Abstract
I examine how youth racialized and gendered as Black girls co-conspired to challenge misogynoir with their peers racialized and gendered as Latina/x and Polynesian girls. I investigate how they did so within an after-school space at a public charter high school that came to be known as the “Critical Feminisms Club.” Thinking about the space alongside the girls in the club, I reveal how they politically and pedagogically engaged love to (a) (re)author the stories of Black girls and (b) challenge the material and ideological misogynoir that circumscribed Black girls’ lives, possibilities, and futurities within their lives and schooling. They (re)narrated how they should be in relation with and responsible to each other as collective, co-relational, and interdependent beings, recognizing how Black womanness/girlness was a genre of being human that was specifically targeted for enclosure, exploitation, and elimination. Their love-politics engaged pedagogy to remake the world such that the safety and protection of Black girls and gender-nonconforming youth was a necessity and priority, which they saw in turn as bound to the safety and protection of the non-Black identified Latina/x and Polynesian girls who accepted this interdependence and mutual responsibility.
Keywords
Preface
“Have you thought about a PhD in education?” Dr. Nasir caught me off guard. I was in her office, supposing law school. I hadn’t crossed Tolman looking for a transformational moment. I was looking for a letter of recommendation. But Dr. Nasir witnessed what I brought along from school blacktops. She encouraged me to carefully constellate from concrete—she wanted me to grow, on my terms. It didn’t have to be Dr. Nasir’s responsibility, but from between what I said and didn’t say, she saw me. I felt like she heard the memories that I was not supposed to have, the calamities I kept damned, be damned, and what made me light up and laugh—when others glanced past, just another Asian boy. Dr. Nasir was not the first, nor the last, Black woman who cared about what I carried and saw the future held a place for me. I am not alone. This article is a love letter to the Black women, girls, and gender-nonconforming folks who have nurtured, cultivated, and shared with me what has been named by Black feminists like Jennifer Nash (2013) as a tradition of “love-politics” (Nasir & Givens, 2019). A politics of love defined by how it looks out for the forgotten and vulnerable. A politics of love that consensually embraces our mutual responsibility, with a vision of justice that tends to the shades of gray (Morgan, 1999), leaving no one to perish in the burning house. A politics of love that refuses the shallow, the easy, the good enough, in the name of audaciously envisioning and fashioning worlds where we can thrive and be present—with each other. This article is my attempt at one small act of reciprocity, in honor of you.
Introduction
There is a growing body of education research on how youth racialized and gendered as Black girls challenge their subordination in schooling (Bailey & Trudy, 2018; Butler, 2018; Wun, 2016). There is less research on how Black girls co-conspire to do so with their peers not racialized and gendered as Black girls. This has contributed to “anti-Black girl” discourses that suggest Black girls are not in need of educational support and resources (i.e., based on stereotypes like the “strong Black woman” who does not need help and has inhuman capacities to endure large amounts of pain; Bailey, 2021; Morgan, 1999; Wyatt, 2008) and/or imply that Black girls do not desire to build solidarities to confront oppression (i.e., in part emerging from White feminist discourses that equate Black women’s claims to intersectionality, with Black women refusing solidarity; Liu & Shange, 2018; Nash, 2018).
In this article, within the context of an after-school space that came to be known as the “Critical Feminisms Club” (CFC), I examine how Black girls and youth racialized, gendered, and identifying as Latina/x and “Poly” (i.e., Polynesian) girls embraced and uplifted a Black girl (“Assata”) experiencing what Moya Bailey (2021) refers to as “misogynoir” at a public charter high school (Bailey & Trudy, 2018). 1 Developed within the legacy of Black feminist scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, Imani Perry, Farah Griffin, and Angela Davis (Bailey, 2021, p. 10), misogynoir is a term that was put forward by Bailey (2021) to give language to the “uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence” that befalls Black women and girls. I deliberately make use of misogynoir as a term that was developed to offer linguistic and explanatory power.
Alongside ongoing research and investigations by Black feminist scholars, community-rooted intellectuals, and activists (Bailey, 2021; Crenshaw et al., 2015; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Harris, 2020; Lindsey, 2022; Richardson, 2002, 2019, 2021), misogynoir became conceptually helpful as I worked with the youth of the CFC to make sense of how Black girls frequently reported being stopped for dress code violations, casually named by peers as unattractive while simultaneously presumed to be hypersexual, framed as aggressive during classroom discourse, assumed to be irresponsible and unthoughtful as they made life decisions, and actively surveilled as prospective threats to order, inside and outside of class. In this way, the term provided language to help describe the sudden violence that occurred to a small in stature Black girl (“Angela”) who was well known by her teachers and peers for her intelligence, charisma, and generosity of spirit. Angela stepped up to proactively stop a fight between Black girls at her school, and a school administrator responded with words and actions that positioned her as irrational and dangerous (Bailey, 2021). As Angela narrates the moment: You’re [school administrator] mad because I stopped the altercation and saved the school money? Sorry, what do you want me to say? I didn’t get in an altercation. I helped stop the altercation. What was the problem? Why are you yelling at me and why are you talking to me like some specimen on the bottom of your shoe?
It was clear to her mother, Tarika, as well as Angela and the girls and gender-nonconforming youth in the CFC that Angela would have likely received differing treatment if she had not been racialized and gendered as a Black girl.
As administrators were having to make incredibly difficult decisions regarding the school budget, misogynoir also notably became a useful term as I attempted to explain the institutional violence of the school’s decision to cut funding to the girls basketball team. As one of the few spaces on campus that was broadly participated in by Black girls, Black girls across the campus widely organized to let the administration know the impact on their lives. Defunding the girls basketball team would function as racialized and gendered violence against Black girls—that is, misogynoir—within a schooling context that made no visible efforts to prioritize and institutionalize spaces that sustained Black girls. Amidst all of this material and ideological violence, the CFC became one affective space where Black girls and youth racialized, gendered, and identifying as Latina/x and Poly (i.e., Polynesian) girls could come together to make sense of and organize against misogynoir and interlocking systems of oppression.
Conceptualizing the workings of the space over time, alongside girls and gender-nonconforming youth within the CFC, 2 I reveal how affective moments of co-conspiracy took up love as a pedagogy and politics for social justice. While “love” as an affective, pedagogical, and political concept 3 has often been emptied of meaning through widely circulating scripts found in Hallmark cards and popular media, ontologically positioned as an affect that somehow apolitically exists beyond power formations and/or constructed as “too fuzzy” or “too abstract” to study, this article critically interrogates these overdetermined understandings of love (Kelley, 2002; Matias & Allen, 2013). I consider love in the tradition of intellectuals and scholars like bell hooks (1993, 1994, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004), James Baldwin (1961, 1963, 2021, 1973, 2010), Jennifer Nash (2013), Joan Morgan (1999, 2015), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981/2015).
