Introduction: Love Is Solidarity in Action

Abstract

Introduction:Love Is Solidarity in Action Rashida L. Harrison (bio), Mary Frances Phillips (bio), and Nicole M. Jackson (bio) On November 24, 2021, we watched as a white southern judge reported the verdicts determined by a marjority white jury; they convicted two white men of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, while a third, received guilty verdicts for his actions as an accomplice. Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was out jogging in a white neighborhood when he was violently pursued by a retired police officer and his son. They claimed Arbery was responsible for several thefts in the predominantly white neighborhood. Many of us were holding our breaths and exhaling a little more with each guilty count. The week prior, however, we experienced a collective anger as a seventeen-year-old white teenager was acquitted for several counts of homicide, even as he purportedly left his home with a loaded assault rifle and drove roughly thirty minutes away to "help protect private property and serve as a medic" at a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Protestors of all backgrounds were out in support of an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake, who was shot by a white police officer seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Even as the two men killed were white, they supported Black lives, and their lives were rendered inconsequential. The white teenager who was acquitted was rewarded for his loyalty to white supremacy as sanctioned by the state. As has been required in countless instances surrounding the extralegal lynching of Black bodies, the survival of Black people over those two weeks has been preserved because love imbues us with hope and the energy to continue the fight for justice. We began our coediting journey thinking about freedom and justice. As our conversations evolved, we often came back to the question of what motivates and sustains Black communities. We came back to love and care as core to our foundation. [End Page 12] In our early discussions, we realized the necessity for ongoing attention to a canon of Black love, particularly within Black feminist traditions. We had several discussions among ourselves about the meaning of love, the historical approach to uncovering Black love, and the barriers to teasing out moments of love in a past too often shaped by violence. We realized that Black love is not always an explicit theme in the writings of Black scholars, but it can function as the prevailing framework in which we research. This realization offered a myriad of possibilities, most importantly, the notion that a conceptualization of love is intertwined with a pursuit of justice. It is from here that we began to reinvision both the intentional and unintentional acts of justice that amount to a particular expression of Black love. We turn to two less obvious examples of public acts of love and the gendered nature of enacting love and care for people of color. Even as they occur in the U.S., they illustrate transnational solidarities. The example of activist and immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo Therese Patricia Okoumou opened conversations about how we "do love." Okoumou climbed the Statue of Liberty on July 4, 2018, in protest of the federal government's policy separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border. After being found guilty by the state of New York, she defined her political action as centered in empathy and care for dispossessed people. Okoumou's protest to climb the Statue of Liberty highlighted that instead of welcoming them "what we showed them is cages. So, if I go in a cage with them, I am on the right side of history." Her activism is firmly rooted in empathy, offering the potential for radical solidarity based on love. During the summer of 2018, another event held the attention of Black and brown communities during an Atlanta Braves baseball game. Players, Curacaoan, Ozzie Albies and Venezuelan-born Ronald Acuna Jr. shared an intimate embrace in the dugout. There were varied responses to this public display, which ultimately denied these men the space to show affection, demonstrating the depths of toxic masculinity and the feminization of emotion. But, as one person commented on...