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

by bell hooks

All love relationships flourish when there is sustained commitment. Constancy in the midst of change strengthens bonds. In both romantic relationships and friendships, I enjoy going through changes with loved ones, watching how we develop. To me it’s similar to the delight and awe that loving parents feel as they witness children go through myriad changes. Having a longtime partner who both participates in our growth while also bearing witness is one of love’s profound pleasures. I

In all about love, I define love as a combination of care, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust, and commitment.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up. No one in the world . . . knows more—knows Americans better or . . . loves them more than the American Negro.” In the mid-sixties, Hansberry told a group of aspiring young black writers that if they wanted to understand the meaning of love, they should talk to black folks and “ask the troubadors who come from those who have loved when all reason pointed to the uselessness and foolhardiness of love.” Daringly she stated: “Perhaps we shall be the teachers when it is done. Out of the depths of pain we have thought to be our sole heritage in this world—O, we know about love!” Both Baldwin and Hansberry believed that black identity was forged in triumphant struggle to resist dehumanization, that the choice to love was a necessary dimension of liberation.

As the quest for power subsumed the quest for liberation in anti-racist struggle, there was little or no discussion of the purpose and meaning of love in black experience, of love in liberation struggle. The

We cannot effectively resist domination if our efforts to create meaningful, lasting personal and social change are not grounded in a love ethic.

Even when we cannot change ongoing exploitation and domination, love gives life meaning, purpose, and direction. Doing the work of love, we ensure our survival and our triumph over the forces of evil and destruction.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. —JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

The desolation of these places where love was and is now gone is just one among many signs of the ongoing crisis of spirit that ravages black people and black communities everywhere. More often than not this crisis of spirit is talked about by political leaders and community organizers as engendered by life-threatening poverty, violence, or the ravages of addiction. While it is utterly true that all these forces undermine our capacity to be well, underlying these issues is a profound spiritual crisis. As a people we are losing heart. Our collective crisis is as much an emotional one as a material one. It cannot be healed simply by money.

We know this because so many of the leaders who preach to us about the necessity of gaining material privilege, who are holders of wealth and status, are as lost, as disenabled emotionally, as those among us who lack material well-being. Leaders who are addicted to alcohol, shopping, violence, or gaining power and fame by any means necessary rarely offer to anyone a vision of emotional well-being that can heal and restore broken lives and broken communities.

Gaining access to material privilege will never satisfy needs of the spirit. Those hungers persist and haunt us. We seek to satisfy those cravings by endless consumption, appetites that easily turn into addictions that can never be satisfied. Needs of the spirit can only be satisfied when we care for the soul. Our ancestors knew this. Only a politics of conversion where we return to love can save us.

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.

Naturally, these stories say little about love and tell us more about the nature of human suffering and heartache. In his insightful work The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm defines love as a fusion of care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility. Drawing upon this work and adding to it, M. Scott Peck extends this definition to include “the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual growth.”

He finally concluded to go to his mistress.” Douglass insisted in his narrative that “he had never known a mother’s love,” but he shared at the beginning of his story that his mother had walked miles to hold him as a child even though she risked brutal punishment. To Douglass, a mother’s love was defined by care that was sustained, that could be counted on. In his case the trauma of separation and abandonment overwhelmed these early memories of loving care. Jacobs was cared for deeply by her grandmother. That care lasted throughout her lifetime.

Chronicles of life after slavery and on into the mid-1900s show that black children were often given mixed messages by parents. They would be told by parents to respect themselves and other people, to cultivate good manners, to tell the truth, only to then be compelled by these same elders to act in a different way when encountering the white power structure.

Litwack’s book is full of testimony about the confusion black children faced as they tried to live within a world that had two codes of behavior.

The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar alluded to this false self when he wrote that “we wear the mask that grins and lies.” All too often, though, the false self black folks donned to make it in the public white-dominated world was not easily shed when they reentered all-black private settings. The reliance on lies, subterfuge, and manipulation used to get by in the world outside the home often became the standard of behavior in the home. Importantly, many of the survival strategies black people learned which enabled them to cope with life in a racist culture were not positive skills when applied to intimate interpersonal relationships.

