Love and Liberation

Love and liberation go hand in hand. There is no liberation without a love ethic and you cannot love someone if you do not want them to be free of oppression. Love is not tolerance or non-violence. Too often we ascribe the loving label to people who are simply interested in niceties and maintaining the status quo. When you think of love as an action word, you see that it can coexist with emotions we usually think of as negative. You begin to see the merit in getting angry when people you love are mistreated. When you understand the need for liberation, you begin to see love as what you do for the benefit of your loved ones, in addition to how you interact with them. Being a loving person means you see the potential good in humanity and you want to see the best version of humanity emerge. Being loving means you love all people despite the individual harm they’ve done and instead look to the improvement of life for everyone. Mainstream understandings of love fail to highlight its radical potential and importance. I want to define love and its role in driving and maintaining social change, drawing specifically from the lives and works of Black and queer people. I’m operating under the idea that common understandings of love and liberation are limited and they often treat these issues like they’re mutually exclusive when that is the opposite of what is true. Love is praxis, it’s how we get free.

It is understandably difficult to imagine how love can be an action when all we’ve been taught is how love is a feeling that we simply fall into. This interpretation removes the agency and intention of a person who loves, and makes it seem as if we have no say in whether or how we experience love in our lives. Psychologist M. Scott Peck suggested that love is “[t]he will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (Peck 81). Furthermore, “love is…both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love…[W]henever we do actually exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so. The choice to love has been made” (Peck 84). In making the choice to love, we vow to foster the growth of and advocate for better for ourselves and others. Love is not passive. Everything can be considered loving if it’s done with the right intention and effect. Love as an action can be expressed in the way you interact with your loved ones and strangers, it’s listening to people when they express themselves and responding in a way that shows you want better for them. It’s being open to criticism and putting forth an effort to improve your behavior and righting your wrongs for everyone’s benefit.

Love is more than a feeling, it is the belief that all people deserve freedom from oppression. Love has broader implications that just determining how we behave in our individual relationships with ourselves or others, and it must color every interaction a person has with the world. Our views on love influence our values, which impact how we exist in the world. Bell hooks asserts that “a love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change” (hooks 87). In seeking liberation, you fight for all people to be free from oppression. A love ethic is inherently tied to liberation. You cannot have one without the other. If you choose to love, the basis of all your actions must be in the name of liberation. In its current state, our society and love cannot coexist. Our society cannot claim love because it’s built on inequality and conquest. In adopting a love ethic, one must recognize how society is constructed to suppress love.

On the surface society emphasizes the importance of love, but there is no evidence of its importance if you look into the operations of our world. We cannot claim to value love if people are free to cause suffering and destruction, that is antithetical to love. Many people claim to love while supporting efforts that are obviously ill-intentioned and harmful. They claim love in ideology only and fail to act accordingly. “Unconditional tolerance would require people to be okay with the intolerant and dangerous ideas and behaviors of other people. But because loving people know that there is a limit to what they can accept, dangerous people will not be protected from the consequences of their actions in the name of love” (hooks 90). Our society does not care about love because it actively creates and maintains oppressive systems. You cannot love someone if you are responsible for their subjugation, and you cannot love someone if you ignore their dehumanization. Love is something people “value” without fully understanding, and it’s been relegated to the status of an abstract idea.

Love is a tool that must be used to dismantle society as we currently know it. Knowing and acting through love will prevent our liberation efforts from being soured by society’s true values. Because our oppressors do not know love, when we act through love we refuse to become like our oppressors. So often people try to fight their oppressors by becoming different versions of those who oppress them. “Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class” (Freire 46). Oppressed people know themselves only in relation to their oppressors, so they too fail to know love. Knowing love allows oppressed people to break the cycle of oppression. Love teaches us the importance of collectivism, it teaches us the virtue in equity. Being loving means you value the wellness and growth of others outside of yourself. If oppressed people can come to know love, they can emancipate themselves and their oppressors while also preventing the resurgence of oppression. Liberation is not a goal with a foreseeable end so, love must be incorporated into all facets of life and it must be sustained and nurtured over time. We must not use love to our advantage, and then we decide we no longer need it, just go back to the way things were. In the same way many cynics believe greed and hatred and competition are inherent to humanity and they work to maintain this view, we must feature love in everything we do.

In making the choice to love, people must unlearn the harmful ideas they’ve been taught by society. Love requires constant self-reflection, constant reexamining of the self and our proximity to the world. Because love is defined as a desire for the betterment of ourselves, others, and the world we cannot be complacent. To love, you must be able to look outside yourself and act in the best interest of others. Love requires us to recognize how our fates are intertwined with other people, thus it is not loving to ignore the plight of other oppressed people in favor of our own issues. “If any Black freedom fighter, as we are differently positioned in the wide matrix of oppressions, fails to assess the ‘I,’ our freedom dreams… might very well be another Black person’s nightmare. We are, therefore, presented with the task of self-reflexive analysis and the crucial work of unlearning and undoing the things that might allow our visions of freedom, and our dreams of a more loving world, to actually substantiate the world we are seeking to resist” (Moore 326). If you make the choice to love in an effort to fight for liberation, you must be prepared to unlearn what society has taught you about not only love, but everything else as well. You must examine why you’ve been taught what you’ve been taught and think about who and what these ideas serve. It’s an arduous process. It’s difficult to come to terms with the idea that everything we know about the world may be flawed.