Taking up love as pedagogy and politics for social justice, I argue that the girls and gender-nonconforming youth in the CFC (re)narrated how they should be in consensual relation with and responsible to each other as collective, co-relational, and interdependent beings. They recognized how Black womanness/girlness was a genre of being human specifically targeted for enclosure and exploitation (and when not cooperating: elimination) by institutionalized structures of state-sanctioned schooling—in the name of materially accumulating for and ideologically building up the Western bourgeoisie’s model of being human, “Man” (i.e., since the latter half of the 19th century, liberal monohumanism’s homo oeconomicus; Robinson, 1983/2020; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Their love-politics engaged pedagogy to remake the world such that the safety and protection of Black girls and gender-nonconforming youth was a necessity and priority, which they saw, in turn, as bound to the safety and protection of all non-Black-identified girls and gender-nonconforming youth and beings who accepted this interdependence and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2013). 4
Research Questions, Field Site, and Methodology
This article explores the following research questions:
Research Question 1: How are “Black girls” understanding and organizing against systemic injustices through education?
Research Question 2: What are the implications for education researchers and teachers educating for social justice?
These research questions were addressed following over 1,000 hours of ethnographic research at a public charter high school in a small working-class city (“Bay Grove”) in the California Bay Area. The city of Bay Grove is approximately 2.5 square miles in size, with 28,155 residents. Although a relatively small city, Bay Grove shares socioeconomic qualities that are familiar to many predominantly working-class communities of color across the United States. On a typical evening, it is not a surprise to see a pack of police cars haphazardly parked in front of one of the single-story houses lining Bay Grove’s labyrinth of worn roads. Many of the youth who live in Bay Grove struggle to find areas to study in overcrowded houses and apartments, some now sheltering generations of families. But Bay Grove continues to make a way out of no way, having been and continuing to be at the center of movements for justice across the country—often a surprise to folks who visit.
From roughly the mid-1960s to the 1990s, Bay Grove was a majority Black or “African American” community. During this time, there were small influxes of other non-White identified people, including the entrance of the Pacific Islander diaspora in the mid-1970s (particularly Polynesian peoples from Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga, but also Fijian-Indians from Fiji). In the 1990s, Bay Grove experienced a rapid increase in the number of Latina/o/e/x peoples from across the diaspora, representing dark to light skin tones—reflective of Indigenous, African, and European ancestry. According to the 2010 U.S. census, most residents of Bay Grove who identified as “Hispanic or Latino of any race” had roots in Mexico. As of the 2010 U.S. census, Bay Grove was approximately 28.8% White, 16.7% African American or Black, 0.4% Native American, 3.8% Asian, 7.5% Pacific Islander, 38.0% “some other race,” and 4.8% from “two or more races.” Although 28.8% of residents identified as White, only 6.2% marked themselves as “not Hispanic or Latino.” Furthermore, within each category the following residents identified as “not Hispanic or Latino”: 15.8% African American or Black, 0.1% Native American, 3.6% Asian, 7.4% Pacific Islander, 0.2% “some other race,” and 2.2% “two or more races.” Consequently, residents identifying as “Hispanic or Latino of any race” were 64.5% of Bay Grove’s population. Moreover, although not immediately evident when looking at the overall demographic data, Bay Grove continues to have one of the largest diasporas of Pacific Islanders in the continental United States.
Almost at the center of Bay Grove sits Bay Grove High School. Enrolling anywhere from 283 to 320 students from the 2013–2014 to 2017–2018 academic school years, the demographics of Bay Grove High School could be said to have aligned with the demographics of the city. Unlike the larger and more affluent high school on the opposite side of the freeway, which had approximately 7% of students participating in the free or reduced-price lunch program during these academic school years, 88.4% of Bay Grove High School’s students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.
Ethnographic research took place over 4 years and crucially included following dozens of youth, but specifically 22 individual students from Bay Grove High School. The data for this article primarily come from research with 12 youth who identified as girls and gender nonconforming and participated as core members of the CFC (Table 1).
Core Members of the Critical Feminisms Club
My ethnographic research was grounded in participant observation, which was enacted in two ways: (a) teacher’s assistant and participant within formalized and informal activities across Bay Grove High School (e.g., giving lectures, supporting the organizing of assemblies, engaging students during passing periods and lunch, participating in restorative justice circles and interventions, mentoring) and within four nearby organizations (e.g., guest lecturing, volunteering, research) and (b) educator-researcher (“applied ethnographic research”; Hill, 2009) within youth-driven programming after school at Bay Grove High School, where I sought to sustain youth and their ways of teaching, learning, knowing, being, and speaking (i.e., Hip Hop club, CFC, and martial arts and boxing program; as “lifeway sustainer,” Wong & Burkhard, 2021).
The CFC met once weekly after school during the last 3 years of my research. I audio- and video-recorded these sessions, wrote fieldnotes, and collected documentation and materials (e.g., poetry, class notes, class projects). I triangulated and co-interpreted my ongoing understandings through informal conversations before, during, and after CFC sessions (what has often been referred to as “member checking”) and during semistructured interviews with youth in the study. Along the way, I shared my developing interpretations of blinded data with Black feminist mentors and colleagues and experienced education scholars of collective freedom to further consider what I was witnessing and construing.
This ongoing triangulation process aligned with my use of what has been ideologized as a grounded theory approach to coding and theming (Charmaz, 2008). Education researchers who make use of grounded theory construct research as an “iterative process” where analysis takes place throughout the research (Paris, 2008, p. 21). As soon as data collection begins, so does analysis; investigation and scrutiny of theories and ideas continue following data collection. As prominent findings emerged from ethnographic data, I moved to discourse analysis whereby I evaluated rhetorical practices and indexical signs (i.e., in this case, deictics, reported speech, and evaluative indexicals) to understand how relations were being co-constituted within interactions (Rosa, 2019; Wortham & Reyes, 2015). I accessed discourse analysis to better understand the meanings of interactions within social context.
In the following section, I offer a brief background on my positionality and reflect on what led me to consider the idea of a CFC. The CFC emerged as I sought to sustain a group of Black, Latina/x, and Poly girls and what I came to see as their “love-politics” (Nash, 2013). I elucidate my conceptual framework and elaborate on my critical reflections as I contemplated what it might mean to offer a space dedicated to serving girls of color and centering their pedagogies, actions, goals, and priorities (i.e., what could be called “culturally sustaining research”; Alim et al., 2020; Wong, 2022). From scholarly literature to texts emerging from “the flesh,” 5 I examine the theory that informed and undergirded the concept of “critical feminisms” as I saw it already being enacted by the girls and gender-nonconforming youth who would come to make up the CFC.
