As Dr. King wrote, we need strength to love
As protests engulf America, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin ignited a fire in the soul of a beleaguered nation ravished by months of isolation, surging unemployment and more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Now, we’re in a panic to “do the work” of racial justice. Celebrities have tweeted their outrage. Corporations have posted “Black lives matter” statements on social media, and some have pushed for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that claim to promote anti-racist ideas in the workplace.
This attempt to correct injustice is laudable, but the work of anti-racism must be rooted in the moral ethic of love and acknowledge the profound sacredness of human beings.
Love is not empty sentimentalism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned against such thinking in his seminal work “Strength to Love” in 1963.
King argued that love could transform hearts and minds, as it reflected the idea that “God’s image is ineffably etched” in everyone.
Coretta Scott King explained that “by reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent moral ethic of love, we shall overcome … (all) evils.”
But how do we practice love? The answer lies in honoring what it fundamentally means to be human. All humans have the capacity to do good and evil, to treat each other and ourselves with cruelty or with compassion.
Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Kendrick Lamar demonstrated this complexity in his lyrics, “I got power, poison, pain, and joy inside my DNA.” We all have this duality within us and are capable of being both the oppressor and the oppressed, the freedom fighter and the fascist, regardless of our skin color or our station in life. To humanize a person is to treat them in a way that honors this complexity.
Dehumanization occurs when we ignore this complexity and caricature each other as pure monsters or pure angels. To see a human being like this is not to see him at all.
The film “Beauty and the Beast” warns us against this, and it’s worth studying, since Disney has connected Americans of many different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives through a shared set of stories and narratives.
Americans have shared destiny
In the film, a vain prince is cursed because he prejudges others based on their physical appearance. He is physically transformed into the thing he despises: a macabre and cruel beast.
Still, the townspeople who become so eager to kill the Beast are also corrupt. Just because the beast has behaved badly doesn’t mean the people are justified in becoming overzealous and tyrannical in their pursuit of justice.
The only force that can reverse this is someone who has the foresight to look beyond physical appearances and understand intuitively that a human being is, in the words of Ralph Ellison, “that sensitively focused process of opposites, of good and evil, of instinct and intellect, of passion and spirituality, which great literary art has projected as the image of Man.”
Belle is heroic because of her capacity to perceive the redeemable man even within the monster, and to treat him as such.
As a nation, we have failed to live up to this ideal. We see each other not as multifaceted, woefully imperfect beings but as beasts and objects worthy of contempt. In our politics and on social media, we reduce each other to political abstractions and dehumanize one another regularly.
In his 2008 speech “A More Perfect Union,” Barack Obama noted that this was not the way. Instead, Black and white Americans needed to pursue justice with the understanding that our destinies are intertwined: “For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past… binding our particular grievances – for better health care and better schools and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”
Push for inclusive policies
And likewise for whites, Obama noted that “the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of Black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds, by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”
Despite our hardships, can we find the courage to hold fast to the impenetrable idea of “liberty and justice for all,” learn to go the extra mile for our neighbor, and recommit ourselves to each other’s welfare and to this project we call America? Will we push for policies that reflect the spirit of democracy, that seek out the well-being of all: Black and white, civilian and cop, poor and rich, conservative and liberal?
Will we develop the inner conviction to have compassion for each other this fiercely, in spite of our tribal brawls and bickering?
Will we gather the strength to love?
Chloé Valdary is a writer and the founder of Theory of Enchantment, a New York-based company that teaches social and emotional learning, antiracism and diversity and inclusion in high schools, companies and government agencies.