These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
So, what if we’re each other’s project? The question is, what are we building and destroying together in the name of love?
proj·ect
noun
/ˈpräˌjekt/
1. an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. "A research project."
To me, love is a political project. How we love, whom we choose to love, and whom we choose to withhold love from, the content, context, and contours of our love have been shaped by not just our family but our nation-state(s). White supremacy, anti-fatness, ableism, xenophobia, colonialism, anti-Indigeneity, imperialism, and all other systems of oppression and domination play a role in how we love.
I also consider loving a political commitment because to love within these conditions is challenging. In the enduring book, The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Love and growth are inextricably tied, but we must get curious about what we are building and growing between us. Are we building a garden filled with flowers, veggies, and fruits that will have the ability to nourish us? Or are we building a nuclear mushroom cloud that will subsume and destroy us? Being human is a group project, and there is no more challenging group project than love. We help each other become more loving and more human. Because systems of oppression and domination have captured us, only a principled kind of love will save us and transform us into more loving beings.
Therefore, when I endeavor to enter a loving space with others, be it familial, platonic, romantic, or undefined, I must have a clear intention, strategy, and goal. I have a choice(s) to make. I can either choose to enter that love space fully on autopilot and allow unchecked and unmanaged bias, oppression, and domination to reign supreme, or I can choose to enter that love space clothed in radical presence as a sociopolitical being who is choosing to have their love animated by anti-racism, Black joy, Black liberation theology, care, tenderness, etc. I view this choice as a political one because my politics rests, rules, and abides in love.
Loving Black people is my supreme political commitment. And I will also add that non-Black people of color and white people who endeavor to be anti-racist and seek to engage with decolonization are also part of my political love commitments. For example, being friends with white women as a Black femme is a radical faith walk, and I consensually enter these relationships for the sole purpose of one day learning how to love beyond identities and white supremacy. The only successful interracial friendships I have had are with white women who understand and can articulate their political commitments to loving Black people through a deep commitment to anti-racism because love alone is not enough!
Many Black women bristle when I tell them that learning how to love in healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with complicated Black women is part of my political project. Therefore, I will engage in a principled struggle to achieve this end. And the constant refrain I hear is, “I don’t want to be treated like a project.” And after much thought and talking to the homie Micha, I have finally perfected my answer. To this, I say, so what if we are each other's project? If we have chosen to enter a consensual healthy, loving relationship where spiritual growth, healing, and transformation are possible, what is harmful about us labeling this a project? Many of the Black women, femme, and gender-expansive people I know are survivors of child sexual abuse, gender-based violence, parental abuse, or neglect, colorism, texturism, have been harmed by the carceral system, and above all, have been fed a steady diet of anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, and ableism. All these systems I have listed are white supremacist projects. These various systems of harm levied against us have made it a struggle for us to give and receive love. It being hard to give and receive love is not an issue unique to Black people. Black people are not pathological.
We have been shaped and socialized by anti-Blackness, indigenous dispossession, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, classism, etc. these systems are in us; therefore, we enact them, which means although our worthiness is never in question, I want to be clear we are all worthy of love. These very things also make us not easy to love. Both things are true.
The word project in relation to love and relationships of various kinds gets a bad reputation, and I think it is because it is so often linked to heterosexual couples. The picture that is immediately conjured up in our minds is of a woman attempting to raise a man who is deeply committed to never leaving Never Never Land. But to me, that is not an example of love being a political project. It is an example of a woman being exploited by patriarchy. Patriarchy tells men that they are complete and finished subjects by virtue of their biology. Heterosexual relationships devoid of a gender liberation ethic do not exist to benefit and nurture women’s growth. And it is the women and the children who must change in order to maintain the man’s presence and support. Patriarchy requires keeping men happy and feeling important as a societal project for the sake of our collective and interpersonal safety.
However, if there is a patriarchal project, there must be a feminist, anti-racist social justice project and approach to love and relationships.
When I speak of love as being a project and US being each other's greatest gifts, I am talking about a consensual relationship in which each person who enters in is honest about their flaws, baggage, trauma, and their willingness to confront themselves in the presence of another. As a sociopolitical being who espouses a Black feminist ethic, I believe that the highest expression of love is the willingness to be transformed by love.
