How to Love While Black
Three years ago I thought about what I wanted to write my English thesis on. I already knew that the thesis would be about black people, I just didn’t know what about us.
Around the same time I brainstormed, someone handed me a copy of All About Love by Bell Hooks. I was hooked (pun intended) and decided that I too was going to write about love and black people. Only I was going to use literature to support my nonexistent argument.
I sat across from my advisor and said:
“I want to write about love…between black people…in literature!”
She looked at me a bit perplexed and asked me to elaborate. I went on a rant with the words: blackness, intimacy, racism, trauma, violence, and love repeated numerous times. She looked at me once I finished and said,
“That’s a great idea, it just needs to be refined.”
The refined idea was this: Black people in America have faced a multitude of trauma, racism, and violence from the moment they stepped on to American soil. This trauma has passed down from generation to generation and has morphed into a modern day phenomenon that is in the very fiber of the way black people interact with one another. My thesis was a particular focus on the ways black people performed intimacy in heterosexual relationships and how when juxtaposing those relationships to their white counterparts, it always seemed harder for black people to love in a way that was free from trauma, racism, or violence.
This research took me down a path that led to me examining gender roles during slavery, looking at certain documents, like the Moynihan Report, which predicted the effects that slavery and racism would have on black people, but blamed black people for those effects. I examined the way I dealt with black men, or even considered the options I had for romance when thinking about my blackness. My thesis felt so important to me, as I navigated a predominately white institution in the height of Black Lives Matter, police indictments, and an overtly racist system that felt eerily akin to the Civil Rights era. My question was how is all of this playing out behind closed doors? How are black people relating to each other? And will we ever be able to do it without the ramifications of slavery? Three years ago, my answer was that black people needed to explore what intimacy looked like outside the confines that white America placed us in. I had no idea where to begin blurring the lines of confinement, but I knew it needed to happen.
Three years later, I still pretty much agree with everything I wrote, and still do not know what loving each other as black people, in all its forms (romantic, platonic, and familial) looks like without trauma and violence. I even started to explore this notion of intimacy to black women specifically and started internally and externally asking questions. Are we indebted as black women, to only loving black people? What does it mean as a black woman to explore what love looks like in a world that always tells us we are in last place when it comes to desirability?
I would be lying if I said that I had the answers to all these questions and as I get older and see people around me, explore and perform love in their own ways, I wonder how many of these practices are from our own lived experiences? Are these passed down traits? I have no idea, but I know when I sat down and said I wanted to write about love, I thought it was that I wanted to write about romantic love, but really I wanted to know: what and how is it to love and be black? I thought that perhaps my research would give me the answers to explain my own life, or how I would act in the future.
I mean isn’t that how most research starts; it comes from wanting to explore yourself?
A few days ago I started listening to a podcast called 1619 which is part of a large project that The New York Times is doing chronicling the impact of slavery on America since the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619. It is an honest, shocking, and staggering recollection of the huge impact slavery had in the building blocks of America. As I listened, I heard some statistics I never heard in my life and then I heard some stories I knew very well. Yet no matter what I heard, my body had a perpetual chill that comes from listening to the injustices that black people faced.
I couldn’t help but think about how this 1619 project, much larger than my 30 page thesis, is in a way exploring a larger theme. Which is how are we as black people and Americans as a whole exploring the life long chilling and detrimental effects of slavery? Something I remember writing in my thesis was that the reason Moynihan’s report missed the mark was due to the lack of acknowledgement. He never fully acknowledged that it was America’s fault that the black household was in “trouble.” 1619 tries to get to that acknowledgement, and only time will tell as the project expands if they succeed.
As I listened this morning to the second episode, I thought to myself: America may never acknowledge this. America may never in my lifetime or any of yours admit that the crimes against black people in the Atlantic Slave Trade and in the American South are some of the worst crimes in humanity. That those crimes are still being paid for to this day, by its victims.
The acknowledgment may never come. So what now? How do we acknowledge ourselves?
Surprise! I do not know! But, I know that it starts with looking at the very intimate moments and seeing how we can extract the trauma and violence and in its place leave love.
Maybe it starts with taking that chill I felt while listening to the podcast, and recognizing the feeling that comes from knowing the blood that runs through me comes from enslaved people. And that underneath that chill, is a kinship that only being dually black and American one can experience. Perhaps it means taking that kinship and learning how to expand it into new shapes, worlds, and dimensions.
Perhaps we can invent a new way to love after all.
