections by stating the foundation of the American higher education system was based on the owning and exploitation of enslaved Black people as a source of expendable free labor. Ideological remnants of this racist thinking are still embedded within the structures of academe which still render Black people as intellectually inferior (White & Cones, 1999). These ideological remnants are chronicled by the lack of tenured faculty of color, the numerous microaggressions questioning Black students’ intelligence, racist attacks reported on college campuses, and deficit-based research targeted toward Black students (Anand & Hsu, 2021; Burke, 2021; Davis & Museus, 2019). Physical remnants can be found in various aspects across college campuses including racist traditions, songs, and statues.

According to Taylor and Reddick (2021), American colleges and universities have cultures that are so aligned with racism that an “intellectual reconstruction” needs to take place that uproots anachronistic practices within institutional structures (p. 171). Dumas (2016) stated the history of anti-Blackness in American education has created a permanent condition in which Black people are still viewed as nonhuman in the social imagination of whites, and thus continues the “institutionalization of Black suffering” (Dancy et al., 2018, p. 178). For instance, Black students reported experiencing anti-Black racism at least twice per day (Marshburn & Campos, 2022) in classrooms, residence halls, advising sessions, and through social media (Burt et al., 2019; Volpe & Jones, 2023; Williams et al., 2022). According to Jenkins et al. (2021), Black students also experienced harassment and racial profiling by campus police. Incidents such as these take a mental and emotional toll on Black collegians pursuing higher education, which necessitates wellbeing strategies that might restore, maintain, and grow a healthy sense of self.

The impact of anti-Blackness on students

Considering higher education’s history, Black people’s intelligence, interior, and humanity are often assaulted in American educational systems (Dancy et al., 2018). This foundation served as the basis for the embodied trauma that Black students experience while living, existing, and being within Black bodies (Okello, 2020). The physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects of existing in a Black body and constantly enduring racial microaggressions lead to many issues including burn-out, fear, imposter syndrome, social and cultural isolation, and various assaults on their spirits (Edwards & Thompson, 2016; Husband, 2016; Negga et al., 2007; Okello et al., 2020). For instance, Quaye et al. (2020) described racial battle fatigue or the exhaustion from encountering daily racial microaggressions as a serious issue amongst Black students and professionals within higher education. Racial battle fatigue negatively impacts physical and mental health including anxiety, irregular sleeping patterns, and the inability to freely express emotion (Quaye et al., 2020).

Students may experience various stressors throughout their academic careers. These stressors include anxiety concerning exams, dissatisfaction with academic performance, lack of support, competition from peers (Helmbrecht & Ayars, 2021), and the pressure that heavy social media usage has on students’ lifestyle expectations (Iwamoto & Chun, 2020). However, these issues are exacerbated for Black collegians who simultaneously experience racism on college campuses. Racism manifests in day-to-day experiences including racial slurs online and in person (Valandra et al., 2022), violent encounters with campus police (Brooms & Druery, 2023), and disparaging comments regarding the physical aesthetic of Black bodies (Gaines, 2018). These factors can lead to Black students’ feeling a sense of unbelonging (Jenkins et al., 2021), the onset of health-related issues that impact their psychological well-being (Le et al., 2021), and even discontinuing their education.

In addition, Black students who disclosed experiencing more racial discrimination also reported higher levels of depressive symptoms and lower levels of self-esteem (Seaton et al., 2010). This embodied trauma can manifest in multiple ways including the internalization of anti-Blackness (Brooms & Druery, 2023) and what Gaines (2018) referred to as a Black anti-love regarding the rejection of Black bodies. Overall, Black students are facing assaults on their minds, bodies, and spirits that continue throughout their college years and beyond.

Thus, this study contributes to the literature by considering embodied formations of self-love in higher education as a way to intervene upon the psychological, emotional, and spiritual distress that Black students experience. This work is also expanding higher education research on mental wellness and Black students’ wellbeing (e.g., Le et al., 2021; Seaton et al., 2010) and sense of self. As professionals develop a fuller understanding of self-love, they can work toward creating spaces for Black collegians to explore self-love on their own terms.