It sounds scary to abandon a way of thinking you’ve had your whole life to adopt another, less popular outlook. But adopting a mindset that centers love and liberation can be so freeing on a personal level. Most of what we’ve been taught is absolute powerlessness; we are incapable of creating real concrete change, so instead all we can do is try to hold on day by day. The outlook society encourages us to have is limiting; it prevents us from seeing the potential in the world around us. If you want to combat the hopelessness many people feel, it may seem counterproductive to hope for something that seems so far off. But, together, hope and love give you power. When you make the choice to love, you give yourself the chance to hope for a better world. For so long, we have been forced to accept things as they are and have been discouraged from challenging the status quo. Adopting a love ethic means you reject what society has encouraged you to do, and you free yourself from the shackles of society’s teachings of hopelessness. The hope and power you gain from love are necessary in the fight for liberation.

When living by a love ethic, you must recognize that everyone is deserving of your love. Liberation requires that no one be left behind or forgotten. This includes the oppressors, who are often responsible for creating harm. The correct response to harm created by oppressors is not to in turn oppress them because in doing so there will always be oppression. The goal of liberation is not to become the oppressor, the goal is to dismantle all oppression. Therefore, you must love everyone. In a 1962 letter, James Baldwin tells his nephew, “you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (Baldwin 67).” He speaks specifically about white men, but this applies to all oppressors. We must love our oppressors, not because they oppress us, but because they are people. But this does not mean we accept or encourage the damage they do. We must simply recognize their humanity as they have failed to recognize ours. Oppression dehumanizes the oppressed and oppressor alike. There is no benefit in allowing that dehumanization to progress.

At the same time, love cannot be indiscriminate. To love well you have to have the power of discernment, to know who and what deserve your attention and your grace. You must be able to create healthy boundaries in order to protect your ability to love. If you allow too much negativity in your life in the name of love, all the love will be beaten out of you. (Self-)Love gives you the strength to recognize when a situation serves neither you nor a higher purpose and it gives you the strength to protect yourself. I do not preach love to encourage people to allow themselves to be broken down by their oppressors; I want people to love because it allows you to see potential in people beyond their current state. Love is not unconditionally tolerant. “When love of people is conflated with unconditional tolerance of ideologies, love loses its radical edge. Love is radical because it has limits in its tolerance. Unconditional tolerance would require people to be okay with the intolerant and dangerous ideas and behaviors of other people. But because loving people know that there is a limit to what they can accept, dangerous people will not be protected from the consequences of their actions in the name of love” (Lawrence). Preaching tolerance as a necessity when loving means people are forced to accept harmful behavior in the name of love.

Because of the society in which we live, liberation will not be non-violent. The essence of our society is violent to its core. It is not possible to respond to the harm done to oppressed people simply with non-violence. In the fight for liberation, every action is taken with a loving intention. Love allows us to understand that if we truly want to be liberated we cannot appeal to the morality of our oppressors. “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift” (Freire 47). Simply asking for our needs to be considered will only result in disappointment. We cannot allow ourselves to be dehumanized with words as our only defense. To liberate ourselves, we must defend ourselves from our oppressors. By current definitions, our self-defense will be considered violent. We will never be the aggressors, we will only respond to the harm and violence that we have been victim to for years. The violence enacted by the oppressive systems that we live under today is in no way comparable to the violent acts that must be committed in our defense. The intention and impact of these actions is what distinguishes the two. One is done in an effort to sustain oppression, and it functions well for the goal; the other is intended to disrupt oppression and it is simply the response to the former. Love is present in one and not the other. As long as the violent acts taken are not completely contradictory to love, they can be justified.

Love should guide our behavior. Learning to love can change the way you interact with yourself, others, and the world. We are not taught the importance of love, so it is something you have to make an effort to learn about. When choosing to love, you are making the decision to dedicate yourself to the advancement of all people. When choosing to love, you are deciding to leave behind the self-serving and individualistic behaviors and ideals taught to you by our society in favor of a collectivist mindset. Everyone benefits from love. The more people who are able to see the merit in love, the closer we get to true freedom.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “A Letter to My Nephew.” Progressive, The (USA), vol. 63, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1999, p. 67. NewsBank: Access World News, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=AWNB&docref=news/15CF7F5622D02BA0.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York City, Herder and Herder, 1970.

hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York City, HarperCollins, 2000.

Lawrence, Morgan. “Consider Love.” WRIT340, 2021.

Moore, Darnell L. “Black Radical Love: A Practice.” Public Integrity, vol. 20, no. 4, 2018, pp. 325–328.

Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual

Growth. Touchstone, 1998.