Salvation: Black People and Love ― bell hooks' Incisive Cultural History on the Transformative Power of Love in African American Life

Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.

Wisely, Baldwin insisted that we are always more than our pain. Not only did he believe in our capacity to love, he felt black people were uniquely situated to risk loving because we had suffered.

Valuing ourselves rightly means we understand love to be the only foundation of being that will sustain us in both times of lack and times of plenty

For black men of all ages it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs.

Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.

With this understanding of love’s meaning it is clear that more often than not slavery made it all but impossible for black people to love one another. When emotional ties were established between individuals, when children were born to enslaved mothers and fathers, these attachments were often severed. No matter the tenderness of connection, it was often overshadowed by the trauma of abandonment and loss.

love does not bring an end to difficulties, it gives us the strength to cope with difficulties in a constructive way.

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.

Until black people, and our allies in love and struggle, become militant about how we are represented on television, in movies, and in books, we will not see imaginative work that offers images of black characters who love. If love is not present in our imaginations, it will not be there in our lives.

Emotionally shut-down black males are often represented as epitomizing desirable masculinity.

I tell them that love is always there–that nothing can keep us from love if we dare to seek it and to treasure what we find.

Often individual successful black people work in predominately white settings. In those environments we may often be treated by white folks as though we are special

When he was alive, Marlon Riggs, activist, scholar, and filmmaker, used to insist in conversations with me and Essex [Hemphill] that “black men loving black men was the most revolutionary act.” To Marlon this statemen t was an affirmation of the importance of self-love. He believed that a self-hating individual black male, irrespective of his sexual preference, would never be able to love another black male. While I agree that anyone mired in self-hate cannot love anyone, I used to tell him that the “most revolutionary act” black men could make was to deal psychoanalytically with their childhoods.” For it is in childhood that so many black males, gay and straight, come to fear masculinity and manhood. This fear is often based on painful and abusive interaction between fathers and/or male parental caretakers and sons.

That huge majority of black folks who identify as Christian or as believers in other religious faiths (Islam, Buddhism, Yoruba, and so on) need to return to sacred writings about love and embrace these as guides showing us the way to lead our lives.