Critical Reflexivity and the Formation of the Critical Feminisms Club
My initial educating-researching at Bay Grove High School began within a club space for celebrating and learning about Hip Hop (“Hip Hop Club”). Although I had hoped the Hip Hop Club would become a liberatory space for youth identifying across genders and sexual orientations, I made the mistake of permitting cishet-identifying boys to share a music video that included a rapper invested in toxic masculine scripts and discourses. The girls who were initially a part of the Hip Hop Club made the decision to leave. At that time, I had to come to terms with my failure as an educator and to decide what actions I would take. I knew that the girls’ decision to leave was not just based on that moment but was reflective of how they had varyingly experienced ongoing toxic masculine (micro)aggressions in nearly every space they entered in the school. The perspectives, priorities, and lives of youth and adults gendered as cishet “boys” and “men” 6 were institutionally elevated due to a widespread mythological predetermination that they were divinely (hooks, 2004) and/or biologically “stronger” (“naturally selected [i.e., eugenic]” as superior beings; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 16). Thus, there was a widespread passive and/or intentional acceptance that “boys” and “men” were inevitably “endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (hooks, 2004, p. 17). Cisheteropatriarchy ran deep, ideologically and materially.
As an “Asian” cisheteromasculine-identified man, I was left grappling with how I could better engage in what Garza (2015) referred to as “co-conspiracy” (Love, 2019, p. 170; Hackman, 2015). Within the context of speaking on what could be learned from Hurricane Katrina and the Movement for Black Lives, 7 Alicia Garza (2015) argued for the importance of building new forms of love and collectivity: “Black people should seek new forms of power and learn to wield and execute it differently ‘than those who oppress us’ while abandoning ‘solidarity’ and instead taking on ‘radical conspiracy and collaboration.’” Garza spoke to peoples racialized as Black on the need to not take up power differently than those invested in White supremacy. More generally, she asked all who are invested in justice to be willing to give up inherited resources and power in cooperative actions with the people whom we are “allied”: “Co-conspiracy is about what we do in action, not just in language.” 8 Garza argued for more rigorously reflecting on and addressing our own complicities in perpetuating social injustices.
Considering Garza’s (2015) notion of radical conspiracy and collaboration, I returned to Morgan’s (1999) reflections on how to go about confronting one’s abusers and the systems perpetuating and enabling the abuse. I thought about the need to offer a space dedicated to girls from a “distance that’s safe” (Morgan, 1999, p. 80). Although I wanted to continue to guide the boys through their own respective hurts and investments in cisheteropatriarchy, I began contemplating and organizing toward what would become the CFC. At that time, I was further driven by Morgan’s prerogative: The focus of black feminists has got to change. We can’t afford to keep expending energy on banal discussions of sexism in rap when sexism is only part of a huge set of problems. . . . If feminism intends to have any relevance in the lives of the majority of black women . . . [it has to] move past theory and become functional. (p. 80)
In conversation with Assata, Patria, Sandy, Angela, Angela’s mother, Tarika, and my feminist of color mentors and elders, I began to conceive of what it might look like to have a dependable and established space that sustained a community of girls and centered their pedagogies, actions, goals, and priorities. I thought about a moment like the one Sandy had recalled with me. She had told me about a specific moment with Assata that brought them closer together:
She cared so much for Poly rights and for Black rights. . . . It’s really like, wow, I was surprised, and that’s what drew me closer to her.
And when did this happen?
It happened sometime last year. We were just sitting outside and then she’s like, “Do you not know how many—have you noticed that there’s no Polys on TV?” And she was so—you can tell when Assata’s really mad. She’s like, “That pisses me off!” And then I was like, “Wow.” I’d never seen her talk about Polys the way she did. And that sort of drew me closer to her as a person. And it made me respect her because now she can turn to me for advice on anything. And she can trust me with basically her life experiences.
As Assata unapologetically represented for Polynesian diasporic peoples and pushed Sandy to develop a critical consciousness on “Black rights,” Assata did not invoke false equivalences or flatten their struggles as being “the same.” Assata developed an affective intimacy with Sandy and called for justice in light of their respective experiences with oppression (i.e., in this case, considering Polynesian representation within broadcast media in the United States). As a result of these affective moments of co-conspiracy, Sandy would increasingly come to stand with Black girls experiencing misogynoir across their school.
Thus, I was primarily inspired to consider using “critical feminisms” 9 as a pedagogical construct to support what I witnessed a heterogeneous group of girls of color already accomplishing through love-politics and “radical conspiracy and collaboration” with each other (Garza, 2015; Gringeri & Roche, 2010; Love, 2019). 10 That is, I was moved to the concept of “critical feminisms” as a means to give language to what I saw Angela and a group of Black, Latina/x, and Polynesian girls already doing pedagogically and politically (Yosso, 2005). 11 From long-standing engagement with texts, mentors, kin, colleagues, and students, I thought about “critical feminisms” as encompassing interconnected and overlapping Black feminisms, Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, Asian feminisms, Pacific Islander feminisms, Hip Hop feminisms, and feminist traditions dedicated to critically working toward and envisioning collective freedom through intersectional frameworks for understanding power (Hill Collins, 2019). These traditions are varyingly committed to approaching social justice through coalitional movement building and a deeper love-politics (Cooper, 2015; Davis, 2016; Garza, 2015; Hamer, 1971; J. E. King, 2006; Morgan, 2015; Nash, 2013).
My thinking on critical feminisms was indelibly shaped by how I saw the girls engaging each other. They were not metapragmatically practicing discrete feminist traditions (i.e., the girls did not originally identify as “feminists”) but were instead engaged with community-rooted feminist aesthetics, axiologies, epistemologies, ontologies, pedagogies, and politics. They were acting and organizing together in solidarity from “the flesh” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981/2015) in ways that could not be accurately described through any independent and boundaried academic demarcation of feminist theory (e.g., Chicana feminism vs. Black feminism). I aimed to foster, sustain, revitalize, and lovingly critique (Alim & Paris, 2017) their enactments of nondiscrete and overlapping feminist of color “herstories,” knowledges, and ways of knowing, acting, and being in the tradition of the Third World Women’s Alliance and scholar-activists like Bambara (1980) and Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981/2015). I aimed to do so by honoring what I saw they were innovating and learning intergenerationally from their mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunties, elders, and ancestors in their communities (Garza, 2015; Nash, 2013; Paris & Alim, 2017).
When I first introduced the possibility of a CFC, I was not sure what Angela and the young women would think and feel; the idea was my pedagogical placeholder. If they did go for the idea of the club itself, I was almost certain they would quickly come up with another name to invoke their actions and goals. I specifically consulted Angela because she was already serving as a leader of the girls. I have referred to Angela as “the founder” because I do not believe that the club would have survived, materialized, or carried on without her direction, teaching, knowledges, organizing, and love. In the end, Angela and the girls liked “critical feminisms.” Angela reflects on the day that I brought all the girls into a classroom during lunch and pitched the idea of a club space under the name of critical feminisms:
Why did you say yes?
