Black Radical Love: A Practice

At the root of Black resistance—the collective struggle through which we might imagine and build a world more just, more free, more equitable, more magical—is love. Nothing but an unwavering love for Black people can catalyze and sustain the protracted struggle for Black liberation and its various iterations across time, like the contemporary movement for Black lives.

And when I speak of love, I am not referencing a type of neo-liberal idea—affect turned into a commodity emptied of meaning, vulnerability, and the power it brings about. Not love as unrequited grace without justice, or prayers for those who harm us while denying our anger and hurt, or a fight without arms. Love, as I imagine it, is political.

Love, as bell hooks (2000) explored in her landmark text, All About Love: New Visions, should counter the individualism so central to the flow of economic and social relations that shape our world—everything from geopolitics to the ways we show, or deny, intimacy within our neighborhoods and homes. Love, in fact, is animated through our connections, mutual understanding, and community. True love rebukes and binds the structural impediments through which some Black people live and die. And to be clear, by “die” I mean murdered with calculated rapidity or the slow socioeconomic and political processes that render the alive socially dead as Orlando Patterson theorized. In fact, nothing but Black radical love can activate a Black politic shaped by an ethic of mutual care: an ethic that rests upon a grounding principle of shared concern and a responsibility to care for the different—the other, that person other than the self—in this moment of perpetual anti-blackness, fed by and large through this nation’s consistent investment in militarized capitalist patriarchy. I believe only this particular type of love can create the break in this mess that impedes our collective freedom.

What but radical Black love can motivate Black people situated at the edges of the margins with the most to lose—women; trans people; disabled individuals; the incarcerated; economically distressed; and undocumented people—to put their lives and security on the line on behalf of their kinfolk, some of whom might very well be responsible for their slow and, sometimes, immediate demise?

What but radical Black love can birth Black revolutionaries; activists; organizers; hell- raisers; community and institution builders; dreamers; theorists; and artists in a time when so much is on hand and ready to deaden our concerns for Black people?

What but radical Black love can turn an act of racist vigilante violence, like the killing of Trayvon Martin at the hands of now-free—and alive—George Zimmerman, into a critical moment of mourning and political reframe. A moment wherein, and amid the state-level display of Black life’s disposability, Black organizers were still able to assert the truth that Black lives have, do, and will always matter?

What but radical Black love can compel would-be students; mamas and daddies; sisters; brothers; next-door neighbors and play cousins; the once unbothered; or young people rocking sagging pants, to take to the streets of Ferguson under the sweltering Missouri sun for over 100 days without rest or justice after one of their own, Mike Brown Jr., was shot, killed, and left to bleed to death on a public street for four and half hours?

At the heart of the more recent protests, in public scrutiny of the state and nonviolent resistance, is an energy so profoundly magnetizing it ushered in a moment that throws into relief the sacredness of blackness and Black peoples’ right to survival. That critical point is what is missing in so many of the public conversations, both the critiques and the praise, focused on the movement for Black lives.

The movement for Black lives is at once a consequence of Black love and a striving for the possibility of a Black liberatory future, where all Black people might be free and alive to love as they will. That collective Black future overflowing with protected joy will remain solely theoretical however, if we don’t make a commitment to examining the “I,” namely, our placement, in the intersection. If any Black freedom fighter, as we are differently positioned in the wide matrix of oppressions, fails to assess the “I,” our freedom dreams, to borrow Robin D. G. Kelley’s (2002) useful framework, might very well be another Black person’s nightmare.

We are, therefore, presented with the task of self-reflexive analysis and the crucial work of unlearning and undoing the things that might allow our visions of freedom, and our dreams of a more loving world, to actually substantiate the world we are seeking to resist. Doing so might mean we may fall short in centering, freeing, and giving life to those we know who need it.