Methodology

To locate the embodied intricacies of self-love, we merge multiple methods to consider the nexus of affect and the body (Okello, 2018; Spillers, 1987). Data for this study draws on individual qualitative interviews and written critical race testimonies (Baszile, 2008). Building on the pedagogical work of Denise Taliaferro Baszile (2008), critical race testimonies are subjective and context dependent. Critical race testimonies function to expose the nature of reason. According to Baszile (2008), critical race testimonies grow out of the Black autobiographical tradition (Alabi, 2005; Andrews, 1993; Franklin, 1995). The Black autobiography has been used to address the sociopolitical and cultural realities of Black people.

Relatedly, testimonies are consistent with narrative traditions, family histories, and chronicles and testimonios (Bell, 1987; Carrasco, 1996). Methodologically, critical race testimonies are a form of what Solórzano and Yosso (2002) termed critical race counter-storytelling. Specifically, they discuss counter-storytelling as a method of advancing stories of those overlooked in canonical literature (Delgado Bernal, 2002). In critiquing master narratives, testimonies embrace the racialized reflexivity often taken up in autoethnographic work (Boylorn, 2006; Ellis, 2009; Holman Jones, 2005).

Importantly, critical race testimonies, though stemming from the Black autobiographical tradition, are unspecific to anti-Blackness. To address this tension, we engage annotations and redactions (Sharpe, 2016), discussed below, a Black reading practice to account for what CRT is not theoretically constructed to do regarding the precarity of Black people as unlovable things – locate instances of Black liveliness, self-love. As such, the following questions guided our inquiry:

1. How does loving Blackness look, feel, and sound?

2. What are the possibilities and limitations to loving Blackness?

Institutional context and participants

The selection and recruitment of interviewees was sought using purposeful rather than random sampling (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). One of the researchers formerly worked at the institution and utilized their network to identify participants. The researcher reached out to faculty at the institution. This approach was useful in that potential student participants may have trusted the reference of faculty to participate in the study. We also acknowledge the potential of prior relationships between the researcher and participants to shape the process.

Participants for the study were invited by a recruitment letter distributed to colleagues and professionals at one regional public institution in the southeast. The institution is historically white and situated in a city with a public history of anti-Black violence directed specifically at Black people that continues to shape social and political life in the region for Black populations. The Black students who agreed to participate completed an online survey that gathered demographic information. The survey was only sent to those who agreed to participate.

The researcher reached out to twelve students, and in total, seven students participated in the study, five undergraduate students and two graduate students. The graduate students, Stephanie, and Sasha identified as Black women and were in the second and final year of their master’s program. Among the undergraduate students, four identified as Black men: Christopher, Malik, Dwayne, and Marcus. One participant, Ashley, identified as a Black woman. Each of the undergraduate participants were either juniors or seniors. Participants curated testimonies that responded to the research questions, which attended to the holistic body and self in the wake of anti-Blackness. Furthermore, we recognize the range of experiences among participants, and yet, work from the assumption that Black collegiate students at every level of their learning experience have the capacity to think deeply about the self and their relation to society. Moreover, we assume that Black students as knowers are offering myriad renderings about their existence and the social political conditions affecting their lives, which necessitates a critical approach for attuning to their existence. This assumption further legitimates our analytical approach.

Data collection

To take part in the study, participants had to Identify as Black/African American and be in their later years of post-secondary schooling. The recruitment letter explained self-love as a core theme of self-definition (Okello, 2018), and the urgency of it in anti-Black environments proven to be hostile toward Black people. The recruitment letter also noted that the purpose of the study was to interrogate how Black students understand self-love as they transition out of the collegiate context. Once participants affirmed their commitment to the study, researchers emailed the prompts to participants that included the aforementioned research questions. Specifically, the instructions asked students to please respond to the following questions:

1. What does self-love mean to you? How does loving Blackness look, feel, and sound?

2. What are the possibilities and limitations to loving Blackness?

No other instructions were given to participants, though they were invited to reach out to the researchers with any questions about the prompts. Researchers did not place length parameters on participants writing to allow participants to write as much as was necessary for them to address the question.

