Salvation: Black People and Love (Love Song to the Nation Book 3)

by bell hooks

Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the strength to go forward in the midst of heartbreak and misery. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem, the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls. The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. Without love our lives are without meaning. Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.

While masking was sometimes crucial to survival during the period of racial apartheid, those strategies destroy our capacity to be truth tellers when we adopt them in contemporary life. This cannot be stated often enough. Since patriarchal masculinity also encourages men to mask what they feel as a way of manipulating others, black males are especially at risk; they may be rewarded for being estranged from their feelings.

those who lack material privilege have as much access to spiritual and moral riches as anyone else.

In African-American life black women have been love’s practitioners. Amazingly, despite how easy it would have been or would be for black women to give up on love given the adversity we have had to confront on these shores, many of us have held to our hope in love because we believe in love’s power to heal and renew, to reconcile and transform.

Black women make a mistake when we assume that closing ourselves off and wearing the mask of indifference makes us strong or keeps us well. Repressing our feelings leads to stress and that leads to a variety of illnesses. Allowing ourselves to feel only rage is equally debilitating. To love ourselves rightly, to love others, we have to claim all our emotions.

Underlying the attacks on black single mothers is the assumption that patriarchal families are the healthiest. Of course, most of the recent work on nuclear families highlights that these families are more often than not dysfunctional. Feminist scholarship on family life calls attention to the extent to which coercive male domination erodes family values. Widespread domestic violence and male-perpetrated incest are two indications that the patriarchal nuclear family is not inherently a more positive location to raise children than a single-parent household.

Men do not make life good for women and children by simply being present; it is how they act and interact that makes the difference.

We live in a culture where all men have access to practical, affordable, and adequate forms of birth control. No responsible man need father children he does not want to care for. Until our society stops blaming single mothers, the necessary scholarship that looks at male motives for fathering children that they do not parent will never be undertaken.

Significantly, the refusal of our nation to recognize the extraordinary contribution of single mothers who give loving care is tied to the sexist assumption that caregiving is inherently a female trait and not a choice. Yet the fact that some women are from the onset of childbirth unwilling to nurture or give care exposes the fallacy of this myth.

While militant black male leaders challenged white supremacy in productive ways, their uncritical embrace of patriarchy undermined anti-racist struggle by falsely projecting the idea that black women were the enemies of black men.

Despite a huge body of critical writing about the importance of fathers, patriarchal thinking still encourages women and men to believe that paternal contribution to parenting is never as important as that of mothers. Naturally a culture that teaches everyone that fathers exist to provide material sustenance places no value on the emotional nurturance of fathers. This has been especially true in black life.

Patriarchal thinking certainly does not encourage men to be self-loving. Instead it encourages them to believe that power is more important than love, particularly the power to dominate and control others.

Feminist thinking is useful to black males, and all males, who are grappling with the issue of self-love because it offers strategies that enable them to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity. It offers to men a vision of liberatory masculinity.

healthy love, which necessarily includes teaching children how to be disciplined along with other life-enhancing skills.

Male domination does not lead to happy homes, no matter all the propaganda that suggests otherwise.

Of course none of the discussion focused on the issue of love. It was all focused on the question of power; issues like whether black women were matriarchal and castrating, holding the black man back, ruled the day. No one talked about the overall psychological impact of the rupture in black solidarity created by patriarchal thinking.

male domination, like all forms of domination, makes love impossible. While one can care for someone deeply and dominate them, it is impossible to truly love someone and dominate them. Love and domination are antithetical.

It cannot be stated often enough that domination makes love impossible. Black men who embrace sexism believe it is the ability to dominate that makes them men; they choose power over love.

Fear of homosexuality has led many black adult men to withhold their love from male children and adult peers. Rooted in homophobia, this fear must be overcome if black men are to experience self-love. At the same time, until black folks openly address same-sex incest, the sexual abuse of black boys by older males, self-love will not become the norm for all black men. Self-loving black men do not fear being gay. For they know that embracing their sexuality, in whatever form it takes, is a gesture of self-acceptance necessary to love.