Love, As A Politic
As we enter a new year, there is a new way to reimagine love as a means toward our collective liberation
The early 2000’s. I vividly remember post-engagement breakup, sitting in the same bedroom apartment I grew up in. The same bedroom apartment I had spent winterspringsummerfall listening to and watching rap and anime and sitcoms and porn over my formative, teenage, and young adult years. It was in this time period of an ended love that I sat in a reflective state. I went to my laptop, headed to Google.com and typed into the search bar: “What does it mean when you fall in love with everyone?”
The room had the same stains of familiarity that I had so grown accustomed to— the slightly powdery, blue, empty walls; the walls that Wunce held pictures of Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim, Lauryn Hill, Michelle Thomas, and New Era fitted caps. It’s amazing to me how much love consent in color a space no matter how far removed you may be from space. Following the break-up, I found myself looking through old journals and old essays to try to find that version of self that seemed to have disappeared throughout a loving, but also complicated partnership. following the breakup, I also found myself anew—I would be turning 30 and then that turning was also seen as an unraveling taking place in myself. The question I did to ask Google was the question I had seemingly been asking myself as a cishet Black man, all of my life. The asking was a deeper dive, a probe into the ways love has manifested itself in all facets of my living—from my partners to the places I chose to call home; to the places I decided to work, to the creative work and art that I chose to make. Everything I have attempted to do has always been centered and framed with love as the catalyst, as the nucleus, to alchemize community in all the ways I wish to see the world being reimagined. Because for me, love has always taken many shapes and forms even when I did not have the language to express what those shapes and forms might feel and look like.
I first learned love from my mother. It was an unfiltered sort of love that gave me room to develop my senses and intuition. So much of that came from me being a latchkey kid: my mother worked the late night shift as a Medical Surgical Technician at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx, which meant she would leave the house at 10:55 PM to catch the 11:00 PM BX 12 bus that was across the street, leaving me home alone at times while my older brother stayed outside and my eldest brother remained behind bars. My mom helped me with my homework, made dinner, and took care of our household all as a single, newly divorced mother. By the time she did all of this, she’d be exhausted, sleeping for the remainder of the late afternoon and evening on weekdays, which would leave me with the alone time my imagination required to dream up the ideas, the stories, the characters and songs that would portend the arch of my artistic practice. It was not only the free time that I was afforded, however. The greatest gift my mother offered me was love in the form of freedom and autonomy, with set boundaries that would teach me where the limits were, how far or close. Icould play with the argins, without attempting to hinder any of my creative aspiratons. As an Afro-0Caribbean immigrant from the island of Dominica, my mother’s style pf parenting may have been considered somewhat new age in this period. Less concerned with the kind of career or job I would choose, or what college would put me in the best position to obtain some form of lucrative employment, my mother’s primary concern for me was to continue to push for and chase my dreams.
It was through this vision of love that I would grow up seeking other ways to ascribe the feelings of agape developing n me, with literature and music as the means in which I would cultivate my voice. This is where Hip-Hop/Soul and poetry took their place as an incipatory part of my art practice. From Jay Z to Saul Williams, from Nikki Giovanni to Nas, Sonia Sanchez to B.I.G., Jack Kerouac to D’Angelo, the arts become not only a tool for me to communicate and learn how to use language in a decolonized way, but provided a safe haven for my teenage and young adult person to grapple with the ever-changing, unsafe world I was surrounded by. I was reading and hearing from the musical and literary sages of my time. and time a time before, each sharing their pwn personal journies to a certain kind of liberation I had yet to have a full grasp of. Some spoke of Black love, others Black capitalism; others spoke of a hate for the police force or “pigs”, while others spoke of road trips, mushroom trips, queer identities; the smoky NYC and SF cafes I wanted to inhabit. But it would be through Toni Morrison that I would see the multitudes of love’s existence. It was in her work that Blackness as monolith would be deconstructed ver and over again: flying niggas and gambling men and fluid women; slave mothers and unwed women, loose men and lawless adventurers all succumbing to the many ways love could grip us by our own neck sleeves, tug us into corners and pull us out of closets and push out into whatever the next precipice of a Black radical thought process could look like, the tailwinds of love driving its sailing to a more salient and safer shore for us all.