Additionally, this study invited participants to curate images about self-love in conjunction with the written testimonies and interviews. After receiving the testimonies, we scheduled a 90-minute semi-structured follow-up interview that broadly engaged with participants about the process of curating each item. The semi-structured interviews provided space for participants to consider the importance of self-love and their perceptions about the utility of self-love as they were preparing to transition beyond the educational context. During the interviews, researchers thanked participants for their time and asked if participants had any questions related to the study or the interview. The researcher began the semi-structured interview by asking “What were your initial reactions to an invitation to talk about self-love and loving Blackness?” Next, the researcher asked participants to “talk me through” the written responses and images.

After asking about the curated responses, the researchers asked the following series of questions: As you leave, or prepare to leave the collegiate context, what do you see as the value of self-love? What will you do to nurture self-love after you leave the collegiate context? How can educators and professionals support self-love in Black students? How can educators and professionals love Blackness? For the purposes of this manuscript, we focus on the two research questions, what does self-love mean to you? How does loving Blackness look, feel, and sound?, and What are the possibilities and limitations to loving Blackness?, in order to interrogate embodied formations of self-love.

Analytical approach

This manuscript examines the desires of Black life, and more specifically, formations of Black self-love untethered from the rigid, classificatory constraints of traditional approaches to qualitative research that are linear, (post) positivistic, and put forth dominant approaches to the collection and analysis of data, and assumptive frames of how to do educational research (Brown et al., 2014). To accomplish this, we attempt to locate self-love through annotations and redactions (Sharpe, 2016) as an analytical approach. Annotations and redactions is part of the genealogy of Black reading praxis that considers the various ways Black people negotiate contested spaces despite the structural patterns that function to stall their activity in the world (see James, 1999; Okello, 2020). Conceptually, annotations and redactions are reading practices that read against the grain. These practices involve examining the text to uncover both structure and agency, making meaning of what is explicitly stated and illuminating what may be overlooked.

Whereas research is never a neutral site, always and already subject to power and influence, annotations and redactions endeavor to recover, to break open, and produce richer descriptions than what might otherwise be visible. Paradigmatically, annotations and redactions might best be understood as a critical orientation, that is, too, borne of a different discipline — Black Studies (Sharpe, 2016). Conceptualizations of Blackness in educational research are often under theorized at best as it relates to Black people, and damaging at worst (Hampton et al., 2023). Thus, it is an approach that augments and thinks with renderings, reading into, and against, anti-Blackness and how it is systematically infused in speech and the notion of data collection. Annotations and redaction speculate and consider what might have been, or what could have been. Following Hartman’s (2008) practice of critical fabulation, it is not a practice of giving voice, whereas the instantiation assumes that participants are not already actively conveying meaning. Rather, it is praxis that theoretically presumes depth and complexity as it attempts to reckon with the precarity of Black living alongside the transcription and testimony, painting as full a picture of lives as possible.

Annotations and redactions, by definition, attempt to bring clarity and context to a text; they provide supplemental information and explanation. Sharpe (2016) described the process as bringing attention to that which is relegated to no significance; a commitment to seeing and refusing to look away. To annotate and redact is to make Black life visible if only momentarily, recognizing that the press of anti-Blackness demands absence (Stewart, 2019). Further, to do so is to push against historicity, state forces, seen and unseen, that would strip Black life of the capacity to feel, to desire.

Additionally, annotations and redactions are concerned not just with a close reading of texts, but might otherwise bind researchers to participants by way of affect. In this regard, Sharpe (2016) invites readers to consider what the unit of analyses call forth, as in what is the responsibility of the researcher/witness “to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery” (p. 116), the unending project of survival against subjection. Taken together, annotations and redaction offer a critical and ethical reading practice that may locate loving expressions in, for, and against economies of anti-Blackness.

In this study, we examined the testimonies and interviews of each participant through the lens of self-love, as described above. Theorizing with self-love, initial themes guided our reading of these data such as care, relationality, respect, and dignity. During our close read of each testimony, we highlighted passages, and note phrases in the margins that responded directly to the research questions. Furthermore, we listened to the written and spoken testimonies (Campt, 2017) shared by participants asking, what are the authors holistically expressing. Still, we assume the data is partial and incomplete on the assumption that participants are complex and research protocols are imperfect mechanisms that are often steeped in anti-Blackness, necessitating iterative analyses. Thus, we conducted multiple rounds of reading and reflecting on the testimonies, accompanied by discussions among ourselves as co-researchers.

