Αγάπη — Σε Μαύρο
(Love — In Black)
I don’t purport to know what love is. Not entirely at least. I mean how could I? I have yet to look at the face of a child and find myself staring into eyes like my own. To know that the small beat of their heart is mine to protect. Or to see a product of my love for someone else made flesh. That feeling is something I pray I’ll know before I leave this world. But I’ve known the love of a good woman. And the love of a good family. And the love of a good God. I’ve looked at another and thought that their friendship was as true as that of my own kin. And I’ve known enough to know love is a choice, a choice to put someone before yourself. So I know some. And I know that as a black person, in this world, in the United States… to love remains one of the most difficult endeavors to undertake.
The assault on black personhood seems, therefore, not to be an attack on our humanity but perhaps on our capacity to love. Attacking the very thing that connects us to the world in which we live or to the God above it, it would appear that the system designed to dehumanize the black subject is most concerned with forcing hate upon them. As Shakespeare put it, “Satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre. Hob, nob, is his word. “Give ’t or take ’t.” Indeed, hate works no other way. Give it or take it. And this is true, especially, for those that inherit the oppression of their foremothers and forefathers. The captive Africans sold into slavery by their own people, those attacked by white segregationists as they made their way to elementary school, or the people so downtrodden they feel as though they must riot just to be seen. They are brainwashed thus: give hate or take it.
Likewise, I don’t purport to know much about the ancient Greeks. Stories of Mansa Musa always concerned me more than those of Alexander. Kunta Kinte was always my T’Challa for that matter. Yet I do know this of the ancient Greeks: they knew eight kinds of love. To anyone whose native language is as limited as English, I assume that fact resonates similarly in their heart. Love to them was something to be studied, understood, and, most of all, cherished. But, where is my parallel to that? As a black man, not a single one of those eight is by any measure easy for me. Eight kinds of love and none, I repeat, none I am taught are meant for me. Not in this country. Not in this world. Not in this life.
φιλαυτία
(self-love)
Philautia. Not selfishness, not conceit, and not the love of self. True self-love is such that in order to care for others, we must first care about ourselves. In order to receive love from others, we must first learn to love ourselves.
The world does not teach a black person to love themselves. In fact, in most cases, it teaches us to do the opposite. Nigger. How many times would it take someone to say that to you before you believed them? Before you believed you were nothing more than a nigger? Well, I guarantee I’ve heard it more times than that. How many people wanting to touch your hair and pet you before you feel like an animal? Well, I guarantee it’s happened to me more than that. Or how many teachers or employers or businesses you expected to patron or even churches have to write you off before you feel like you don’t belong anywhere? Well, I guarantee it’s happened to me more than that. So I scream, “What can I do?!” And no one responds. “Where can I go,” I shout but still there is no answer. “Who am I,” I whisper. And no one is around to even acknowledge my breath.
Too often, from black and white people, have I heard that I am not black enough. Or better yet, that I am not white enough. Because the world believes a black man should act some particular way somehow that means I am not man enough. Not good enough. No. I get it. You simply mean I’m not enough. That I don’t measure up and I don’t make the cut. So its all the more difficult to look in the mirror and love myself. I’m not even allowed to be myself.
ερωτοτροπία
(playful love)
Ludus. Elegantly put, the affection shared by young lovers. To have feelings for someone and to act on them. Also the ensuing infatuation in early romance akin to butterflies in one’s stomach.
ἔρως
(romantic love)
Eros. A dangerous and frightening kind of love. Described as pleasure, passion, or sexual desire. A physical manifestation of love that is accompanied by the fear of a loss of control.
μανία
(obsessive love)
Mania. The imbalance of Eros and Ludus. Love turned obsession. The worst love of all, a potentially violent fixation.
People often describe romantic love as fulfilling. Even beyond the feeling of being appreciated and having someone to appreciate. The ability to trust someone else physically, to need someone else physically, is important. Yet, the prevailing narrative of men of color as rapists and women of color as objects upon which someone can impose themselves deny us that very fulfillment. Furthermore, we are looked at as subhuman in both cases; either because of our fictitious lust for white virginity or shear objectification to the point of denying someone agency over their own body. The fear that I might give in to my “primal desire” or my female counterpart might utter the word “no,” somehow stop that kind of love from being accessible to us. Least of all with anyone not likewise a person of color.