I cannot, for instance, recount the number of times some Black person whose confessed love for Black people stopped short of justice for Black trans and gender-nonconfirming people. I cannot tell you how often I’ve come across some Black cisgender heterosexual man arguing why a specific focus on Black women and girls—who are often the victims of sexual and other forms of predatory assaults by Black men and boys—is dangerous to movement work because of the ways it splits an imagined Black political agenda. And I will be lying if I didn’t admit my own failures to take stock of who is left out from conversation tables I have helped organize or have been part of—tables where decisions are made and power resides.

Love, true love, Black radical love is a practice—a ritual, one must take up daily. It is a practice of protecting Black life and emptying ourselves of the death-dealing practices of misogyny; trans and queer antagonism; ableism; elitism; ageism; and any other act of lovelessness that aids in the killing of Black people’s spirits/bodies. This critique, shaped by the legacy of Black feminist thought and politics, is central to the current iteration of the Black struggle for liberation.

But let me return to this idea of radical Black love I began with, which fuels so much of the movement work I’ve either been part of or witnessed. I will never forget, for example, the evening of August 28, 2014, a short time after Mike Brown was killed. About 42 of us gathered at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. We arrived as strangers, for the most part, enraged by Mike Brown’s brutal killing. That evening, the deep, abiding love for our people was what compelled Patrisse Cullors and me to work together, fulltime, and virtually, with two dozen people across the country, for over two weeks to organize the Black Life Matters Freedom Ride in collaboration with New York City–based organizer Thenjiwe McHarris, artist and organizer Corece Smith, and St. Louis–based organizations like the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), Hands Up Don’t Shoot, and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

For 21 hours, from New York City to St. Louis, a busload of organizers; journalists; lawyers; clergy; elders; youth; women; men; queer; gender-nonconforming; college-educated; and street-smart Black people spent time engaged in deep conversations, political debates and, most important, friendship-building on a charter bus that lacked air-conditioning and a working toilet. The group of strangers who met up with about 500 others traveling from across the United States and Canada strategized; protested; engaged in political education; ate; slept; laughed; cried; and prayed together that Labor Day weekend. The group returned to New York City a few days later, after having offered their voices, resources, and presences to aid the work of the brave activists in Ferguson, but we also returned back to our respective locations as a collective, as a community, as a family.

The ride was an important first step in the development of a new Black political formation. Strangers came together, and returned from Ferguson to their own Fergusons. Their presence seeded the development of the Black Lives Matter Network, championed by Patrisse, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometti, a short time later. While the media noticed the sensational aspects of disruption and protest, what it missed were the relationships formed at that time, through a network, which developed out of a desire to provide a conduit through which Black strangers on the journey to freedom might meet. What, however, does that look like in practice?

It looks like chapters being formed, like our chapter in New York City, where many of us had already been involved in various forms of movement work. But it also looks like helping to raise money to ensure chapter members in need of therapeutic services can get the help they need. It looks like intimate dinners and conversations, without promotion on social media, happening at the homes of members so people can eat (if they are hungry); check in (should they be in need of any form of assistance); cry (should they require a shoulder); laugh (because joy is also necessary); and be held accountable (should any of us need to be reminded of why it is we must work for all Black lives). It looks like an empty couch or room now taken up; a job vacancy filled; collaborative projects birthed; friendships formed; moving off of social media and inviting others to conversation when conflict arises; receiving a phone call in the middle of the night to gather money to bail someone out of jail; and folk driving or flying hours to show up at the funeral of a stranger unannounced, like the chapter did when my father died.

None of this is new; iterations of the Black freedom movement have always been grounded in radical love and the desire for collective care. We’ve always practiced what some now name “micro-affections.” This is what Black radical love at the heart of the movement looked like yesterday and looks like today, but for some reason, relationship formation, collective care, and love continue to be unacknowledged, under-theorized, and understood as less than radical potentials. Collective care and radical love are strategies: they shape our political orientations, and they bring life to our organizing approaches. The way we treat people; our willingness or unwillingness to engage others; our care; our love is as crucial and political as anything else, because Black radical love not only anticipates liberatory Black futures, but also leans into such futures, after all.

We seize Black futures now and forever.