Findings

Our interest in this study was motivated by what institutions cannot do for Black life (Stewart, 2015). Interrogating self-love was an attempt to do more than name anti-Black conditions that structure life; the purpose of the study was to investigate how Black students understand self-love so that they might begin to exhume potentialities for living more fully that are rooted in Black possibility. Accordingly, several students noted, “I have never thought about self-love.” An analysis of testimonies and interviews generated by participants produced several considerations on the praxis of self-love in and beyond the educational context. Specifically, findings reveal how, and to what extent, Black students were making sense of self-love as they neared the completion of their degree programs. In what follows, we discuss what we term affirmations of Black being.

Self-love for Black students affirms presence–spatially their bodies are worthy of space taking. Though their bodies are marked by myths of unbelonging, for Black people, self-love affirms a right to be present. In conversation with spatiality, self-love affirms affect, or their capacity to feel. The inherent capacity confronts distortions that refuse Black people’s ability to feel or desire and returns to them the range of emotional responses — despair, joy, fear, hope. Related to affect, self-love affirms knowing, and as such, elevates values, stories, frameworks, spiritual and cosmological principles, that are rooted in one’s cultural history as essential to one’s knowing and decision making.

Self-love grounds an intimate connection with the sacred with the recognition that the public sphere does not prioritize or function in ways that preserve the sacred. Thus, self-love for Black students invoked, and affirms a seeing practice, intent on getting clear on the relationship that white institutions have with Black bodies and minds. Seeing represents a hard-looking, driven by sensing — intuition, foresight, and attention to the patterns of history. Connected to seeing, self-love, affirms doing. Here, self-love, is imbued with an acting upon the world (e.g., problem-solving) in ways that affirm their needs, pleasures, and a healthy sense of entitlement. As a beginning, untethered from the sense that any of these affirmations subsumes and preorders another, we begin with an affirmation of presence.

Presence

Black students discussed self-love as an affirmation of presence. Presence was discussed broadly as a sense of one’s being in the world. This finding surfaced as both a hope and affirmation against what Black students knew were anti-Black structural realities. As Black people exist in a structurally antagonistic relationship with society, a relationship that would otherwise define them as perpetually out of place, lacking home, and incapable of claiming a right to whiteness and its property making attributes, the claim to presence as a state of existence, or ontological beingness is noteworthy.

Presence against the tyranny of history and contemporary logics that militate against one’s station, are represented, perhaps, most clearly in Sasha’s claim during the interview when she stated, “I should have every right to be here.” Continuing this articulation Sasha reflected on what it meant to exist, presumably, as a human, positing that self-love was “understanding that I was born with a purpose that I was … I’m here, to fulfill something I’m not completely sure of just yet, but just like everyone else is born and they’re not asked to be born,” she, too, should be extended the rights and liberties of personhood which include the right to be present, or here. Reading against the grain, here, also denotes a livingness or being alive in the social structure, which seemed to compete with what she and others knew as the instantiation of social death that Black being in the western, United States demands.

Importantly, Sasha’s inclusion of the auxiliary/helping verb “should,” reflected a conscientiousness about her will to presence, in and against anti-Black structures, that cannot be understated. It seemed to say that while I believe I deserve these things as an extension of some shared capacities, alas, I am deeply aware that Black presence is not promised, guaranteed, and, to some degree, may not be attainable. In lieu of the unpromised, love was a decision to work against the shape(s) of white supremacy and the external confines of what Black was supposed to be. On this latter point, in his testimony, Dwayne said,

Loving Blackness is accepting that there isn’t one definition of being black. You can be black and quiet. You can be black and loud. You can be black and speak in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) or be black and speak in proper English. You can be black while enjoying rap, anime, or whatever you want to be.

The explicit point made here is one of expansiveness, calling for a sense of Blackness as something beyond cultural fixations about who and what constitutes authentic versions of Blackness. Dwayne’s offering suggests that they have witnessed the ways Blackness is boxed in or accepted. Alternatively, one might gather from their comments that Blackness is malleable and capable of shapeshifting to meet the demands and culture and one’s sense of self.

