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

by bell hooks

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...