I can remember having a conversation with her in the early seventies about the nature of love like the fictional dialogue between Hannah and Eva Peace. A grown-up woman trying to understand “this thing called love,” I was taking a critical look at my relationship with my father. I told Mama I did not feel Daddy loved me. And she told me, “Of course he loves you. He’s taken care of all your needs all these years.” Tears overwhelmed my words as I tried to explain to her that love was more than meeting someone’s material needs—that it was about respect, care, knowledge, and responsibility. I was a graduate student then, reading philosophy and studying psychology. I knew there was more to loving than caring for material needs.

Talking recently with the popular young female rapper Lil’ Kim, I asked about love in her life, and she responded: “Love. What’s that? I have not known any love.” Abandoned by parents who physically abused her, she had no way to understand love, but she did understand material survival by any means necessary. Her attitudes about love were cynical. Her focus in life was on attaining more money and fame. Listening to her, I realized that it is easier for a talented individual to move from rags to riches in our society than it is for them to know love. We use the satisfaction of material longing to deny the need to love and be loved. Older black women entertainers,

Sustained loving care is needed to help heal the pain of emotional abandonment. Throughout our history in this nation, black people have tried to deny this pain—to act as though it does not affect our capacity to trust. Without trust there can be no genuine intimacy and love. Yet for those among us who have been abandoned, it is difficult, if not impossible, to trust. To move toward love, we must confront the pain of abandonment and loss. This means speaking what may have once been unspeakable.

To this day I vividly recall the pleasure I felt reading what I had been “taught” was the love chapter. From the book of Corinthians I learned that to be loving meant to be kind, forgiving, and full of compassion. I learned that love was more important than faith or hope. Yet the full vision of love evoked in the Scriptures was not realized in most of our homes. Writing about the link between Christian religious experience and love in his essay “The Mark of Churches,” John Alexander reminds us that in theory the church is not only a place of love but a place where we learn to love. However, for Christians of all races these lessons often stay at the level of theory and never become practice. Alexander contends: “Instead, we keep paying far more attention to our work than to loving others. We spend more time cleaning our houses than caring for our relationships. We do whatever our ‘thing’ is and tend not to get around to love.”

When I was a child, I would often call attention to the failure of adults to live the beliefs they espoused in churches.

Our mothers, unlike their white counterparts, had to try and make a home in the midst of a racist world that had already sealed our fate, an unequal world waiting to tell us we were inferior, not smart enough, unworthy of love. Against this backdrop where blackness was not loved, our mothers had the task of making a home. As angels in the house they had to create a domestic world where resistance to racism was as much a part of the fabric of daily life as making beds and cooking meals. This was no easy task, since internalized racism meant we brought the values of white supremacy into our homes via the color caste system. Everyone knew that the lighter you were the luckier you were. And everyone judged you on the basis of your skin color.

When the contemporary feminist movement began, it helped many women to see that the sacrificial model was really designed by patriarchal men to keep women subordinated. It helped women distinguish between being a loving mother (which required the assertion of responsible selfhood and agency) and an anti-loving model which required that women repress all their own needs and desires to serve others. Some women were disturbed when feminist thinkers compelled everyone to acknowledge that the self-sacrificing woman was rarely genuinely loving, no matter how nurturing and caring her actions might appear. While these critiques have had an impact on younger women’s construction of self and identity, overall they have not changed the idealization of the self-sacrificial woman in black life. She is still held to be the desired ideal.

Often younger black females recognize this and refuse to take on the mantle of martyr. Their awareness that the self-sacrificing woman does not win the day is keen. They know she does not receive love from anyone; gratitude maybe, devotion sometimes, but love—rarely. Refusing to be like Annie, the mother in Imitation of Life, they feel there is more to gain by becoming like her daughter, Sarah Jane—narcissistic, self-interested, and self-invested, out for what they can get. Of course they are no more able to love than the sacrificial caretaker. Since giving care is a part of love, the sacrificial caretaker has some sense of what loving entails, however incomplete. The callous, cynical, narcissistic female has no understanding of love.

To choose love, we must choose a healthy model of female agency and self-actualization, one rooted in the understanding that when we love ourselves well (not in a selfish or narcissistic way), we are best able to love others. When we have healthy self-love, we know that individuals in our lives who demand of us self-destructive martyrdom do not care for our good, for our spiritual growth.