Ashley, similarly, commented in her testimony, “Loving Blackness means accepting the many forms that it takes which includes Black folx that don’t subscribe to a heteronormative culture, gender non-conforming, varying socioeconomic status, religious preference.” For Black students’ presence did not ignore structural forces; rather, it considered how to be in and alongside those forces.

Knowing

Sasha noted in her testimony, self-love “sounds so familiar, but it’s so distant.” In this way, self-love can be read as an attachment to an ideal that should be true, as similarly stated in the notion of presence, a future tense unrooted from naivete and yet possible; it communicates a sense of not yet but must be to realize love in its fullest sense. Reading against the grain, the articulation of familiarity conjures notions of heritage and anecdotes shared across time, ways of knowing and being that were useful for survival then and now. In this sense of familiar knowledge, in her interview, Sasha recalled “I’m blessed to say that I grew up with a mom who instilled the beauty of Blackness and knowing that it isn’t [simply] on the outside, it is also on the inside.” In this way, Black students regarded self-love as a project of memory, remembering, and connection. They reflected on the ways anti-Blackness was/is bent on separation, disconnecting Black people from what they know and their knowing practices, and how that process of disconnection is often masked by the seeming love that society has for Black culture.

Sasha lamented in her interview “we live in a world that loves black culture, but we don’t address the issues that come with being a Black person in this world.” The “issues” here could be read as the accompanying anti-Black hostilities of Black being (e.g., judicial, and extra judicial violence, premature death, etc.) that does not support the counsel of Sasha’s mother about Sasha’s inner beauty, and in many ways is antithetical to her mother’s instruction to know her beauty and worth. On these terms, Black students talked about the value of knowing, self-love as holistic.

Stephanie and Sasha both discussed love as holistic, with Sasha rhetorically asking in her interview, “how do you feel on the inside.” Pointing to interiority, or what Elizabeth Alexander (2004) called the Black interior, is critical in that it illustrates a point less obvious to conventional anti-Black epistemological thought, which is, Black people possess an interior space that is rich, capacious, and fleshed with desires. Marcus shared a similar idea when he wrote in his testimony that self-love was “being content and happy about the person you are…staying true to who you are.” This undertone threads across participants in that there exists a seduction to bring oneself into alignment with western ways of knowing and being inside the educational context.

Christopher, Ashley, and Dwayne each talked about the importance of mentors in the form of faculty and staff and Black Studies specific courses and frameworks that helped to facilitate new learning about their histories, present, and future as Black people in diaspora. They talked about the ways K-12 education did little if at all, to build or encourage a sense of self that was rooted in Blackness. The collegiate context, thus, for participants, as difficult as it may have been to negotiate, was instrumental in facilitating this sense of connection. The challenge of leaving the context was not lost on students, as Christopher, in his interview, referred to self-love as a “journey.” He continued, saying, “It’s something that if you don’t have a solid foundation…it will take some time to gain. Self-love is the acceptance of who you are.” This notion of “journey,” again, a consistent idea that surfaced for students seemed to say that self-love was a process, not an arrival and that it would be necessary to equip oneself with the tools to continue struggling against ways of being that fit a western, neoliberal idea.

Feeling

Self-love had an affective component for students. It was represented by emotional capacities to share, receive love, and to give/show love to others. This affirmation of affect labored against Cartesian politics that call for dualities and function to separate the mind and body, feeling and emotion in favor of objective, emotionless postures. Sasha, described self-love by saying in her interview, “it just feels right.” Feeling right gestures toward embodied, felt realities, and a sense of where one should be. It suggests, too, that a feeling of wrongness exists. Wrongness, in the Black intellectual tradition, is understood by Wynter (2006) as the psychic dictates of the current order of knowledge that impose an unbearable wrongness of being on Black people. Reading against the grain, what Black students may be hinting at is that part of the project of emancipation is feeling yourself free from those unbearable dictates as a gateway into another type of being.

Wynter (2006) pointed to the Black Arts/Aesthetic movements as sociopolitical instruments for Black emancipatory projects, believing that a revalorization was possible through art, music, and sounds. Stephanie lifts this tradition and method as opportunities to be moved. She continued, saying in her interview:

Like black artists, I like r&b music and that’s just what it is and… I enjoy black church…And you’re not going to catch me at a predominantly white church right, because I think the music is different, I think the preaching hits different. For me, I also gain value from those things. I love the way that I feel when I listen to music. I love the practical advice that I feel like I get from the church and so, for me, self-love looks like actively practicing those things.