To critical feminisms?
Uh-huh. When I brought you in there, as an idea about starting a club around it.
Because I knew I needed to learn about it. [laughter] Up until then I knew what feminism was when Beyoncé said it in that one song, when she was like, “Feminism. Something, something, something.” [laughter] And that’s why I was like, “Oh, I know what feminism is,” and then you were like, “Okay, so what if we have a club?” I was like, “Oh, shoot.” [laughter] I was like, “Hold on.” I was like, “This is going to involve a lot of crying, a lot of thinking. And I was like, I’m down!”
It is worth noting that Angela and the girls accepted the name and idea of a “Critical Feminisms Club” somewhat because of our initial conversations and what I thought was a persuasive PowerPoint presentation relating their interests and actions to women of color across the country carrying out similar acts in the name of Black feminism, Hip Hop feminism, and other “critical feminisms,” but mostly due to Beyoncé. In spite of all the valid critiques of Beyoncé’s investments in racial capitalism (which Angela herself critiqued; Robinson, 1983/2020), there would have never been a CFC without Beyoncé. Beyoncé called herself a feminist, and they liked “critical” to describe their “thinking” (i.e., “This is going to involve a lot of crying, a lot of thinking.”). They connected with Beyoncé’s aesthetic engagement with love-politics and feminism, and the result was a desire to hold space together as a CFC (or often affectionately, “club”).
Once they accepted, the CFC began meeting weekly. The first and only rule as we embarked was above all, the group was for supporting the girls with whatever they decided they needed; never for me or anyone else. On the first day we met, as a person who was identified as an Asian cisheteromasculine man, I let them know my goal was to be a guest and servant of their space. But this was often much more difficult than what has been espoused within discourses of “allyship” or “co-conspiracy.” Cisheteropatriarchy found its way into the space as sometimes they centered my opinion in spite of my best efforts. Other times, I inadvertently centered my interests and concerns, and I had to consult Angela, Assata, Patria, and the girls to make sure I found ways to step back and get out of the way. Perhaps this was most evident as we first began meeting. They were used to having adults run the spaces they were in and initially waited to start the club until I gave the word. I began sitting outside of what they perceived as the front of the space as I sought to reverse the gaze of their questions (e.g., I began to answer questions like “Can we start?” with answers like, “I don’t know, up to you. Do you all want to begin?”)
The CFC began meeting for roughly 1 to 2 hours after school. As they developed and expanded the space, I suggested that we change the meeting to the one half-day that happened each week to allow for longer meetings (i.e., at Bay Grove High School, Wednesdays ended at 2:15 p.m. to allow teacher and staff meetings). By the end of the year, the CFC was meeting anywhere between 2 and 5 hours once a week after school. Given the relationship that Angela and the young women had with Mr. Just (performing arts and restorative justice teacher) and Ms. Sani (a biology teacher who came to be our official sponsor), I suggested we meet in either of their classrooms depending on availability. As they elevated their liberatory political author/ity 12 and their relationship with the school changed, they made the collective decision to move along with Mr. Sani (restorative justice coordinator, Ms. Sani’s husband) as he left to direct the neighboring Boys and Girls Club. I knew, above all, that the CFC had to meet in what scholars and educators have sometimes referred to as “chosen space” (Covarrubias & Revilla, 2003, p. 462), that is, space selected and crafted to fit the needs and concerns of the group (hooks, 1993).
As a general structure, each meeting usually began with music and food (i.e., what I referred to in community organizing traditions as “breaking bread” together) and then a “check-in.” I introduced a check-in question that I had developed from my own substantial time teaching in after-school spaces, influenced by mentors who did the same: “What’s the best and worst thing that happened to you over the past week?” As mentioned, as I began stepping back, Angela, Patria, Leslie, and others whom I have come to refer to as the “elders” of the group would initiate these check-ins. Following the check-in, there was a lesson or activity that I organized based on their collective weekly feedback. I supplemented these lessons based on regular input from their mothers, family members, and my mentors and theory and praxis in texts from critical feminisms. Often, these lessons and activities would be enhanced with invited special guests and educators, including mothers, sisters, elders, university students, professors, and community organizers. However, sometimes the order was flipped or reorganized.
Over time, each session was adapted to prioritize what the girls decided that they needed. Sometimes, this meant helping with college applications, hosting a mediation, a game day, or planning an action. Other times, this meant consoling one of the girls through a heartbreak, abuse, or the incarceration of a loved one. Occasionally, this meant just celebrating “Black and Brown” girlhood by watching a movie or documentary and engaging in dance. Above all, this was their space, and I did as much as I could to support their visions. Over time, I began to see the way they made freedom move(s) (Alim et al., 2023). They sought justice not just for themselves or for folks who looked or faced “subjection” (Hartman, 2022) in the ways they did, but for anyone enduring oppression and suffering (Nash, 2013). They sought to understand and act on their interconnections and incommensurabilities. Over time, I came to see the anchoring social justice politics and pedagogy that oriented the space: love.
Conceptual Framework
Love as Politics for Social Justice
As I began to witness how love-politics and love pedagogies were practiced in the CFC, I read deeper into how love has been practiced as a politics for social justice. I considered traditions where love has been “transform[ed] from the personal into a theory of justice” (Nash, 2013, p. 2). Within the Black feminist tradition (Beauboeuf-LaFontant, 2002; Morgan, 2015; Nash, 2013; Walker, 1983), love has moved from “mere affection” (hooks, 2000, p. 5) into “a political call for transcending the self and transforming the public sphere” (Nash, 2013, p. 20) in the name of “healing, change, and liberation” (Sanders et al., 2006, p. 152). Lorde (1984) illuminated how within Black feminist traditions, love has been about a gentle and generous “self-love” that demands “we know we are worthy of touch before we reach out for each other,” a love that embraces collectivity as a furthering of agency and power (p. 175). The ultimate purpose of love is to “speak truth to each other” in the hopes of consensually, courageously, and collaboratively building “ourselves and each other, in the service of our work and future” (Lorde, 1984, p. 175).
Following Chicana/x and Latina/x feminist traditions (Chenier, 2018; Mejía, 2015; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981/2015; Sandoval, 2000; Sierra-Rivera, 2018), Anzaldúa and Keating (2013) argued that love should aim to reveal the “artificiality of the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (i.e., “nos/otras”) in the name of “compassion and reconciliation, and a promise to be present with the pain of others without losing [our]selves to it” (p. 4). For Anzaldúa (1981/2015), this love was possible with the strength to take the path of “conocimiento” and “unlearn” what stands in the way of justice for oneself and others:
[It’s] taken over thirty years to unlearn the belief instilled in me that white is better than brown. . . . And it is only now that the hatred of myself, which I spent the greater part of adolescence cultivating, is turning to love. (p. 202; see also Anzaldúa & Keating, 2013)
Rather than constructing love as an apolitical and irrational force, operating from critical race theory, Matias and Allen (2013) pushed for a love that demands the institutional and ideological “end of whiteness” and returns to love as the “interconnectedness of our humanity” (p. 286). Matias and Allen aimed to revitalize a “humanizing love” as invoked by intellectuals, scholars, and activists like hooks (1994, 2001, 2004) and Baldwin (2010). Matias and Allen maintained that love has too often been “dismissed as merely an irrational sentiment left unquantifiable, unobjective, and useless” due to the disregard of “heterosexual white men, blinded by their privilege in maleness, heterodominance, and whiteness, [whom] have analyzed and interpreted love in their favor for so long that the true gravity of love as a social force [has been] overlooked” (p. 286).
