On love in the time of fascism
As we watch our government march on toward violent authoritarianism, we’ve also seen a rash of “well _______ taught me to love everyone”. Maybe it was your mom, your dad, your granny, your preschool teacher, Sesame Street, your Sunday school, or your basketball coach: many of us were supposedly taught to “love everyone”. A while back, I fired off some tweets on the subject. It’s a common but frustrating refrain that I am tired of hearing both because it’s often rooted in privilege and almost never a helpful thing to say.
It is very easy to “love everyone” when your world is extremely homogeneous. I, for one, was raised in an insular white wealthy suburb. As a child, “love everyone” meant “be nice to everyone”- an easy concept for most small children to grasp. It’s not hard to be nice to everyone because everyone looks, acts, and thinks just like you and your family. While being nice is a useful instruction to children, it means little in practice in a far less homogeneous world than the one we grew up in. I can tell you the world of my childhood didn’t have poor, brown, Black, trans, or almost any immigrant representation; how do we “love everyone” when we never knew just how many people *everyone* truly means?
Furthermore, the platitude of “ _____ taught me to love everyone” does not operationalize love. How do we *do* love? Doing love and doing love well is a lot more than being nice to people we encounter. As bell hooks explains, “love [is] the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth” and that this process or action requires many components. We teach our children to value “love” but are not taught how to act on that. How do we show up for trans, Black, brown, Latino, Muslim, Asian, queer, poor, disabled, and immigrant people if “loving” people just means being nice to them? Plainly, when marginalized communities are poor, hungry, homeless, unemployed, and killed in the streets, our simplistic, inert definition of love is useless to them.
Our simplistic definition of loving everyone is not only useless to marginalized communities but also maintains their oppression. If our language for “loving everyone” is never operationalized, we are left falsely equating “loving” (i.e. being nice to) bigots as well as the oppressed. Stated another way, ignoring the violence of bigots under the guise of “loving” them, contributes to their violence against the oppressed. Those of us with privilege, especially, condone and maintain systemic and interpersonal violence when we fail to challenge and contradict the ideas and actions of our bigoted community members. While this is not new, it strikes me that the stakes are higher under an authoritarian regime. Not calling out the white supremacist mentality found tucked cozily in our neighborhoods for fear of not being “loving” enough is a fear we can’t afford.
Not only do we excuse the bigotry of others through this broadly applied and useless protocol for “loving everyone”, we excuse our own bigotry and complicity in systemic oppression. Far too many of us, when called to rise up against white supremacy and other institutionalized oppression, sidestep this call to action because we already “love everyone”. We easily avoid self-interrogation and thus any possibility of resistance to systemic violence because we think we’re already doing all that we need to do in “loving everyone” just as we were taught. Claiming to love everyone allows us to opt out of actually caring for the marginalized in our communities and often just reinforces our privileged insulation.
Lots of our well-intentioned parents, teachers, and mentors, in an effort to raise decent children, taught us to love everyone. But our good intentions, without substantive, practical language about how and to whom we do love, offer little to marginalized communities and defend our own bigotry. In the dawn of sanctioned fascism, we can no longer afford to use platitudes in lieu of action. To be clear, I am not suggesting that love is not important. Rather, I’m reminding us all (myself as much as anyone) that love is an action and a process, not just an empty phrase we utter to protect ourselves from judgment and complicity. We must love. We must love bigly, widely, deeply. But we also must love practically, tangibly, materially and especially to those most marginalized. Our lives depend on it.
Rachel can be found ranting on Twitter at @colocha_rachel.
