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The Color of True Love

Greenbacks. American Samoan factory abuses Vietnamese workers. Sweatshop slavery for commercial profit.

Purple roses. International trafficking in Filipina women. Sex-based slavery for commercial profit.

Black history. Colonial trade in African people. Race-based slavery for commercial profit.

Human beings trying to own and control one another. It degrades. It violates basic human rights, and causes pain and suffering. It is hateful and goes against our highest mandate to love one another.

Black history shows that this kind of exploitation can be overcome. It also shows the triumph of human love and real family values over government-supported and religiously sanctioned attempts to own and control our bodies and intimate relationships through rigid structures, such as legal marriage.

Love Laws, a phrase coined by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, refer to society’s attempt to control whom we love, how, and how much. As Kevin Weston points out in the adjacent opinion piece “Black History is Family History, Too,” African slaves in America were denied the right to marry, on top of other societal barriers, and subsequently evolved alternative approaches to loving one another and building family and community.

Other marginalized groups have had similar experiences and managed to forge loving relationships, despite unfair and oppressive Love Laws. For a long time, Asian workers in America were denied the right to bring over their wives and families from their home countries, and at the same time were barred from marrying local citizens. So, they crossed traditional cultural divides to be with other Asians in the United States. Fenton Johnson writes about how same-sex couples, along with huge numbers of non-married opposite-sex couples, “have formed and maintained relationships outside of legislative and social approval that have endured persecution and duress for this simple reason: love.”

Black voices have long cried out to rethink our understanding of love in the context of social tradition and societal control. Weston emphasizes that “traditional marriage” has never worked for Blacks in America, and that it has been more about how individuals in a relationship think of it, rather than what government or religion dictates. Referring to the Jesse Jackson scandal, Weston declares it the personal business of Jackson and his family, and whatever arrangement they have. Even as early as the first half of the twentieth century, Zora Neale Hurston of the Harlem Renaissance wrote of fidelity and forgiveness within the personal relationship of a married black couple.

Elias Farajaje-Jones, a black writer, priest and sex educator, goes even further: government and organized religions should discontinue their practice of legalizing relationships. Even the governor of Hawaii, where a massive fight to legalize same-sex marriage took place in the 1990s, agreed that the government should get out of the marriage certification business. Farajaje-Jones advocates universal access to healthcare, insurance and housing, regardless of relationship, in order to empower individuals as free agents to enter a relationship with more of their own sovereignty.

Finally, Bell Hooks, a leading black cultural critic and feminist theorist, bridges the larger connection between societal Love Laws, economic oppression, and the destruction of family, in her book All About Love: New Visions: “Much of the talk about ‘family values’ in our society highlights the nuclear family, one that is made up of mother, father, and preferably only one or two children ... Of course, this is a fantasy image of family. Hardly anyone in our society lives in an environment like this. Even individuals who are raised in nuclear families usually experience it as merely a small unit within a larger unit of extended kin. Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. By encouraging the segregation of nuclear families from the extended family, women were forced to become more dependent on an individual man, and children more dependent on an individual woman. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.”

Black voices and black history continue to help us navigate the rocky road toward true personal freedom, human love and community.