Too much focus on “realistic” images has led the mass media to identify black experience solely with that which is most violently depraved, impoverished, and brutal. Yet these images are only one aspect of black life. Even if they constitute the norm in underclass neighborhoods, they do not represent the true reality of black experience, which is complex, multidimensional, and diverse.

The fact is that racism, sexism, and class elitism together encourage individuals to assume that the negative image is more “real”; individuals approaching blackness from this biased perspective have an investment in presenting the negative image as the norm. To do so promotes, perpetuates, and sustains systems of domination based on class, race, and gender.

Now, we all know that stereotypes often exist in part because when any subordinate group is required by a dominant group to be a certain way in order to survive, the powerless group will take on those characteristics.

As a strategy of colonization, encouraging enslaved blacks to embrace and uphold white supremacist aesthetics was a masterstroke. Teaching black folks to hate dark skin was one way to ensure that whether white oppressors were present or not, the values of white supremacy would still rule the day.

Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.

No one acts as though the black actors who eagerly take roles that depict black people as being irrational, immoral, and lacking in basic intelligence are perpetuating white supremacy. Yet these images not only teach black folks and everyone else, especially young children who lack critical skills, that black people are hateful and unworthy of love, they teach white folks to fear black aggression. This fear allows white folks to feel justified when they treat black people in dehumanizing ways in daily life. A white woman who clutches her purse as she walks toward a young black male or female on the street sends the message not only that she fears for her safety but that she sees all black people as potential criminals.

an essay titled “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” I called attention to the reality that to end white supremacy we must create the conditions not only for black people to love blackness but for everyone else to love blackness. All black folks who love blackness recognize that it is not enough for us to be decolonized, that the non-black folks we work with, who teach our children, and so on, need consciousness raising that will enable them to see blackness differently.

Shaming has been a central component of racial assault, yet it is also central to all other dehumanizing practices. Within a culture of domination, shaming others is one way to assert coercive power and dominance. In traditional black folk culture some forms of humor promote forms of teasing that when used inappropriately become ways to humiliate and shame.

Who has not been in a public setting where diverse children are running around joyously expressing themselves while a lone black child sits obediently—silently? Everyone may comment about how well-behaved this child is. The fact that harsh authoritarian discipline may have produced this obedience is rarely noted. Usually when a black mother publicly uses harsh, emotionally abusive verbal assaults to discipline a child, folks are aghast, but that same verbal practice may have been utilized at home to create the “perfect” behavior so many folks admire in the silent, obedient child who responds only when addressed by an authority figure.

Verbal assault is so common in American families of all races as to be considered simply normal. Whether it is has been normalized or not, we know that it has harmful consequences.

I talked about how much we show love by the way we communicate with one another, that we need to speak warmly and tenderly to one another. Mean-spirited, aggressive speech wounds. Lots of mothers responded positively to this section of the book, testifying that it is all too easy to forget that harsh words can wound and break the spirit.

An adult parent who refuses to acknowledge a child when spoken to conveys the message that the child is not worthy of attention. Many men use withdrawing into silence to express their power over others.

black male voices these sentiments: “Silence is our weapon. Silence is our shield.” None of us can be self-loving if our presence is not recognized and valued.

privilege. Children of all classes are abused. We need studies that document the strategies individuals use in homes lacking in material privilege to create care and respect in the midst of adversity. All too often the assumption prevails that one cannot expect poor people to be caring. We hear again and again that these individuals are too preoccupied to deal with their emotional development. Such thinking, coming initially from the ruling classes, has provided a convenient excuse that individuals who lack privilege can evoke to justify cruelty.

The heart of self-love is healthy self-esteem. In his insightful book Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden defines these pillars as “the practice of living consciously; of self-acceptance; of self-responsibility; of self-assertiveness; of living purposefully; of personal integrity.” Among these practices, personal integrity is one of the hardest, since it requires commitment to truth telling.

She and our grandfather Daddy Gus, her husband of more than seventy years, taught us the importance of living consciously, taking responsibility, and maintaining personal integrity. I emphasize this to state again that those who lack material privilege have as much access to spiritual and moral riches as anyone else.

Currently, the poor are usually represented in mainstream culture as lacking in moral values, so we cannot state often enough that poverty is no indication of moral beliefs. Stigmatizing the poor in this way is one of the ways the collective self-esteem of poor people is continually assaulted in this society.