At this level of love as a political force, Baldwin theorized what it might mean to see ourselves and our youth with a deeper love. Baldwin (2010) invoked love as an inherently political process that requires one to “take great chances” and “be conscious” of the joys and pains circumscribing our social worlds (p. 76). He contended that love was possible with the courage to collaboratively help each other to see the hurt and systemic violence that we are blinded to as we grow up and attend schooling within a “loveless” U.S. society (Baldwin, 2021, p. 28): If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. (Baldwin, 1973, p. 41)
Envisioning love as a politics of growth, Baldwin (1973, 2010) argued that our feelings of safety and comfort are often a sign that we have accepted a vision that will fail us in seeing injustices unless we open our eyes to the larger workings of the world around us. Love was indelibly about realizing the connection of the personal to the collective, the intimate to the public. Baldwin (1973) insisted that we take up a “two-way” love that seeks to reciprocally unmask our fears, pleasures, and pains if we are to realize freedom.
Operating from affect theory, scholars like Ahmed (2004), Cvetkovich (2003), and Jasper et al. (2001) have considered what it might mean to engage love as a means to influence politics and social justice. Ahmed (2004) elucidated the precarity of love by examining how love has been deployed as a politics to withhold rights and resources and strengthen the “othering” of “those who are ‘not us’” as an affective orientation (p. 1). Ahmed (2013) prompted us to remember how love is conditional and cannot be viewed outside of the sociohistorical context of systemic forms of domination and control that continue to affectively use love to manage differing people within the current White supremacist order. Ahmed (2013) illuminated how within European-rooted nation-states, love has often been deployed as a politics to “differentiate between those who can inhabit the nation, from those who cause disturbance” (p. 16). As an emotion that can be directed toward White abstractions, like the nation-state, love can be utilized as a tool of oppression. Love can be operationalized to consolidate and distribute opportunities for life.
Love as Pedagogy for Social Justice
Situated within politics that see love as a “theory of justice,” education is intimately intertwined (Nash, 2013, p. 1). Education is conceptualized as not only needed to raise the “consciousness” (Davis, 1981, p. 36) required for dreaming and generating strategies for love as a “theory of justice” (Nash, 2013, p. 2) but also as a means to be “animate[d], motivate[d], and knit[ted] together” (Kelley, 2002, p. 12) people whom are invested in building thick solidarities (Liu & Shange, 2018) as a form of agency to work toward socially just futures (Davis, 2016; Nash, 2013; Revilla, 2004). Similar to Baldwin (1973) and his notion of two-way looking, M. L. King Jr. (1963, 2010) highlighted the indelible link between love and education. Speaking on what was needed for the “strength to love,” M. L. King Jr. (1963) asserted that the “heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong” and argued that love requires “open mindedness” and “an assiduous pursuit for truth” (p. 41; Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, 1954–1960).
Laying down a foundation for a “pedagogy of the oppressed,” Freire (1970/2000) argued for an education that confronts “domination” through a commitment to the promise of dialogue as a practice of love between teachers and students (p. 89). For Freire, education and the act of “naming [of] the world” can become an act of domination if not conducted through a dialogue that aims to “abolish the situation of oppression” (p. 90). This dialogic exchange is made possible by love, just as love reciprocally creates the possibility for dialogue. Thus, Freire argued that we must approach learning as a mutual exchange and questioning with “love for the world and for people,” which, in turn, can create the “possib[ilty] to restore the love” that was “made impossible” by oppression (pp. 89–90). Freire intimately connected love to generativity and action. Engaging love as a pedagogy for freedom ultimately meant having the bravery to “generate other acts of freedom; otherwise it is not love” (p. 90).
Evaluating the relation between love, education, and social justice, Alim and Paris (2017) argued that teaching for social justice means “providing our children with the opportunities to survive and thrive” but more importantly, with a love that can help us see our young people as whole versus broken when they enter schools, and a love that can work to keep them whole as they grow and expand who they are and can be through education. (p. 14)
Referencing Morgan (1999) and Tricia Rose’s June 2016 keynote address at Cambridge University, Alim and Paris argued that educational justice will mean finding the strength to engage in “loving critique” of ourselves and our young people “[because] to love something is not to affirm it all the time; we need transformational love” (p. 11).
Within her applied ethnographic research on “love as pedagogy” in an after-school program (“Saving Our Lives, Hearing Our Truths”), Brown (2009) created a pedagogy “to practice Black girlhood and sense love, to name it, claim it, and share it” and “to affirm Black girls and those who love them” (p. 229). Teaching with love as a pedagogy for social justice through the lens of Hip Hop and Black feminism (i.e., “hip-hop feminist pedagogy”), Brown sought to demonstrate how to “make possible new questions, offer alternative explanations, and provide usable knowledge that improves upon Black girls’ freedom and the greater emancipatory possibility their lives hold for us all” (p. 229).
Similarly, Lane’s (2014) Black feminist autoethnographic research as an English teacher at a Los Angeles public high school engages bell hooks’s (2014) understanding of love as pedagogy. Based on her work in the classroom, Lane argued that love is important because it provides educators like herself “the clarity to appropriately tailor the mood of a classroom and set the foundation for building community” (p. 42). Lane’s research exposed the need for socially just classrooms to work toward an “actual and fo’real love” invested in caring for youth as “whole people” (p. 42).
Also considering the pedagogical role of love, Ohito (2019) studied the “antiracist” and “love-infused” pedagogy of a university-based teacher educator (“Victoria”) whom ascribes to critical pedagogy. Evaluating Victoria’s teaching, Ohito argued that her critical pedagogy was able to embrace “moving intensities” of love in ways that were able to “disrupt oppression by (a)rousing pleasure and a wealth of other somatically satisfying states of being and feeling (such as joy)—thereby transforming suffering into healing at the level of the personal, political and collective body” (p. 142). For Ohito, critical pedagogy was able to “radically alter beliefs” when embracing “strong feelings of love” that took up the “materiality of the feeling body” in pedagogical theory and practice (p. 142). 13
Findings
With this epistemic, methodological, and conceptual framing, I now offer a brief window into the workings of love as pedagogy and politics for social justice in the CFC. The members of the CFC taught, learned, and engaged each other through love-politics across too often “siloed” and White supremacist constituted racial categories; these moments often looked like, and were reciprocally made possible, through interlocking affective exchanges like that which occurred between Assata and Sandy (see section, “Critical Reflexivity and the Formation of the Critical Feminisms Club”).
