“All actions come from two places: fear and love.”

My two older sisters and I worked at the same pizza place while we were in high school.  It was the best pizza shop around, being slung by one of the only openly gay people in our tiny town of 1500 people.  When Chuck hired me, the only black girl in town, it made for some great scenes.  Chuck loves to tell stories, and he would give me some good dirt on Allie from her days working for him.  He would also tell me about his experiences working in kitchens in the south, and actions he took to keep himself and his black co-workers safe.  Chuck once told me “All actions come from two places: fear and love.”  Living in small towns in Michigan and the rural south, he knew this well.  That sentence has stuck with me my entire life.  It has been coming up even more for me these past few months. 

My sister Allie is the white woman I wish to see in the world.  She is brilliant and talented and loving, and I just want her to share her brilliance with a large audience (and the whole world, but we’re getting there).  We also talk at least once a week - usually more - and this is another place for us to have dialogue and share thoughts.  We’re on the same page about most things, so this is also a space for us to be political, to process trauma and sickness and family, and perhaps that will also allow us to not always have to do it on the phone.  This has been especially true for me in the recent months of all the publicized murder of black folks.  I don’t have the capacity to talk about it with white folks, and barely have the capacity to talk about it at all. So I’ve been setting boundaries, even with my own beloved sister with whom I tell absolutely everything.  In the family chat I tell the white folks to take it to a different channel.  With Allie I ask if it’s something I really need to know.

I was reflecting on love this morning, and the act of choosing love.  Choosing to act with love isn’t always pretty, and it isn’t always easy.  It is not a weak approach, and often is the harder decision.  It also doesn’t  mean you allow for abuse of yourself or others, nor provide “free speech” nonsense to those who are actively harming others. To me, it means setting firm boundaries with aggressors to let them know their actions are unwelcome and dismissed, while simultaneously keeping yourself and others safe.  Choosing hope and love is how I live my life, but if you would have asked me at the end of 2019 if this were true, I probably would have laughed in your face.  But any act of resistance - any act for social justice  - is in fact an act of hope.  All the protesting and calls for radical change to policing in the US and the world is an act of love. Black folks don’t have the luxury of being pessimistic or hopeless.  If we believed that, then what is the point of living in a society such as this?  And to be a black, queer woman in America, choosing to love myself is my largest act of resistance. 

I have loved my share of so-called “conservative” people; it comes with growing up in a white family and white town.  Most recently one of these loved ones taught me about my sense of hope.  In all their pessimism of the world, and their firm belief that “this is just human nature,” I realized I believe every human has the potential for good, for love, and most importantly - for healing.