Stephanie’s comments demonstrate the potential for self-love’s affect to simultaneously create a grammar of possibility. Listening to music or preaching, for Stephanie, worked in multiple registers. The sonic frequencies and articulations may generate positive sensations for an individual’s characteristic of joy, comfort, and satisfaction. These feelings, too, can work in tandem as pragmatic principles for living. Christopher shared thoughts consistent with this partnership, writing in his testimony, self-love “sounds like encouraging words or uplifting speeches to bring Umoja amongst the people.” In his description, self-love can be read as affective exchange, something shared between people and culture. In these ways Black aesthetics can be affective conduits, carried by sonic frequencies through words and speech patterns.

Affective components of self-love highlighted possibilities for joy, celebration, and freedom. Ashley wrote in her testimony, “a Black man deciding to showcase his emotions and passion for something despite toxic masculinity, is self-love,” it “sounds like a group of Black kids laughing freely, running around without letting the perception society tries to force on them dictate who they will become.” Here, emotions, or the freedom to feel is unencumbered by white patriarchal logics or anti-Black carceral structures that monitor and police Black expressions. Feeling, self-love, in this way, is mobilized as an act of refusal.

Regard

Spillers (1987) wrote that Black people are so “loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean” (p. 65). The achievement of some sense of self-regard means stripping down “through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness” (p. 65). We begin with this context to clarify the ways society strangles notions of Black self-possession in the western, United States.

Stephanie clarified in her interview, “society does not incentivize loving Blackness.” Of note, Stephanie stated, “we live in a society that doesn’t incentivize loving blackness in the same way that it incentivizes loving that white ideal and so that becomes hard.” Another way of understanding this statement is to say that incentivizing and regarding a “white ideal” is only possible when something is pitted against it. Or, for an incentive to take hold, there must be an active denigration of other possibilities. Amid this dispossession, however, Black students articulate self-love as a life-making, a project of graciously regarding the self. Here, regard should be understood as pleasure taking, delight, and holding oneself in esteem. Ashley emphasized this point, writing in her testimony that “there has to be a level of respect and admiration for oneself. Life is no easy task and comes with pain and suffering that can leave even the strongest people jaded and weary.” Of note, Ashley reckons with pain and suffering as something that “will come” but does not leave Black people as the sum of pain and suffering. During the interview, she made this point explicitly, saying:

There will always be people who tried to convince us or convince you that self-love comes at a price, but pain and suffering isn’t a necessity all the time, however, familiar that feels to us. We’re used to it at this point. Some things we’re desensitized to because we’re used to the pain and suffering. But I don’t want that to characterize us.

Regard also surfaced as forms of acceptance despite identity tensions. For example, Malik wrote in his testimony “self-love means accepting what you cannot change about your identity and actively bettering yourself in the areas that you need work on … appreciating all my cultures that make up my heritage has been helpful to my own mental health.” Here, Malik grappled with what it meant to identify as a Black person as someone with a parent who is white. For Malik, coming to see his Blackness as no less authentic, and yet, just different, marked an important part of self-love. He added that self-love was coming to appreciate that “your unique qualities make you who you are, “while Stephanie talked about this point, writing in her testimony, “self-love means acceptance and nurturing of the things that make you uniquely you.”

Seeing

Blackness problematizes the visual field in Western discourse such that the affective capacity for Blackness to trouble the dominant society is exacted when located on Black bodies. Plainly, the presence of the Black body causes disruption in the sociopolitical imaginary. Black student participants responded to the precarious nature of their existence by enacting visual practices to address the narrative weight and erasures that were pinned to them. It is important to note that attention to visuality and sight in this formulation is not constituted by ableist depictions or relating to the range of biological abilities; rather, renderings of sight/visuality here were discursive, pointing to discourses of visuality. As mentioned above, there is an aspect of futurity linked to self-love, that calls forth imaging and imaginative processes.