Living in a culture that constantly devalues us, black women must work doubly hard to be loving. Coping with the stigma of being labeled whores and prostitutes, licentious and lewd, led black women in the early twentieth century to place undue emphasis on puritanical virtue. Believing that claiming the status of virtuous womanhood would automatically dispel negative stereotypes, black females often surrendered emotional playfulness and sensuality in favor of a stern maternal stance. This created the same tense divisions between black women that variations in their color created, for all black women were subject to being seen as either madonnas or whores. Both representations required that black females surrender a complex emotional universe and conform to a stereotype. Since a hatred of the female body and its natural functions was at the root of both stereotypes, no matter the identity a black female embraced, madonna or whore, it was unlikely she would learn to love her physicality.

White supremacist thinking keeps these racist/sexist stereotypes alive in everyone’s imagination for a reason; it both encourages and allows for white male lust for black females even as it encourages this lust to stay on the level of objectification and degradation.

It should be obvious that all children are likely to be more healthy when raised in a home that is, first and foremost, loving. Homes where there are loving male and female caregivers undoubtedly offer children a positive environment. Yet none of the discussion about the harmful effects of absent black male fathers has centralized love. Instead, patriarchal thinking implies that simply by being present, black fathers ensure that black children will have healthy self-esteem and self-love. This is simply not true. A domineering and/or violently abusive father who is present will not be creating a home environment that promotes a child’s well-being. 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. Destructive behavior by present black fathers makes black family life dangerous and precarious, just as constructive behavior enhances family life.

No home is a good environment to raise children in if parents are not loving. There is a big difference between unloving female-headed households and those that are loving. A dysfunctional parent will not create a healthy environment for children. This is as true of the female-headed single-parent household as it is of the male-headed single-parent household. It is equally true of the two-parent household. Children grow best physically and emotionally in homes where they are loved.

In her memoir, Laughing in the Dark, Patrice Gaines shares the insight that “fathers are just as important to girls as to boys. . . . Some fathers, like mine, are absent even when they are present. . . . My deepest self knew that before I went out into the world and found a man to love I needed to be loved by the first man in my life. I needed a rich and basic love by which to judge the love of all other men.” Gaines, like so many of us, never got the affirmation of her value from her father that she longed for. When fathers are present and uncaring or cruel, they do damage. A father who seldom sees a child but gives love contributes more to that child’s emotional growth than a father who is present but always indifferent, who shames, coerces, and engages in all manner of abusive behavior. Everyone in our culture is reluctant to talk about the importance of father love. The moment we place love on the agenda we have to talk about all the forces in our society that keep us from being loving, from loving ourselves and others. Loving fathers do not abandon families. Hence if our entire culture taught all men the art of loving, we would not have the problem of absent fathers. Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, black males who embrace the values of these ideologies have enormous difficulty with the issue of self-love. Patriarchal thinking certainly does not encourage men to be self-loving. Instead it encourages them to believe that power is more important than love...

No one has prevented black males or any group of males from parenting their children. There is no evidence to support the notion that healthy mothers try to keep healthy fathers away from sons or daughters. The hard truth that this nation does not want to face is that most patriarchal men, irrespective of their racial identity, do not wish to be loving parental caretakers. Attacks on black single mothers raising sons are rooted in woman-hating. They make all single mothers feel that they are failing sons if they cannot bring a father presence into the home. Or they make mothers fear they will harm their sons by loving them.

Black mothers raising nonsexist sons in patriarchal culture must work doubly hard to counter negative messages about masculinity and female leadership.

Socialized within the context of the United States to believe that men should be dominant and women subservient, the vast majority of African-Americans have held in high esteem a patriarchal vision of family life. Despite the fact that the systematic institutionalization of white supremacy and everyday racism made it impossible for the vast majority of African-Americans to create family life based on the sexist assumption that men should be providers working to sustain the material needs of the family and women nurturers taking care of emotional needs and the concerns of the household, black people have worked hard to conform to this model. Even when our lived experience indicated that the model of communal kinship with gender equality was both more constructive and more realistic in a world where employment was and is hard to find for any black person, most black folks continue to accept patriarchal notions of sex roles as the standard to judge and evaluate black life.