In the case elucidated in the following, Assata, Angela, and Patria demonstrate what love can look like and accomplish in real-time, pedagogical praxis when deployed in the interest of social justice. After having suicidal ideations and a mental health crisis that led to her hospitalization and the trauma that came with her experience, Assata comes to the CFC. With the support of Angela and Patria, Assata broadly pleas for Black girls and women like herself to be treated justly and with love when undergoing similar experiences with mental health. Angela and Patria’s interlocking contributions to Assata’s (re)narrating of self has the impact of supporting Assata in claiming her life as “serious” and valuable. The broader implication is the need to transform society so Black girls and marginalized folks ideologically and institutionally receive the love and care they deserve.
This was one of many loving moments when Angela, Patria, Assata, and the girls and gender-nonconforming youth in the CFC would link the intimate to the public. They developed relationships with each other that supported them in developing the influence (i.e., power) to collaboratively author and (re)write stories of themselves and others (i.e., author/ity) in the interest of transforming the politics of the institutions and people circumscribing their lives and lived possibilities (i.e., liberatory political author/ity). These moments of love served as a means to collectively broaden their influence to remake and build a world that could more deeply love them and the peoples in their worlds whom they saw as suffering from systemic forms of violence, exploitation, and domination.
Love as Politics and Pedagogy for Social Justice With Assata, Angela, and Patria
Harriet Tubman strong and brave / like all those flights for freedom with her words, her courage, her heart / Bessie Coleman the first Black woman to be a pilot / Madame C.J. Walker America’s first female self-made millionaire / Shirley Chisholm the first Black woman to be elected to congress / Maya Angelou a cage bird singing freedom / Assata Shakur / Angela Davis / these are all Black women who proved that a flower doesn’t have to be watered in order for it to blossom / who chose to rise above so that this little Black girl could look you in the face with proof that Black girls are more than just labels that society slaps on us / we are probably the strongest women you’ll have ever known or heard of / we are fearless / we are important / and we are beautiful —Excerpt of a spoken word poem by Assata
When former director of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School, Ericka Huggins, spontaneously invited Assata to the stage to perform her poetry in front of a sold-out crowd in the legendary Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, it was not a surprise; it was expected. Assata performed a poem she had written and performed as a part of her school’s performing arts program. Assata received a standing ovation, and the CFC rushed the stage to celebrate her. She stirred chants of love and hope that transformed the night.
What the audience did not know as Assata flowed down the stage steps was that her poem was a declaration as much as it was an attempt to speak herself into existence. Her daily experiences with misogynoir at her school and within the larger city of Bay Grove had been having an increasingly detrimental impact on her mental health. This came to a head following an exchange with a boy at her school who denigrated her physical appearance, speaking on how Assata adorned herself as a Black girl. The result was Assata having a moment where she told her math and science teacher (“Ms. Sani”)—one of two Black teachers employed at the school—that she no longer had a desire to live. As a result of her admission, an ambulance was called to take Assata to a medical facility. When she realized what her admission meant, it was too late to refuse and presented as the only option. In the end, Assata left the hospital without feeling like anyone there had genuinely cared about her well-being, with the feeling that the experience had been traumatic of itself. Upon immediately returning to school, Assata was dismissed by classmates who could not see why attacks on her Black girlhood could have caused her to feel suicidal; after all, she was a “strong Black girl.”
When Assata came to the first meeting of the CFC since her release from the hospital, she retold her story in what became a political and pedagogical moment of love. They practiced love as a way to advance justice, specifically to address the misogynoir experienced by Assata. When Assata stopped midsentence and looked like she was about to break into tears, Patria tenderly intervened. Rather than centering herself with commentary or her own opinion before she heard more from Assata, Patria instead proceeded with a question that supported Assata in her telling:
Literally, every time I get up the nerve to, I don’t feel like people understand exactly how hard it is to be in my situation. Because they don’t, unless you are in it, you know what I mean? So every time I try, I try to tell my story or every time I get ready like yesterday I was with friends—[Assata goes silent]
Why didn’t you tell me?
Girl, because it’s not that serious.
It is.
They just want to fucking ignore me and shit.
Assata tried to downplay how hurt she was feeling (“Girl, because it’s not that serious”), arguably internalizing the misogynoir and gaslighting that she had received prior to arriving at the CFC, which violently diminished her specific pain and embodied experiences as a Black girl. Patria and Angela stopped Assata from dismissing herself and validated Assata’s feelings, life, and suffering:
That is that serious.
Like they were doing other stuff, on they phones, working out, random shit and I’m just sitting there.
That’s serious.
I’ve been in the hospital. Y’all ain’t seen me. Y’all didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me.
Did they hit you up at all? [while Assata was in the hospital]
No. That;s why—
What friends? Who? What? Who are they? They ain;t your friend.
They ain;t your friends if they disrespect you that bad.
A friend would have put their whole freaking Thanksgiving in jeopardy for you. A friend would’ve called every single day. A friend would’ve made sure to find out which freaking hospital you were in. A friend would’ve made sure that before they even stuffed their face or feed their starvation that you’re okay. A friend would’ve made sure that you get out of there and come back to school so that your grades can get A1.
This became a moment where Patria and Angela lovingly challenged Assata to do the self-work to learn her worth and “take the arrow out of her heart” (Walker, 2018, p. 1). They demanded that Assata see her value and testified about how much she mattered. In this way, they followed in the tradition of Black feminist scholars, artists, activists, and educators like Lorde (1984), Walker (2018), and Nash (2013) whom have reject[ed] the notion that the political call to love is simply a call to love others . . . [they saw] the political thrust of their notion of love is that it is a labor of the self, not a romantic attachment to an Other. (Nash, 2013, p. 12)
Assata then reinforced how important it was to be spiritually, emotionally, and perceptively present with loved ones sharing significant and meaningful moments of their lives (“Like they were doing other stuff, on they phones, working out, random shit”). As Assata was reflecting on deep feelings of neglect and rejection from people whom she regarded as friends, Angela and Patria took the opportunity to remind Assata of what it meant to be a friend and care for someone as a friend. Angela pedagogically adorned her with love in a manner that performatively called attention to the value of Assata’s life. Angela poetically and sonically made use of anaphora as she repeated a clause-initial “A friend . . . ” to affectively reinforce what it meant to be a friend. By not making use of personal pronouns in this pronouncement of friendship, Angela personally decentered Patria and herself. Instead, Angela pedagogically focused on the type of actions that people who loved Assata could and should take. Within this decisive, precise, and poignant accounting of what it means to be a friend, Angela also did not limit love to simply worrying about someone’s physical and mental well-being. Angela defined love as being concerned with someone’s preparation for the future; she let Assata know that they were also concerned about Assata’s survival and advancement in society through education.