Later on, I would take those learnings and, through Black women and social media, I would define and redefine what a politic of love could look like for me. Black women like EbonyJanice would push me to think more broadly about the Black femme body and experience. Through her and others, my mid 30’s would be filled with the names of bell hooks, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Octava Butler, Angela Davis—names I was very familiar with but whose works I had only skimmed on a surface level. Friends like Zola Ellen and writers like Adrienne Marie Brown would push me to see beyond the binary systems at play. White mindfulness practitioners like my friend Sharon Salzberg and the teacher Tara Brach, would help me hone a practice of gratitude rooted in Buddhism. Through it all, love would continue to round out how I interpreted the language.
I say often that the most loving, most revolutionary thing the Black Panther Party ever put in motion was create the free breakfast program, the often unspoken foundation for what we now see as the modern day American welfare system. As I’ve aged, I’ve seen how love has transformed not only our lives but our politics. Desmond Tutu’s commitment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is an exhibition of love in full display. Bayard Rustin, John Lewis, Medgar Evers; Ella Baker, Fannie Lou—these voices dismantled systems with anger, yes, and organizing, but also with love for community and a people served as a nucleus for so much of the work we celebrate. Grace Lee and James Lee Boggs revolutionary education was guided by love as much as it was by Marxism and Fanon. I see even the most crucial conversations of our time—those on genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing; climate change; the erosion of healthcare, education; the growth of food deserts; the automation killing our need for physical connection with our environment and each other—all of these not only intersect with each other, but I would argue that the lack of engaging with love as a genuine way to begin the dismantling of harmful systems of government and governance; as a central politic that can guide policy and abolition; as a disruptor to the colonized way we see the nuclear family, romantic and platonic partnerships, is what is keeping us from a truly liberated society.
Individualism tells us that we get free by the strength of our own merits. And there is no real love in that. That sort of love centers egoic nourishment as the way in, as opposed to the communal support required to forge a new way forward. Toward the end of 2023 , so many of us have been glued to our screens, watching a real-time genocide happen in Palestine, while also watching the same happen in Sudan, in Congo, in Tigray; we protested and sent e-sims and phone banked and donated and used the power of our social media handles to share resources, educating ourselves and each other. It was in this period that I saw love as a politic in full display. So many who may have been somewhat aware of the Palestinian fight for freedom were now fully enmeshed in the calls for a ceasefire and the the end to the Israeli occupation. Locked in arms and solidarity, we are now moving in a more profound, radical way of love that looks to break the binaries that have held us hostage for so long.
As a practicing polyamorist for the past 2 1/2 years, the idea of love for me has become immensely political—it is not only about the breaking up of stereotypical, heteronormative expectations, it also begets a genuine curiosity about all the systems at play, their intersections, and how we can reevaluate our relationship to them. It has expanded my view of love as not only a means of partnership, but a means of developing community in a more superfluous way; an opportunity to continuously refine love as a practice that exists outside of the institutionalized versions of love we’ve been spoonfed without any real interrogation as to if these ways of love work for the current conditions of our society. I want us to live in the love OF love, rather than the fear of it, seeing love not as an option, but as the way we must start any and all conversations about our liberation.
I want us to deepen our capacity for love, to deepen our sensibilities around its mechanics. I want us to treat love, and loving this life and the practice and art of liberation, as an intentional experiment rooted in the kind of curiosity that shifts the paradigms and rules for us all. Love is practical medicine, a magic that lays bare our truths and gives us the permission to have vulnerability and tenderness, compassion and softness, be the torch bearers for how we embrace community. Love is locally sourced food and non hierarchical business practices. Love is sustainability and thrifting; it is second hand and the sharing of resources, of goods, of tools. Love is less about possession and ownership, but an unwavering trust in non attachment to outcomes, to our bodies, to our relationships, to our pathways to freedom. The love I dream of for us all is free, it is radical; it is inherently queer in its openness unexplored binaries and systems of function. The love I dream of puts an end to colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism; to racism, misogyny and misogynoir; to anti-semitism and islamophobia; to xenophobia and ableism. This love ends prisons and the police force. This love protects unions and workers, provides adequate healthcare and housing, along with a livable wage and affordable childcare for all. This love not only reimagines community, but reimagines our hearts in the process. Love is romantical, yes. But love, all endearing and all encompassing, is political too.
This is so fucking beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much for this Joel! Your words resonate with my soul and how I’ve learned i want to be love. Those last paragraphs help me to keep grounding into the infinite love in me & in all of us. I gotta get out to NYC this spring, there’s so much I want to talk to you about