These offerings and musings, are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, stolen, and unceded lands of the Musqueam people the lands also known as Vancouver.
Happy Black Future Month. This year Black Future Month has an extra day due to it being a leap a year. Therefore, this means we have 29 days of all Black everything! Valentine’s Day is also coming up so my musings this month is about love. I wrote about love back in November’s issue, but I am a Libra sun and I have 5 placements in Libra which means love and relationships for better or worse are serious preoccupations of mine. And, I truly believe that our relationships tell you so much about people’s politics and praxis. For e.g. almost every B/I/POC has had the experience of going to their white or white-coded friend’s wedding that is pretty racially homogenous. All of a sudden it becomes hella clear that your fronds anti-racism is only for social media and work and that it is not an actual way of life.
Feel free to reflect back to me your thoughts and feelings.
The future of love is queer and platonic
“We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves in all kinds of relationships. And right now, we need to be in rigorous practice with each other because we can no longer afford to love people the way we’ve been loving them” -adrienne maree brown from the essay ‘Love As Political Resistance” from her book Pleasure Activism
Since 2019, I have been really thinking about and theorizing out loud about the capaciousness of platonic love and how we all need to queer our understanding and enactment of love. I am always thinking about how much of my politics am I truly bringing to my relationships.
I recently, woke up to a text from a beloved sister-friend that would help clarify this answer for me. In the text my sister-friend was calling me in on how I was not truly showing up as fully as I can in our relationship and how it was causing her harm. Essentially from the text and the beautiful conversation that followed later that day it became clear to me that I could no longer afford to love her the way that I was loving her. In that moment I was being gifted with the opportunity to live out my values and really lean into radical platonic love.
To queer love is to do intimacy differently. It means that we throw away the white normative cultural ideas about love that we learned and do a new thing. To queer love is to love people how they want to be loved.
I like to use queer as a verb because to me queer is instructive and it is a mandate. Queer is not just about gender or sexual orientation. Queer is deeply sociopolitical and relational. When I queer love, I am actively rejecting the notion of the golden rule that we have been socialized into in this Judeo-Christian society. The golden rule says, “to treat others as we would want to be treated.” I think that is a super selfish and self-centered way to approach love and relationships. The golden rule is rooted in capitalism and white supremacy. If you check the following boxes:
· White
· Male
· Able-bodied
· Cisgender
· Heterosexual
Having a combination of these identities makes it easier to love or be loved and it increases your chances of being treated well. Having a multitude of these privileges may allow one to have less problems articulating their personhood and having their personhood be seen as legible and legitimate, but what about the rest of us?
Someone who is a survivor of child sexual abuse/sexual assault, who grew up with an incarcerated parent(s), who is a transracial adoptee, grew up in the foster care system, is in recovery, has abandonment issues, is learning to have boundaries late in life, is undocumented, is a migrant, is transgender, queer, femme, low-income, disabled, or etc. is going to require love that fits their specific desires and more importantly their lived experience and context.
Love must fit the object of the affection if you want your love to register and matter to your beloved.
With this in mind, I asked my sister-friend “how do you need me to show you love?” And because she is a self-aware person who is doing her own WORK she gave me three things that she needed from me. They were clear and more importantly they are doable! Now, I am clear on how I need to organize my love and efforts to meet her love language. I know for a fact that the conversation her and I were able to have and the space we were able to create for this level of truth telling and confession could only happen because we are both politically aligned and serious about putting our politics into praxis. In the end, our shared Black feminist ideology, our belief in abolition, and our mutual desire to be in a radical platonic friendship ensured that both of our needs got met.
I hope this month that you will take the time to do an audit of all your relationships and really ask folks how do they want to be loved? And when you get answer I hope you will implement it..
