Black love in action is why we’re alive
Love.
As a noun, it is a feeling. As a verb, it is a doing, sharing, trusting, and caring — all shown through action.
Our shared history as a people reflects the truth that love breathes bravery down our backbones and nourishes us to continue shaping, bringing forth, and sustaining solutions that make joy and shared abundance real for all of us.
Core to the story of us — a story that began before the searing ones nested in the soil of this country did — is love in action. Across time, this mantra has molded and powered Black self-reliance and self-determination and helped support our thriving.
In the African societies we descend from, love was structurally built into systems of doing and being. The San people, for example, have long tapped into their sacred capacities to pour into their own development. Indigenous to southern Africa since 42,000 B.C., the San people and their healing practices have long been rooted in communal love. The Bushmen healers who headed trance dance ceremonies were strengthened via communal gatherings, walking on fire to display their wondrous faculties. This strength would be mustered up and called on later to cure individual ailments and to mediate strife wherever it appeared in their community. For members seeking remedies to natural illnesses, healers would allow for bartering and in-kind offerings as compensation. In each of these strengthening exchanges is the San people's investment in one another and understanding that if each member alone is strong, they together are a more powerful whole.
Giving in this vein of communal love and care has always been us. This Black Philanthropy Month, we honor and reflect on this rich legacy. With 'Love in Action' as our guiding theme, we at the Black Future Co-op Fund are reflecting on the rich legacy of Black giving in Washington. The roots of philanthropy, “love for humanity,” come from Black philanthropy. Carried in our shared heritage and bloodlines is a generative love that sustains us. Grounded in love, we can continue to steer and support Black well-being across Washington state. Rooted in love, we will forever blossom.
The makings of a generative love
bell hooks was a literary giant, and this Black Philanthropy Month, we elevate her name and the writings she left us that mirror her desire to inspire, inform, and instigate love and impact.
In All About Love: New Visions, her 13-chapter telling on love's presence in her world and in the larger one, hooks unpacks the components of what it takes for love to be metamorphic, writing that "to truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication." Her laying out of these components makes clear that love is work that involves actions, pluralized to capture the creative ways it can be shown. Defining love as an active word, she elevates the duty inherent in it, saying in the same book that "to begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility."
Adding to hooks' advocacy for loving actions, she prompts us to honor the vastness in each other, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, yearning for "a place in the world where people can engage in one another's differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility." Here, hooks tells us that by centering our strengths and lived experiences, we get to a fruitful love that activates us all in the work to support and secure Black well-being.
A throughline theme in these excerpts and so many of the brilliant, beautiful works bell hooks poured into, is the impactful power of love and the makings of it. As we look to her word for direction and reflection over the next few weeks, we're reminded that Black love in its full ferocity is magical, capable of creating community, merging communities, and supporting the reclaiming of power, both personal and structural.
What Black love in action in Washington looks like
Black love in action has been an engine for transformation statewide since the time of our ancestors. From Hoquiam to Spokane, Black Washingtonians have consistently enlisted our love for ourselves and our communities to forge solutions supportive of our present and future.
Four Black women founded the Black Future Co-op Fund in the wake of George Floyd's tragic death, calling on our grandmothers' legacies and elders' example to support the joy, self-determination, and healing that Black people across the state are eager for. Principled on cooperation and trust, our Fund has since been a vessel for and by Black people statewide. Through love in action, we are shifting the philanthropic paradigm from power-hoarding to power-sharing in pursuit of our community-lifting vision.Taking heed to bell hooks' famous words, "There is no better place to learn the art of loving than in community," the We See You grantees we've invested in with unrestricted funding are leading solutions in their localities that center the humanity and future of Black people.
The love that went into the Black Well-being: Moving Toward Solutions Together report, and its upcoming audiobook also shares this same intentionality. It was our love for each other, for those we've lost, and for those of us who don't exist yet, that brought Black Washingtonians to the table to share their experiences, name the challenges, and define the solutions that would support our health, economic mobility, education, civic engagement, and safety. Nearly a thousand of us brought our genius, challenges, desires, and intentions to in-person and online spaces, wielding a fierce love to dream up possibilities for making prosperity real for us and generations after us.
In this work, the work carried by We See You grantees, and the liberation work being done by many statewide, Black Washingtonians are preserving and seeding the same generative love from which we were all born.
Grounded in love, we bloom from it
Revisiting bell hooks' words this month empowers us with tools and language to reflect deeply on how we can continue to step into an interconnected, active, and constructive love that expands our possibilities across Washington state and the diaspora. Events happening this Black Philanthropy Month globally invite all of African descent to explore how we, specifically the philanthropic sector, can continue to let this same love drive our work and us toward liberation.
At the Black Future Co-op Fund, we're building on the momentum of the movement for Black well-being by collaboratively creating spaces for fellowship, where solutions rooted in love will be devised and delivered in years to come. On Wednesday, Aug. 9 we hosted a virtual gathering with Black philanthropists to talk about how we can live bell hooks' words; mirror the principles in her definition of a generative love; and hold each other accountable in pursuit of our collective freedom. Watch the recording here, and remember to continue carrying love — for ourselves and others — with you today and always.
