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
Credit to Roza Nozari (@yallaroza) on instagram for this beautiful piece which they created with Warner Music for Pride. Nozari writes “this art is created around Kylie Minogue's "All The Lovers" - - against a black backdrop. Head over to @warnermusic @warnermusicuk to learn more about the incredible artists connected to this virtual Pride Installation.”
“I Hope We Choose Love”
“Love for the survivors, love for the perpetrators, love for the survivors who have perpetrated, and the perpetrators who have survived. Love for the community that has failed us all. We live in poison. The planet is dying. We can choose love. Even in the midst of despair, there is always a choice. I hope we choose love.”- Kai Cheng Thom from the essay and book titled I Hope We Choose Love
Love is not the thing we are supposed to lead with within social justice spaces unless we are talking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact if you are not careful merely bringing up love can be a major sociopolitical faux pas. So-called serious thinkers and revolutionaries have no time for love. Love is a distraction or a bourgeois indulgence. Who needs love when we must do the work? I try to stay away from people like this because no one needs a comrade or co-struggler who has an aversion to being with and experiencing love. And let me tell you as a social worker and former organizer if you don’t love people and love them enough to want their liberation even when you don’t like them or agree with their political choices, doing the work is going to be challenging.
It makes sense why many people avoid talks of love in sociopolitical spaces. We want to appear erudite and not fringe. Plus white supremacy has perverted the concept of love and has made it dangerous. And, when I invoke love I am not talking about that vapid neoliberal version of love which is a love that requires unquestioned allegiance and that wants all of its self-centered, self-indulging, and often abusive whims to be validated, and tolerated as proof of being loved and loving.
In this current context, everything is permissible and permissiveness is seen as the highest form of freedom. Permissiveness is the new repackaged neoliberal version of love. If I love you and if you love me we will allow each other to be unethical, harmful, and undisciplined human beings because that is our right. And the true marker of a North American is our obsession and unwavering fidelity with fulfilling our every right no matter the communal cost or the emotional taxes we will eventually have to pay for our decisions.
That is not my orientation or definition of love.
The only definition of love that I work with, think with, and try to somatically embody is the one put forth in the timeless book The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. In the book, he defines love as “The Will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s or another’s spiritual growth.” Meaning if the relationship is not creating the conditions for me to grow and experience a better version of myself then I do not want it. I do not think we exist to heal each other, but I do believe that the byproduct of being loved and seen is that we do in fact and become more tolerant of the parts of ourselves that we despise which creates healing and makes it easier for us to sit with someone else’s ugly and raggedy while they do their healing work.
Peck goes on to write,
“I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love, Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love, No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions.”
Those words indict me every time I read them because it makes it clear that my behavior must match my intentions if I want to ensure that I am doing the effortful work of loving.
So we have survived 2020 a year that was both merciless and merciful. So many life-altering and generational defining things happened this year and we still have so much more to do. How will we be with one another going forward? What has living through a global pandemic taught you? What has experiencing the racial reckoning of this past summer awaken in you? How will you be different and forever changed by living through this moment? How will those changes color your activism, organizing, and loving?
How are we going to live with the seventy-one million United State-ians who voted for racism and fascism? How are we are going to expand our anti-racist cafeteria table? How will we love each other and doula each other into becoming better citizens and humans? We will have many strategies for different people, moments, and communities. Our talking points will vary, but whatever it is that we do I hope we choose love.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
NPR Best Book of 2020 Book Concierge [LINK]- for those who read and who are always looking for a new book you are going to love this app designed by the nerdy folks at NPR.
Therapists and Fans are Turning Against Instagram’s ‘Holistic Psychologist’ [LINK]- “But in the wake of Floyd’s killing, Mintah-Galloway said her perspective on life shifted; she was angry and devastated, looking for solace. “I remember going to LePera’s page, wondering genuinely what she has to say about it, what resources or what work she has to put out regarding this that could be beneficial to me in my pain, to other people I know in their pain. And that's when I saw that she hadn't spoken about it.” Mintah-Galloway said she found this silence hurtful and borderline insulting. So, she dropped a comment on LePera’s most recent post at the time, expressing her disappointment.”
Undrowned- Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals Alexis Pauline Gumbs and adrienne maree brown [LINK]- APG wrote a book about marine mammals through the lens of Black feminist thought and this was a beautiful and insightful interview.
We Will Not Cancel Us Book Release Event with adrienne maree brown [LINK]- this is a great conversation between adrienne maree brown and two other transformative justice practitioners Shira Hassan and Malkia Devich-Cyril centered on her new book. This conversation is a great gut and temperature check for those of us who practice TJ or who are inching closer to wanting to practice TJ.
BEST OF 2020 LIST:
This month I dug in the crates and went through all the articles, videos, books, and podcast episodes that I shared with you and have compiled a list of my favorite or the most critical content.