VIEWINGS AND READINGS
Sula by Toni Morrison- which is this month’s book club read
We Can Only Process Kobe Bryant’s Death by Being Honest About His Life by Evette Dionne-When we’re wedded to specific narratives of how feminists should act, it can be all too easy to disregard humanity. But feminism, at least the tradition I follow, makes space for redemption too. Only Bryant’s accuser can decide if she forgives him, and it’s not our place to do that work publicly on her behalf. What we can do is complicate these conversations so we can usher in more honesty about who’s elevated in the aftermath of a sexual assault and how fame and money insulate perpetrators from being brought to account. We can do this while still acknowledging that Bryant didn’t deserve to die in such a manner at such an age and that the people who loved him are grieving.
Two Things Can Be True True, But One is mentioned First by Jeremy Gordon-Things can change once enough time passes and the dissenters are browbeat into holding their silence. After all, a man died, along with his daughter, and seven others, and if you think now is the time to litigate all the messy stuff that happened so long think again, because my opinion is more important than your opinion. But when I read all these tributes to Kobe, I don’t learn anything about him, because while his death is tragic, he is a person I did not know. Instead, his death teaches me about us.
Millennials Love Zillow Because They Will Never Own a Home by Angela Lashbrook-This is a sad reality and truth and yes I have Zillow app on my phone currently
Pendeja, You Isn’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature by myriam gurba- In order to choke down Dirt, I developed a survival strategy. It required that I give myself over to the project of zealously hate-reading the book, filling its margins with phrases like “Pendeja, please.” That’s a Spanglish analogue for “Bitch, please.”
Can ‘Bad Boys’ Become Good Men by Soraya Nadia McDonald-Will Smith became the biggest movie star in the world by playing one cop after another. Now, he’s got a new Bad Boys movie coming out, but there’s a question looming right alongside it: In the post-Black Lives Matter era, can Bad Boys still resonate?
Transgender Activists Scoff at Idea of Voting for Pete Buttigieg- video [link]
The Future of Trans Representation in Media- video [link]
It Is a Terrible Irony That Kobe Bryant Should Fall From The Sky by Charles P. Pierce-But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.
Whitney Houston and Aaron Hernandez: The Costly Trauma of the Closet by John Casey-
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?
LISTENING
First Draft with Sarah Enni- this podcast interview is with Chani Nicholas and its about her writing process and the container that Chani built for herself to finish this book. I love hearing creatives talk about their creative process plus I really enjoyed Chani’s book
Capitalism and Desire: In Dialogue with Psychoanalysis- If philosophy is your thing you will appreciate this conversation about how capitalism shapes and fuels are desires
Why Theory: Hegel and Race- another very philosophy heavy podcast examining Hegel’s ideas on race and how they shifted
Death Sex and Money Between Friends: Your Stories About Race and Friendship-for those who have been harmed by racism inside of your interracial friendships and for those of you who have caused harm inside of your IR friendships this episode is a must listen. I shared it with a white friend of mine and we had a beautiful conversation that deepened our friendship
Code Switch: ‘Between Friends’-this is a companion piece to the above episode furthering the conversation about interracial friendships
SunStorm Alicia Garza and Ai-jen Poo- this is a new podcast listen to two movement leaders and friends humanize social change makers
The Baron of Botox- this is a 10-part podcast series about the celebrity dermatologist Dr. Frederic Brandt and his suicide. I am really riveted by the story and the feminist questions this podcast is making me confront as it concerns the pursuit of beauty
More Than Enough-This is a 4-part series on universal basic income produced by The Nation that talks to actual low-income people about how universal basic income would impact their lives
Always be Optimizing by Jia Tolentino- [listen to the essay here]- this essay is about how women are forced to optimize themselves and the feminist implications associated with this optimization hustle
How To! With Charles Duhigg: How To Kick a Meth Habit- change is hard and this podcast episode really drives home the point of what is needed to change your life when you cannot change your physical setting
Committed-this is a show about marriage and it what it takes to have a successful marriage. I have listened to three episodes thus far, and I am not sure how to feel about the host. I got thoughts and feelings lol
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Sula-book club meeting will be on Saturday, Feburary 29th 12:00 p.m. PST sign up for details