Angela and Patria continued by positioning themselves as intimately connected to Assata and let her know that her happiness and well-being were intimately connected with their own lives. If Assata was not well, then they could not be doing well either:
Girl, when I called you on Thanksgiving, I called you before I ate.
Are you serious?
I called you before I got my own nana dressed for her wedding. I wanted to make sure you were just fine. I wanted to make sure you had that phone back by Sunday. I wanted to make sure that whoever didn’t call us when you were calling for us [in the school’s office when the situation escalated], got checked. 14 I wanted to make sure that whoever knew that you were in the hospital and decided not to call me, got checked. I wanted to make sure that every person who ever sees you and you share their feelings with them gets checked, because they obviously didn’t take it serious.
And I made sure those people that had pictures of you on their Snapchat deleted that shit because that is not okay.
Angela and Patria went into further depth with Assata, reinforcing how Assata mattered so much that they had made significant personal sacrifices of which she was not aware. Patria let Assata know that she had made sure to personally call, check in, and make sure that Assata was okay before she sat down for Thanksgiving with her family, which deeply and emotionally moved Assata (“Are you serious?”). Angela then asserted Assata’s importance to her life, admitting that she had made sure to call and check in on Assata before she “got [her] own nana dressed for her wedding.” Angela then made use of anaphora (“I called you . . . ” / “I wanted to . . . ”) and epiphora with a repeated clause-ending “got checked” before transitioning mid speech to a clause-ending “gets checked.” Angela’s skillful and improvisational use of anaphora and epiphora further lent an emotional weight through a rhythmic and forceful beginning and ending to phrases in a manner that illuminated just how much she cared for and loved Assata. Angela’s specific use of “got checked” and “gets checked” conveyed to Assata that Angela was going to do the best she could to make sure that justice was served in the moments where Assata had voiced feeling harmed or hurt. This also had the impact of authoritatively letting Assata know that Angela was carefully and meticulously listening to her. Angela affectively bolstered her position that she would protect Assata and make sure that people knew that there would be consequences to misogynoir and not minding Assata’s worth and safety. Seamlessly within a break in this rhetorical display, Patria added to the moment by letting Assata know that she personally confronted the students whom callously filmed Assata while she was being taken away to the hospital and later uploaded those videos to Snapchat. They reminded Assata that these were not empty words because they had already acted on these beliefs when she experienced her mental health crisis.
This moment reached a climax as Angela affectively closed with a powerful avowal of how much Assata mattered to her, which left Assata in tears, overwhelmed by love:
Anybody who gets out of pocket and calls you any type of name gets checked just like [with] my little sister. Anybody who does some dumb little things with her, they’ll get checked. Anybody can get checked. And if a girl were to mess with you, I don’t care if today’s her birthday, she would’ve got that birthday rat weave snatched off, [laughter] she gets checked. I don’t care. We are your real friends. Period. Point blank. We’re not even friends, more like family, so don’t even matter, end of story.
Angela reinforced how serious she was about Assata’s life and value by aligning Assata’s safety with that of her own little sister (“Fania”), who was also a part of the CFC and right then, sitting beside her. Angela modeled what the greatest forms of love could look like for her younger sister and the other younger girls in the club who were present. Humorously demonstrating her resolve and stirring laughter throughout the room, Angela then referenced a previous well-known moment when she helped Assata when she was being bullied by another girl in the school. Angela let Assata know that even if it was that same girl’s birthday, that Angela would “check” her and “anybody” who messed with Assata. Angela let Assata know that their relationship went far beyond friendship and to a higher realm of love, “more like family.”
Significant to Angela’s love and intensified with the “period,” “point blank,” and “end of story” that she declared, Angela firmly embodied and practically demonstrated how to defy misogynoir and love Black girls in a space with non-Black-identified girls who were interested in being accomplices in the face of injustice. Co-conspiracy meant putting your own self on the line for those experiencing misogynoir and systemic injustices; risking your own life and comforts as far as you could go. As one of Angela’s closest accomplices, Patria simultaneously and skillfully modeled this level of co-conspiracy in a manner that kept misogynoir and Assata’s life centered. Patria did not take time and space away from Angela as the Black girl beholden to her younger Black peer. This moment ended with Assata getting a group hug by Angela, Patria, and all the young women in the CFC who were present.
It is worth noting, a consequence and larger tension that arrived following this moment is that the girls in the CFC would increasingly refuse their school’s mental health services when they knew it could result in further harm and isolation—what had occurred with Assata. They struggled to consider where they could go to process and cope with their deepest feelings of pain and suffering and how they could do so in a way that did not neglect time for joy and enjoying life, even as the CFC provided one space of ongoing imagination and praxis to do just that.
Conclusion
Important to the initial questions raised in this article, this moment of love saw a group of Black, Latina/x, and Poly girls coming together to support Assata and grapple with the misogynoir impacting her. The “Black girls” did not ask the “Latina/x girls” and “Poly girls” to leave. Patria became an active participant, and Assata deeply appreciated that Patria did. In part emerging from the Latina/x diaspora, Assata did not refuse Angela’s help as “not really Black,” nor did Angela opt out of supporting Assata. The girls refused to validate the mythological racial categories that they knew were a result of the larger White supremacist system that was creating the ideological and institutional misogynoir that Assata herself was facing. Assata would not have gotten what she needed without her and the CFC’s collective refusals of the overapplication of White cishet male positionalities that continue to get framed as the entirety of humanity and how to be human (i.e., as “Man”; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015), which have come to subsequently overdetermine who matters and how one is supposed to practice safety and protection. 15 This was love-politics. And this love-politics was made possible by the CFC’s resolve and active efforts to teach, learn, and yes, theorize pedagogies of love.
If folks, if you, take anything away from this piece, I hope you take away that love has to be taught, learned, and practiced (Baldwin, 1973; hooks, 1993, 2003, 2004, 2014). Assata, Angela, and Patria did not biologically inherit their love-politics, and it did not come out of thin air. Their love was not magic, even if it was magical to watch (Ladson-Billings, 2017). Their love-politics was pedagogically cultivated in the lineage of their friends, families, communities, and significantly, the context of the CFC itself. Their collectively cultivated love with and among each other was key to creating the space that made it possible for Assata to feel comfortable to share what she did and for Angela and Patria to have the courage to speak love to Assata. Although not possible to illustrate here, they learned paralinguistic cues (nonverbal) to telegraph and validate each other’s presence. They taught and learned that love was not what you just did in private, it was also critically what you did in public. They taught and learned that love could only truly exist when emerging hand in hand with justice. They enacted what might be called an organic intersectional praxis (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 2019). They would in part learn this organic intersectionality from Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw herself, who was moved to visit, commune, teach, and learn with the group. The CFC became an institution where Assata, Angela, Patria, and the girls and gender-nonconforming youth could expand and develop their pedagogies and knowledges of love as they cared for each other, debated positions, and took stances on how girls of color and marginalized youth should be treated at their school and in society. They established themselves as an influential collective that was known to rigorously represent a depth of voices standing together, and they did so through love.