I think that the marker of healthy mutual life-affirming love encourages us to interrogate our motives and get curious about our behaviors that undermine love and our ability to be loving.
And to me, that is a project I find worthy of committing myself to.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to “Move On From COVID - I used to be really clear about the ethics of movement and participation in the early stages of the pandemic. Now that this pandemic is becoming enduring, the ethical lines are becoming harder to identify. This article is the indictment and the call-in we need. Life in the United States is always already risky, especially for Black people and anti-Blackness is disabling. I don’t have the answers, but I am sitting with my complicated feelings.
“I have this book coming out. It’s about the disabled future, about how most of the world will be disabled soon, and how disabled people kept each other and other people alive during COVID. I have tour dates. They’re all online. Because COVID. Because COVID is still here. Because every week, 90 percent of the country is in high or substantial uncontrolled community transmission — the whole country is blood red on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) map. Because 400-500 people a day are still dying of COVID in the U.S., and long COVID is the third-most common neurological disorder. For all of these reasons, having in-person events would feel like inviting my disabled fan base to a slaughterhouse. I have every booster that exists, and I’m still immunocompromised and not hopping on 19 planes in a row.”
I Changed Everything. Now What? “In two months, I’ll turn 43. It’s still tempting to use my birthday wish for another radical shift in my personal life. But I won’t. I’ve yet to fully celebrate my last wish coming true. But through it, I’ve learned a little something about remaking a life. Perhaps most important: It’s possible. Change will always be both noun and verb; it is a thing that happens to us and also a thing we make happen. Stability is less of a reasonable expectation than an ideal or illusion. There is no limit on the number of times we can course-correct. Even if moving around doesn’t yield the results we anticipate, it’s bound to feel better than being unable to see the point of moving at all.”
Women of America! It’s time to reject ‘magical’ curses peddled by Kourtney and Gwenyth, argues Rina Raphael in a blistering expose of the predatory, pseudoscientific wellness industry - The wellness industry is in trouble as more North Americans reclaim their critical thinking skills and rebuke pseudoscience. I am curious to see what will come of Goop as a brand.
“Many women have a bathroom cabinet filled to the brim with sham tinctures, creams and supplements. And after one too many hopeful purchases, they have become more discerning shoppers. Fool me once, shame on Gwyneth. Fool me twice, shame on me. Increasingly, people aren't as easily duped by the exaggerated claims of 'gut-healthy tonics or 'stress relief' pills. Fad ingredients like 'activated charcoal' and CBD have taken a beating. Peloton owners rush to offload their bulky clothes hangers on the resale market (with many opting for more social gyms). Science-based influencers like Food Science Babe garner millions of social media fans. This past fall, Goop hosted a cruise trip. No one showed up.”
The Mixed Metaphor Why does the half-Asian half-white protagonist make us so anxious? - “Here is the better question: Do we want to be Asian Americans? I don’t mean this in a voluntaristic, do-you-believe-in-fairies sort of way, but as a real, honest question: Do people of Asian ancestry in this country want to be Asian Americans? The question is not why a mixed-race person should “get” to qualify as Asian despite, for instance, never having been bullied at school or attacked by a stranger; the question is why we cannot imagine any other way to be Asian. And if there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be. I do not mean that Asian America will suddenly appear on the horizon tomorrow if enough of us choose it tonight. What I mean is that many people across the country, including many of us who are mixed, are already choosing it, and it is enough for now to ask why. There is, after all, a reason that people sit together: They don’t want to be alone.”
UnfollowYourInfluncers.com - This webpage exists to expose charlatan influencers, and their first case study is everyone’s fave, The Holistic Psychologist. The anti-racist, anti-oppression math was not adding up for me, and I have since unfollowed this influencer. Check out the website and make your calculations.
‘The Netflix Effect’: Why So Many Western Women are heading to South Korea in search of love - White women are engaging in predatory sexual tourism, and Korean men are the objects of prey.
“Hit Korean television shows like "Crash Landing on You" and "Goblin," were selling more than men with beautiful faces and chiseled bodies like their stars Hyun Bin and Gong Yoo. They were offering a glimpse into a world where men were romantic and patient, an antithesis to what the women saw as the sex-obsessed dating culture of their home countries.”
The supper rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse - This article is wild. Instead of the rich trying to save the world that they are actively destroying, they are all in a mad rush to perfect the best apocalyptic plan and trying to use the knowledge of academics to do so.
