Moving from the academic to the applicable, this is what I've been thinking about as we begin our efforts in my Racial Justice Movements course (guided by Willamette's newest Professor of the Year!).
"The absenece of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination. Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination--imperialism, sexism, racism, classism ... Many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need and ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change ... Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle ... The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom."
So who's ready?
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3 comments:
Profound and serious thoughts, Larkin. Centuries of just such domination - absent love - and rebellion - absent love - might have taught us the lesson(s) but they haven't. Why? Hard to know, and painful to watch.
Am reading Infidel right now by a Somali woman raised as a Muslim. Among many things, it explores the philospohy of submission in Islam, and how that aspect of the faith has been perverted. I think the 'prophets' of many of the world's religions started with the realization that love was the missing ingredient in humanity's struggles, but, as Corb points out, mankind can't seem to learn. I'd never thought about there being a philosphy of domination, in so many words, but that is a clarifying idea.
I'm ready..That's all there is and all that matters.
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