Both Stephanie and Sasha discussed this as a seeing “beyond the norm,” or otherwise way of seeing. In her interview, Sasha talked about the projections of Blackness in culture and her desire to be “recognized, to be visible, in my most authentic way-not in a comedic way.” Reading against the grain, we take Sasha to be suggesting that cultural representations of Blackness can present Black people as objects of consumption and entertainment. Instead, she recognizes or understands herself as more than those depictions. Thus, there is an expressed desire to be understood, affirmed, loved, in all her complexity. This expressed desire adds dimension to her aforementioned claim about deeply loving and regarding Black people.

In a similar vein, in his interview, Dwayne discussed loving Blackness as “recognizing the value that you and your peers bring to the world simply by existing.” The sentiment functions as a statement of value. Though society may regard Black existence as lacking substance and inherent value, Dwayne envisions, honors, chooses to see value over and against ideas that suggest otherwise. By doing so, Dwayne keys into the imaginative necessity of self-love, to make space, or believe that one deserves space, in the world. Malik believed that this imaginative work allowed Black students to “step outside of their comfort zone,” as cited in his testimony.

The comfort zone can be understood as the zone of nonbeing that Fanon (1952) referenced, where Black people were/are expected to maintain in fixed places that do not interrupt the orders of society. Moving outside of that zone was possible for Malik through exposure, “learning about black history you are not taught in school.” Centering Blackness in curriculum, but also as a medium and lens for living, is to be open to a range of possibilities for seeing (the self) as self-love.

Doing

Self-love revealed itself as a doing and refusal practice, or no/non-doing. The concern here was over the ways Black people are expected to perform, or always be doing. Labor, itself, is an onto-epistemology, or way of knowing and being, and in relation to Black people, for Black students in this study, was a configuration mapped onto Blackness. That Black people are treated as fungible objects of exchange follows King (2016), as the notion of fungibility makes the historicized Black person an “abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values. Black fungibility is the treatment of the Black enslaved body as an open sign that can be arranged and rearranged for infinite kinds of use” (p. 2).

A clear point of tension, Black students discussed self-love as acts that purposefully marshaled against this colonial apparatus and expectation. Ashley’s initial response to the invitation to participate in this study reflected this latter point. In the opening minutes of the interview, when asked about her initial reactions to the study and her potential involvement, she walks the interviewer through her process, saying:

whenever I get an email and it’s asking about a project or anything that’s DEI related or diversity-related or like has to do with race or ethnicity, like literally anything, I usually think like what’s the purpose of this, and then I think again what’s the purpose of this? Because sometimes people ask for something and they’d be like well Oh, this is why I’m doing it, and then you think a little deeper and you’re like this isn’t really why you’re doing it because sometimes people will ask. Usually somebody from a white majority space may ask a request something and then they kind of be like, “Well, this is what we’re doing, and we would really appreciate like your input.” And then they go on to say something that would indicate that you were having to educate someone or that you were having. To do something at your expense. So that to me is like a huge difference whenever people are asking.

This sense of asking and getting clear on the purpose of one’s labor and energy troubles doing for the sake of doing and is cautious of exploitative priorities. In a different example, Ashley, talked about participating in experiences like the “Excellence project.” As a mentor for this program, Ashley and her peers were schooled in theories like William Cross’s (1971) Nigrescence where they could begin to place the language of self-hate in conversation with racial identity development literature, and subsequently, gain new tools for how to see and make sense of their meaning-making journeys. These decisions and nondecisions lift care and concern for mind and body as central to regard. Choosing to say no, or, yes to the self, was present with Sasha as well. She noted that self-love was “advocating for oneself and knowing when to say no.”

Black self-love and self-love in Black: a discussion

For Black students, the educational context was a site to equip the self, to learn the posture of self-love, even if they never named it, recognizing that Black livability demanded it. Black livability is not an essentialist formation. Black livability, as an expression of possibility, occurs in negotiation with the ways anti-Blackness gets on the inside. Blackness, in all its complexity, for Black students, was not, and was never the tension as it relates to self-love; instead, the matter of self-love is perpetually at war with consignments to and of Blackness.

To be clear, as discussed above, the white ideal affirms anti-Black ways of being advanced by European coloniality. In this way, anti-Black assumptions and postures are taken on by Black people as the suppression, and more completely, the extraction of Black onto-epistemological frames (Okello, 2020). This anti-Black arrangement (Wynter, 2003) places a different priority on self-love for Black people as more than feel-good practice; rather, it may be the method that supports their psychological health and wellness in preparation for a society that may not be able to offer as much.

