Love as Justice

Abstract

The law, serving as a codification of the commitments and values of “White space,” often treats love and justice as separable and separate values, experiences, and institutions. Black love, on the contrary, is bound up with and, even, identified with justice. This inextricability is painted masterfully in the interstices of Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The story, widely framed as a woman's journey to autonomy and love, is just as much the story of her search for justice. This article uses Hurston's narrative of love and justice, Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy of humanization, and law to illustrate the implications of Black love for engaging legal justice in White space. It concludes that liberation for Black people demands humanizing legal praxis.

Social Justice is the Spirit and Aim of an Applied Science of Human Behavior: Moving from Colonial to Participatory Research Practices

“…Loving is a skill and a fluid set of contextual actions; we have to form a common foundation and an ongoing dialogue about what it means to be loving in the context of scientific practice. As one entry point, we consider the conceptualizations offered by Yuille et al (2020) about notions of love as they relate to justice and the Black community, and a second notion of love offered by Maparyan (2012) as it relates to womanism and our spiritual interconnectedness with the universe. In both cases, affection, care, concern, and empathy are related to actions, and those actions are related to how we choose to live our personal lives, how we practice in our disciplines, and how we collectively shape our policies and laws.…”

“…The point of an applied science is to be socially meaningful (Wolf, 1978 ). We suggest that to be socially meaningful means to stand in the vantage point of love (Gilbert, 2013 ), including love in the formulation of justice (Yuille et al, 2020 ), and ensuring love for all humanity in the formulation and communication of our scientific practices. This stance should be infused in our research methods and in our clinical practices.…”