The Struggle for Black Liberation and Justice
TEXT OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO
DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIA
ILLUSTRATION JESSICA MINKER
NEWS
THOUGHTS ON
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“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