The truth is playful love is not afforded to me either. In my experience, early romance is a constant questioning of whether or not I’m being hypersexualized. Distrust in the person sitting across the table from me, equal parts due to my inability to love myself and my inability to trust their motives, rob me of those elusive butterflies. I’d imagine for a black woman, the most disrespected, underappreciated, and neglected among us, this happens tenfold. I can only pray my sisters know their worth, I know often I don’t know mine.
This says nothing of mania either. I can only imagine that if obsession with someone is liable to get a white American locked up… it’s likely it’ll get a black American killed. When violence is propagated against black people for no reason other than their appearance, a reason is the last thing that’ll keep any of us safe.
στοργή
(familial love)
Storge. The love a mother has for her child. The protective love of family members or allegiance that comes from kinship.
φιλία
(affectionate love)
Philia. Friendship. Platonic love even greater than Eros. Love shared between two people who understand themselves as equals.
I often wonder how many black mothers a year lose their children to an oppressive system designed to harm them. I’m stopped in my tracks when I think of how many black people become entrapped in the prison industrial complex, robbing people of their husbands or wives and children of their parents. Let alone those killed by police violence in neighborhoods designed, since de jure segregation, to ensure the 13% black demographic remains unchanged. What then of familial love? We’re dispossessed of that too. The black family unit. The pillar of the black community. Kicked out from under us in a world that has no more use for The Huxtables or The Jeffersons.
So it’s understandable that when I go over to a white friend’s house I have to fight the urge to resent them. Their family photos sit all too untouched, collecting dust on their all too full mantle. All the while I’m expected to get along with them, yet they spend more time pointing out the speck in my eye than they do seeing the log in their own. I’m supposed to let their less-than-subtle criticism of a world they are blind to go unheard. Making them blind and me deaf. But then again, I should know my place of course. To die in a neighbor split down the middle and ran but two gangs all the while owned by neither. Right. I remember now. The love of friends can only exist if they both understand themselves as equals. So, in a society where the only way to be understood as a person is to be superior to another: philia is impossible.
πρᾶγμα
(enduring love)
Pragma. A love that has developed and matured over a long time together. A love that is patient and that compromises, that understands and commits. The love that lasts a lifetime.
How can love last a lifetime when so many people of color are not allowed to live one? Lives are stolen from black and brown Americans every day. Not just those killed or locked away, either. The people they leave behind have their lives stolen too. Love is taken from them in the quickest fashion imaginable. It’s hard for love to last through glass and damn sure hard for it to last six feet deep. So all I can pray is that, like hope, love in the black community will endure.
ἀγάπη
(unconditional love)
Agape. The truest love. Unconditional. Infinite. Real. The love of God.
This love is something that the ancient Greeks understood was elusive. They didn’t kid themselves. This was as radical a concept back then as it is today. So much so that this is the reason I even wrote this. Unconditional love. I don’t even think we can begin to understand that. Not entirely at least. I mean how could we? If God is the only one who can be everywhere and see everything, then that kind of makes Him the only one who can really love everyone. But I damn sure think we have to try. At this point its the only thing we haven’t tried. Loving one another.
Even if you don’t believe, understand this: God is love (1 John 4:16). That is to say, in terms of how the ancient Greek writers understood agape, they understood love as transcending all. As being the opposite of evil, and hate, and pain, and suffering. Imagine again, if you yourself don’t believe, what it must be to see all God is thought to be amount — simply — to love.
And this love is the hardest thing to do as a black person sometimes. All the time. To look at everyone, even at those that hate and that hate you, as worthy of being loved. Or, more to the point, as someone who should be loved even when they aren’t worthy. I find it gracious that God might, for even one moment, allow us to know this kind of love. All I can do when I think about my ancestors is to love them. But, all the same, those that oppressed them too. Not what they did, but I do love them. For bondage is a fate not worthy of something so precious as life but a life lived holding another in bondage is not a life worth living. God too would shun such an existence. But He would still love the people living it. So I offer you a better way. A better way to live. What more is there for us than love? What is worth striving for more than love?
Black people might hate that message and white people too. But even if you are reading this as someone who hates that idea or who hates others, why not love? It might just be our last hope. God knows how difficult it is, but some of the best things are. And it’s hard to know an unconditional love when all the others are so frivolously taken from you. But above all agape, now more than ever, is what we must study, understand, and, most of all, cherish.