VIDEOS:
Kiese Laymon on Masculinity, Body Dysmorphia, Abuse and Addiction [LINK]
Debunking Myths About Testerone with Dr. Katrina Karkazis (Instagram video) [LINK]
Would Dating Be Easier If I Had a Vagina? Kat Blaque [LINK]
Chika NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert [LINK]
Racial bypassing in the LatinX community with Lutze Segu (Instagram video) [LINK]
PODCAST EPISODES:
The Stakes: There Goes The Neighborhood [LINK]- this series is about climate gentrification in Miami and our very own homegrown award-winning journalist Nadege Green helped to ensure that the story was told well.
Death, Sex, and Money Between Friends: Your Stories About Race and Friendship [LINK]- because almost none of us know how to do interracial friendships well so it’s helpful to hear how others get it wrong.
Longform #378 Ashley C. Ford [LINK]- ACF is my possibility role model her insights about love, money, and writing have been invaluable to me, I cannot believe this was free advice.
The Bottom of the Map: Space is the Place [LINK]- my absolute favorite podcast find of this year that talks about hip-hop from a very nerdy and sociopolitical grounded place. This episode was about the afrofuture and hip-hop.
Intercepted: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes The Case for Abolition [LINK]- Ruth is the truth and you need to hear her speak and commit her words to memory.
ARTICLES:
You Could Never Misgender Me by Hunter Ashleigh Shackleford [LINK]- “Calling me ‘she/her’ isn’t actually misgendering me. Calling me ‘he/ him’ isn’t misgendering me either. Because my gender isn’t translated through my pronouns, only affirmed by them. I don’t look like pronouns, and pronouns don’t look like me. I don’t perform like pronouns, and pronouns don’t perform like me. My pronouns are a boundary. My pronouns are personal. My pronouns are not gendered.”
White Women for Defunding the Police by Showing up for Racial Justice [LINK]- We are white women raised in poor and working class families. We are in full solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives call to defund the police and invest in the services that keep communities safe. We live in the US South, Midwest, Appalachia, East and West Coast, and Canada, in cities, small towns and rurally. We are white women who know that police don’t keep us safe. We are survivors of violence calling for the abolition of police. Our solidarity lies with those most targeted and harmed by policing — Black gender oppressed people, especially Black trans women.”
Love A Dish Unpleasant Without All The Ingredients by Da’Shaun Harrison [LINK]- “Then I read bell hooks’ “all about love” for the very first time, and my entire life changed. Through what sociologists call “social institutions,” varying mechanisms teach us about what behavioral rules make up our culture and society. What I learned through family, and religion, and the media, and the government is that it was impossible for queerness and Love to coexist; or, at the very least, that if I wanted to feel loved by my family, friends, and other constituents, I had to lock away the parts of me that needed that Love the most. What hooks taught me, even as I have critiques of how cisheteronormative the book is, is that this is not Love at all. And that revelation wrecked me, but also gave me a new sense of peace.”
Whitney Houston and Aaron Hernandez: The Costly Trauma of the Closet by John Casey [LINK]- “Houston and Hernandez were both complicated, high-achieving individuals with many demons — obviously Hernandez’s tribulations were much worse. However, it raises the question, is there a price to be paid for feverishly trying to stay in the closet? Aggressively denying your sexuality is not just about being scarred emotionally, but does it push someone into really dangerous behaviors like hard drugs, rage, and hurting others and/or yourself?”
Mourning Sex by Starr Davis [LINK]- “When a Black man dies, I go looking for him inside the body of another Black man And if he’s not in there, I go searching in someone else”
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Merch: Did you see that the Social Justice Doula has launched merch!!!
I have some beautiful limited edition and limited quantity merch you can purchase under the “merch tab.” It is sold in a tote bundle (which includes a button and sticker) or a sticker bundle (3 different stickers).
Support a Black femme’s labor by purchasing this merch, as well as the Black-owned Miami based printing shop that made all our merch, Roots Printing.
New clients: The Social Justice Doula is currently taking on individual clients for 2021. To contact me, visit my website here.
Call for Submissions (extended deadline): “Twin Futures: Black Resistance and Indigenous Sovereignty”
Guest Edited by Lutze Segu
decomp journal is still accepting submissions of Fiction, Poetry, Non-Fiction, and Media/Art for its first themed zine, “Twin Futures: Black Resistance and Indigenous Sovereignty.” Submissions should take up themes of Black and Indigenous futures while rejecting the false binaries and borders between these two formations.
Indigenous dispossession and chattel slavery are the two engineered atrocities that created the nation-states known as Canada and The United States (Turtle Island).
Black people who are the descendants of the enslaved in North America live in the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman teaches us; Indigenous/Afro-Indigenous peoples are still fighting against ongoing settler colonialism.
Racial reckonings, bold social justice claims, abolition, repair, decolonization, ideas about defunding the police, failed reconciliation attempts, and protest fill the air. A global pandemic is a prescient time to reimagine what is possible. Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty are inextricably tied. There is no futurity in white supremacy, no sustainable plan for the future. But a future that centers Indigeneity and Blackness is a future where survival on this planet can be made possible.
This is a call for writers and artists to help imagine, and thus bring about, these futures.
Submissions open September 1, 2020 – December 31, 2020.
Submit here: https://decompjournal.com/submit