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JOURNEY TO REVOLUTIONARY LOVE

This year was my first time recognizing Black August–I hadn’t even heard of it until last year. When I say, I’m learning, I mean I’m learning. Anyone who has been watching my stories for the last couple of years has witnessed me learning out loud, which feels so important to me in this phase of life. 

The murder of Mike Brown in 2014 changed me. I realized that some folks would only ever see me as another Black girl from southwest Atlanta, i.e. disposable. It illuminated the connection between this form of mis/recognition and the systems that valued some lives over others. I decided then to do what made sense to me. To dedicate my life to learning, and I would not apologize for or shrink from being my version of Black, girl (femme), and southern.

In the spirit of Black August, I did some reading and wanted to highlight what left a mark. First up, is Joy James’ In Search of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, and Community (Divided Publishing, March 2023), an abolitionist text that charges us to explore the roles of love and relationships in making the world over. James references a reframing of education, not an exclusionary, elitist, and assimilationist praxis but as something committed to, rooted in, and nourished by the most vulnerable folks in our society. James uplifts the IBRT (Incarcerated Black Radical Tradition) as a deepening of the BRT, which neoliberalism often co-opts and drains of potency to make it easier for the ruling class to digest. Boiled chicken theory (No, I will not be elaborating).

Across centuries and cultures, political prisoners have provided lessons learned on inequity and institutional violence. Incarcerated folks (including folks who are being held by ICE, who are institutionalized due to mental health crises, and those held under other forms of forced confinement) are on the receiving end of some of the most inhumane treatment. What does it mean to turn to them as potential educators? What does it mean to listen to them? What does it mean to love them?

bell hooks defines love as an action and an intention, i.e. “there is no love without justice.” Joy James explores revolutionary love as a form of socio-economic death, a sacrifice through rooted principles.

I am grateful for the education I have received, like 15 years of high ed., but it was always hella clear to me that the hoops and hurdles I had to jump through to get that education were deeply tied to inequity. I seek ways to upend. I am also powerfully motivated by a desire for connection. This idea of a love tied to revolutionary praxis calls to me always.

Here are some quotes from the book:

  • “death and dying do not always come by way of murder in the streets by the police or other white supremacists, but through attempting to divest from all of the structures that wield power over us—and doing so earnestly... (Revolutionary Love) is a call to sacrifice; to sacrifice our lives, our relationships, our time, our livelihoods with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed in return.” P. 13
  • “Practice increases skill. Combined with Revolutionary Love, we grow power through mutual aid, political education, the release of the incarcerated, and community control over police. Love, vulnerability, and agency mitigate apathy” P. 39
  • “In a consumer society, multi-ethnic elites are alienated from traumatic suffering tied to poverty and racism. Reform seems reasonable to some due to their distance from daily denigration and violence. Practical politics and freedom reduced to personal achievement or idealism become attainable goals.” P. 57
  • “Many conveniently forget that Du Bois later dismissed the talented tenth as opportunistic and self-serving, and why he recanted.” P. 50
  • “Conquest was war. Slavery was war. Convict leasing was war. Sharecropping was war. COINTELPRO was war.“ P. 65
  • “Elite academics inherently are not a revolutionary cadre and tend to function as anti-revolutionary (hostile to revolution, but distinct from police/state forces that are counter-revolutionary, such as the FBI and CIA). Academics rarely personally know revolutionaries except for political prisoners who have obtained high profiles or have been profiled in the research, writing, and conference-hosting done by academics and the academy.” P. 73
  • “Elite or hegemonic forms of abolition could block these powers from accruing to working class and impoverished and captive militants, by siphoning the meanings of radicalism away from the analyses of the most vulnerable and militant and redirecting endeavors towards reform of political norms.“ P. 74
  • “Logically, the abolitionist is alchemist. In the rational world of unabated loss and terror, it is only natural that the liberator would be a magical thinker and radical doer. Trying to better understand the roles of political prisoners as intellectuals and political agents in global abolitionist struggles, I reflect here on the spiritual and political drive of activists; their labors suggest a force of nature that calls upon the ancestral in order to design a future beyond captivity.“ P. 82
  • “This struggle of building community out of activist (not professionalized) culture is an international struggle. Here, we can draw upon the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. According to Freire, “‘Washing one’s hands’ of the conflicts between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.”He emphasizes the non-hierarchical ways in which communities teach each other and with each other without professionalizing the sharing of knowledge and ethical action. Countless unnamed activists and students functioned as pedagogues as well, boldly creating theories of social justice in tandem with their communities, often marginalized from the elite or from the academy.” P. 97
  • “The BPP’s socialist stance appeared to be more practical than intellectual. Rather than theorize, it focused on the practical aspects of distributing wealth. One of the Panthers’ mottos—“All Power to the People!”—was concretized in socialist economics...” “The survival programs were designed to serve and educate the Black community. Attempting to be responsive to the needs of the people, staffed by non-elite rank-and-file members,“ P. 116-117
  • “Free discourse is the ability to be radical in service to the disenfranchised and imprisoned without being attacked. Obama instituted the most repressive laws against whistleblowers and investigative journalists. To stop the white- (Black?-)washing of the Obama legacy and acquiescence to its heirs apparent, radicals would have to negotiate the terms of struggle and sacrifice, and face insults for attempting to illuminate contradictions, hegemonic betrayals, and performative politics within celebrity activism and education masking ideology and accumulation from the monetization of Black suffering.” P. 136
  • “Revolutionary Love is difficult to define. Distinct from personal or familial love, it originates from a desire for the greater good that entails radical risk-taking for justice.” P. 34

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