Praxis

Responding to the workings of anti-Blackness as noted in the literature review, Black students are calling for an understanding of how anti-Blackness comes to bear on and in their lives. Educators and practitioners, thus, should follow the thoughts of Black students in this study who discussed the invaluable presence of courses and training specific to positive self-esteem and identity development and Black consciousness raising. More specifically the study makes clear that the work of self-love, over and against anti-Black hostilities that contend for the space, time, energy, and movement of Black people, requires a commitment to praxis.

By praxis, we are not referring to a linear process of applying technical knowledge (e.g., self-love) to a problem (e.g., unhealthy regard for the self); rather, it may be that working at and toward self-love is an ongoing and unfinished commitment, that is being sharpened and refined toward the goal of a healthy, holistic sense of self.

Matriculations

Moreover, the study makes clear that anti-Black realities precede student matriculation to educational spaces and await their presence. As such, student success literature is implicated in how it purposefully does or does not account for the realities of Black people, and a need expressed here as self-love. Though there is work emerging on structural damage that anti-Blackness facilitates on and around Black students in education contexts, more research is needed to flesh the damaging potentialities of internalized anti-Blackness in the lives of Black students. While the assessment of students’ achievement of self-love is beyond the scope of this manuscript, students expressed enthusiasm about the opportunity to devote concentrated attention to the questions.

The educational context, thus, provides the opportune generative space to cultivate self-love, in the uncertainty of safety beyond the campus. This point does not mean that college campuses are psychologically safe places, they are not. However, there is some potential for educators and practitioners to model what it means to love Blackness — to affirm Black liveliness in a way that centers the need for Black students to engage in self-love processes.

Implications

This study gestures for the importance of Black specificity in research with Black students. Thus, to approach a topic like self-love absent a focus on Blackness and the various negotiations therein, offers but a superficial rendering of how Black people take up and understand the concept. It would seem, thus, that methods that do not incorporate Black theoretical and conceptual postures may not be able to affirm the most intimate component and complexities of Black life and living.

Attending to Black specificity in wellness and identity formation (e.g., self-love) and educational research (e.g., annotations and redactions as the methodological approach), as we have done in this study, necessitates a critical paradigmatic departure. This departure is strengthened by strategies that can name the permanence of anti-Blackness in higher education contexts, without foreclosing possibilities of Black students to cultivate a positive sense of self. Taken together, we understand the praxis of Black self-love as a valuable approach to meaning making that centers Black students’ need to develop self-love in higher education contexts.

Pedagogically, faculty and practitioners who engage with and advise Black students are socialized into a state of ethics that advances the general health and wellbeing of students. While there is utility in ethical standards proposed by organizations like CAS, accounting for Black life challenges faculty and practitioners to examine those general standards in an anti-Black context to understand how the presence of Blackness refuses ethical regard in the social imaginary. Where non-malfeasance, or do no harm, for example, is a common standard of higher education practice, viewing this standard in view of anti-Blackness compels one to ask how the social imaginary, alternatively, demands Black social death, and thus, engaging the particularities of Black living (e.g., self-love) becomes essential for reconstituting the general assumption.

Conclusion

The nature of Black existence demands that theory and practice take seriously what it means to at once name, critique, and work to dismantle the ongoing violence of anti-Black discourse and materiality, and, simultaneously, work to cultivate practices of preservation that would support Black students in meeting the wake of hostilities that vie for their peace and well-being. This study, rooted in the assumption of anti-Blackness as permanent and enduring, adds to the discourse on Black students’ wellness and holistic development, specifically, how they understand self-love.

Additionally, the manuscript details themes for a praxis of self-love that considers presence, doing, seeing, knowing, and regard. Educators and practitioners ought to consider the primacy of self-love as a component of self-defining praxis, that might readily prepare Black students to encounter a public sphere that has shown itself to be incapable of loving Blackness. As such, it illustrates the complexities of loving Blackness from Black students themselves. Moreover, it generated pedagogical and curricular possibilities for supporting Black students in the project of self-love, loving Blackness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).