“That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?”
I’m a psychologist—and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health - I am a huge advocate of therapy, but therapy that is not rooted in anti-oppression is always already dangerous and in service to white supremacy.
“None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.”
Should You Delete Your Period-Tracking App To Protect Your Privacy - Surveillance capitalism is a real and present danger, and your digital footprint can and will be used against you in a patriarchal court of law. TLDR; I would delete them!
“The data collected on period-tracking apps—along with your search history and text messages—could potentially be used by law enforcement to penalize individuals who received an abortion, as well as people who performed or helped someone else get an abortion in some states.”
On Heteropessimissm - Since learning of the term hetereopessism it has been living rent free in my mind. Heterosexual culture is failing straight people and as a Black femininst I am not shocked, but I am very worried. If hetereopessimism is not resolved we who are women, femmes, and gender expansive people will be made more vulnerable to gender based violence. TLDR; femininsts be knowing!
“Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.”
A decade of sore winners - Is there a more absurdist creature than the underdog who has become the overlord, but still sees themselves as an outsider? We all know someone who has everything they have ever wanted and still has a chip on their shoulder the size of Texas.
“Call the 2010s the decade of the sore winner: the underdogs that are top dogs, the upstarts who are establishment. It’s Taylor Swift’s decade as much thanks to her affect as her music. But it’s not just Taylor. Donald Trump is a sore winner. So is Brett Kavanaugh. Every Washington figure who blames “Washington” for their failure to deliver on their promises is a sore winner. Hillary Clinton is not a sore winner — she’d have to win — but she has, it must be said, the vibe. (Recall, for instance, her reaction to being referred to as a member of the establishment.) New York Times columnists and billionaires who think their critics are symptomatic of a second Holocaust? Sore winners. Conservative pundits who, flush with Trump’s favorable court appointments, indulge in ever-escalating paranoia over drag queen story hours are sore winners. Directors of Marvel films who were angry at Martin Scorsese for not loving their work are sore winners. The police are sore winners. Authors of young adult and “chick” lit who feel the need to compare criticism of their work to Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of young girls are sore winners. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is crawling with sore winners. Women who choose to conform to feminine expectations around weight, grooming, and makeup while penning long defenses of high heels, shaving, and lipstick are sore winners (though they are also, in their way and on a higher level, losers). Adult gifted children are sore winners. And so on.”
Social Movement Investing - A guide to capital strategies for community power.
Antivaxx to Provaxx Resources & My Story- “I’ve been very honest on social media about how 2020 changed me. One of the bigger changes that didn’t come till 2021 was my stance on vaccines. Prior to 2021 I was actually an anti-vaxxer. Yes you read that word right I was an anti-vaxxer. No I was not vaccine hesitant I was completely 100% antivaxx. I wasn’t one of those trolls that would tell people they’re killing their baby by vaccinating them, but I definitely shared my fair amount of anti-VAX propaganda on my social media platforms.”
LISTENING:
Your everyday rituals do impact your life — just no how you expect - From wearing a lucky pair of socks, to following family traditions, rituals are embedded in our everyday lives.
Conspirtuality 118:Detoxing from Wellness with Kerri Kelly
Pop Pantheon - Beyonce’s Renaissance (with The New Yorkers Doreen St. Felix)
Vibe Check - This is my new favorite podcast that I am subscribed to. Vibe check is hosted by Sam Sanders formerly of NPR, the critically acclaimed poet, and essayist Saeed Jones, and Zach Stafford three gay Black men and friends, The show sounds like a smart group chat that you have been allowed to witness.
LUTZE SIGHTINGS:
To Be Us: To Work: In 2019, I narrated a documentary about the anti-Black racism that Black people experience at work, and you can watch it on Amazon Prime! The documentary is titled To Be Us: To Work; the pandemic made the original rollout impossible. The film hit the film festival circuit and won some awards. I tried to have a screening in Miami, but the many COVID variants would not let us be great. I am happy to report that this documentary is on Amazon, and you can rent it and watch it now. And because I was asked to narrate this film by my good friend T. I now have an IMDB credit, and it will not be my last!
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Patreon Shoutouts: We want to give a special shoutout to our patrons who pledged this month!
Shay
Kat O.
Katie M.
Wilmide W.