Although I thought I knew a lot about what love meant before sustaining the CFC, my own teaching, learning, and theorizing was changed forever—and not just from my study of love as I engaged the CFC but also from Assata, Angela, Patria, and the girls and gender-nonconforming youth themselves. I critically came to see the relation between consent and love. This was demonstrated in Assata’s story, as their school sought to rescue Assata from her mental health crisis and “care” for her. They unquestioningly thought they were doing the right thing. The legal thing. The responsible thing. The “evidence-based” thing. But Assata, Angela, and Patria taught me that in the case of Assata, it was the misogynoir thing—in spite of genuine good intentions for Assata’s well-being. How can isolating a Black girl away from her community and friends be an act of mental health justice? Is there not a way to address the impact of misogynoir, suicidal ideations, that does not replicate processes of enclosure and elimination that have been a feature of “American” society since chattel slavery? I think about how many enslaved girls were forcibly taken from their loved ones because their response to enslavement was one expected result of brutal processes of subjection and dehumanization: loss of their mental faculties. Is there not a better way? Although well-meaning therapists, EMTs, and mental health professionals can and do powerful work to support us, following this case with Assata, it is far overdue to ask Black girls how they would like to experience healing and transformation on their own terms. As I was recently reminded in an exchange with the Notorious GLB (aka, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings), quoting Myles Horton from the Highlander Folks School, “The people with the problem are the same people with the solution” (Horton also notably centered love, “You can’t be a revolutionary, you can’t want to change society if you don’t love people”; Moyers & Horton, 1982, p. 253). This is a research-based implication that I am currently in the process of pursuing with Dr. Joya Hampton-Anderson with our pursuit of a culturally sustaining health system for Black girls, in our attempt to follow in the footsteps of long lifeways of African continental and diasporic healers, scholars, and activists and co-conspirators dedicated to mental health justice, who have long been engaged in this work (see Hampton-Anderson et al., 2021; Watson-Singleton et al., 2020). We need to study and listen, and then perhaps we might arrive at the socially just worlds we purport to desire.
So, what does this love look like in practice as we aspire to gather, interpret, and share knowledge in co-conspiracy with youth and communities (i.e., what has come to be widely ideologized as applied or participatory action “research”; Cammarota & Fine, 2010; Hill, 2009; Levy & Wong, 2022)? This love requires that we are responsible to every harm we commit and every joy that we do not provide space for regardless of our “intentions.” This love demands we consider the impact of our actions on the terms of the very folks who we are engaged with, without equivocation. If it is said that we committed hurt, then we committed hurt and are accountable. If it is said that we were not beholden to joy, dimmed someone’s light with our decisions and actions, then we are accountable. And make no mistake, accountability to joy is not trivial but is intimately connected to the creation of worlds defined by collective freedom (Kaba & Hassan, 2019; Kelley, 2002; Tuck, 2009) and likewise to what scholars like Williams (1987) and Love (2019) have referred to as “spirit murder.” And these conversations can only occur within spaces where folks who we are “researching with” have the influence (i.e., power) to give or not give permission (i.e., consent) to even have these direct and ongoing conversations and to determine what the consequences should be for our actions. And as hard as this is even to consider, almost inevitably, sorry to break it to you dear reader, even your best efforts will almost certainly not be enough. No matter how much we say we are “giving up,” “acknowledging,” and/or are “aware” of power, if we are a part of an institution(s) that provides us the influence (i.e., power) to engage in violence, exploitation, and/or domination without answerability to youth and communities who we are engaged with, beyond our own “personal responsibility,” then we are going to falter. This is in part what is meant when intellectuals and activists say “structural violence” and what Baldwin (2021) meant when he said that we live in a “loveless” society. Power is not something that can be tossed away with a few words on your terms. Power can only be given up by abolishing those institutions that give us power regardless of whether we did or did not consent to accepting that power (Gumbs, 2010; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Hoare & Nowell Smith, 1971). This near certain complicity is a demand for us to push toward an otherwise: It does not have to be this way. This complicity is not inevitable.
Which brings this piece to an appropriate close, a plea for what I witnessed the CFC ultimately calling on in their love as pedagogy and politics for social justice. We need to work together to create a world where what happened to Assata is no longer possible for her or anyone. This is a call for abolition and decolonization (Tuck & Yang, 2018). What happens when we stop ontologically taking “school” and “mental health” for granted and think about education as a social process of teaching and learning and mental health as broadly connected to creating a world where we have what we need to live meaningfully and joyfully? Then we begin to talk about what we imagine as the purpose of education and our purpose for living (Alim et al., 2020; Wong, 2021). We might even begin to move from thinking about how we might better “include” ourselves into an already permanent “modern” society that can only be reformed. We might consider whose world we are living in. We might ask why mental health processes are often much more concerned with getting us back into school and work as quickly as possible than taking all the time that is needed to genuinely, consensually support ourselves to thrive and live well with each other. We might begin to question why what scholars like Robinson (1983/2020) referred to as a modern colonial system of “racial capitalism” is now overrepresented as the only way of existing (i.e., “capitalist fundamentalism”; wa Thiong’o, 2016; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015), a system that is uncontroversially known to be defined by anti-Blackness and more broadly, its centering of capital above life (i.e., accumulation by racialized dispossession; Harvey, 2010; Wynter, 2003).
What might happen if we move toward fostering and revitalizing a broader world order that centers an expansive and collective freedom, defined by communalism by socially just exchange? What might happen if we follow Black radical traditions and radical traditions (and we’re reminded by scholars like Angela Davis that “radical” simply means getting to the root; Davis, 2016) that have been enacting, developing, and imagining ways to do this for as long as the White supremacist world that we are living in has existed? These radical traditions have called for us to pursue an ongoing, nonlinear, and context-specific process of collective liberation, deploying a number of strategies and tactics (Kelley, 2002; Robinson, 1983/2020; Said, 1978; Tuck & Yang, 2018): educate for interdependence, organize and build thick solidarities, take control over what we produce, ontologically end “ownership” in favor of communalism administrated by participatory governance, cooperatively grow food and shelter for all, and enter into good relations with lands, waters, and all beings who have/will live on the lands and waters where we reside. This is the hard path. But Assata deserves that world. Angela, Patria, and the girls and gender-nonconforming youth of the CFC deserve that world. You do too.
