A young Black man’s letter to MLK: What King taught me about love
Dear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
I am writing to thank you for teaching me about the important human value of love, more specifically — agape love.
Before I read your speeches, I was more familiar with the two other forms of love that you had also written about: eros and philia. You described eros as the form of love that is associated with romance and desire. Eros is the yearning form of love, our yearning for divinity. Philia is the form of love in which is reciprocal. I love because I am loved. This form typically manifests itself between personal friends or with people that you are fond of and are fond of you. But agape, the form of love in which I thank you for teaching me about, is the most powerful form of love.
Agape love is bigger than romance and bigger than friendship. It takes us from a personal connection to a spiritual connection. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill toward all men. This form of love does not need reciprocity. This form of love is unconditional. This is the love of God, the love of Jesus. It requires us to love all men not because you like them, or because their ways appeal to you, but love them because God loves them. This love gives me power and that’s why I thank you for teaching it to me.
“In a real sense, all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
That quote comes from your Letter from Birmingham Jail and it directly correlates with the lesson of agape love. When one loves on a personal level, a level of eros and philia, they can see love as individualistic. They love out of lust. They love for reciprocity. They love with conditions. But when you realize that we are all interconnected and interrelated, you’ll realize that you must seek for the better of all people, no matter their social status or feeling toward you. If one is destructive and hateful and spew destruction and hate into the interconnected reality in which we exist, then our existence will become more destructive and hateful. But love is constructive. Love builds. Agape love does not seek to destroy or to tear down individuals. Instead, it “goes to any length to restore community.” It seeks to destroy evil systems, not people caught in between those systems, and for me, that is a fundamental human value.
Evil systems, such as racism, capitalism, militarism, warism, and sexism, are successful when they divide individuals, create cleavages, and maintain hierarchies. When we no longer see our common humanity, we fall victim to the system. In my early days fighting racism, it was easy for me to see racist individuals, and I thought the best way to defeat racism was to defeat and destroy racist individuals. When I couldn’t find individuals to defeat, then I believed you had to defeat a whole race of racist individuals. Racism makes us see White people and Black people. Love only sees people. But agape love isn’t passive and doesn’t ignore the reality of racism.
When I first learned of “loving your enemies,” I believed it to mean that if we ignore our racial differences and just love one another, then hate and racism would just go away. But agape love is active, it’s not passive. Coupled with power, love is transformative. It’s just because justice is love correcting everything that stands against love. So for me to love my enemy, is for me to fight and seek to correct everything that teaches my enemy that he is superior to me.
Racism places individuals on a hierarchy of value. Love teaches us that we are all equal and interconnected.
I don’t seek to persuade or love my enemy out of their false sense of superiority, but instead, I seek to defeat any system or power that allows my enemy to believe that without accountability.
By learning agape and applying it to my current worldview, I can envision a beloved community, an anti-racist society, and a peaceful world. So thank you.
Quintez Brown
