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 none defined
In this article, two queer men, one Black American and the other Palestinian, theorize “reciprocal solidarity” as a model of solidarity that thrives on love, friendship, storytelling, reciprocity, shared experiences, struggles, and queer kinship.
This brief article examines the ways in which the ideological and theological understandings of some Black churches and the conservative Right in the USA cohere to form a heteronormative agenda which is used to police queer sexual expressions and familial formations. The article begins to explicate a disruptive political and theological frame that transgresses heteronormativity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.