Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

by Kathleen Collins

We needed to be autodidacts; we needed to pass books from hand to hand; we needed to search, and thus be inspired by hard-won effort to create ourselves. We needed to understand that there is power in searching and finding and not having things handed to us. We would follow June Jordan’s declaration in “Poem for South African Women”: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

To be so nurtured; to know day after day only comfort, love; to feel your home a happy place where joy and justice meet—this has always seemed to me the greatest gift imaginable.