living through Black feminist writings during an era of death and erasure with Breya M. Johnson
for the Black Women Know Best newsletter
“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” —June Jordan
The “war on woke” in Florida epitomizes the societal erasure of Black life and death, a relentless reality that is particularly troubling for Black women and femmes. As one of the most-banned authors in the US, Maya Angelou understood the intentionality of this harm: “I just read someplace that after a woman had read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she realized she wasn't alone. I think in some cases, Caged Bird has saved some lives — not just the quality of life, which is very important, but life itself.”
Breya M. Johnson (she/they) also gets it. As a survivor, of their own personal experiences and of this unloving world, she knows that Black feminism is not just life-altering but life-giving. I invited Breya to discuss love and the works that move us closer to our collective survival and liberation.
Key Takeaways and Contradictions:
There is an inherent knowingness that comes with being Black “because of our positionality in the world.”
Practicing love often means acknowledging and moving through hate. And love is not innate but something we have to build.
Black women and femmes personify intentionality, taking on a lot of personal (and often unseen) labor to ensure that others aren't harmed, especially in ways that we’ve been.
Doing the work of loving — in spite of lovelessness — is the work.
Black feminism and womanism encourage us to interrogate ourselves, each other, and the world. It’s a call for courage and self-reflection, so that we may one day live free.
Kendra: You are a self-described “practitioner of love.” What does this mean, and how did it come to be?
Breya: It’s definitely from tracking the themes of love in Black women's writings and seeing how much of it is a gift of love. And when I use the word “love,” I'm not talking about some type of Christian-based affect where we love our enemies or anything like that; it’s more specifically rooted in Black feminist principles — the type of love that acknowledges that this world is really awful and it wants me to hate myself and hate the many forms of Blackness in my community, and I am refusing to do that.
Figuring out how to find that care ethic and love ethic in order to enact it on each other is really how that came to be for me. More specifically, when I was in grad school, I wrote a paper basically tracing the theory of love. And I really, really, really credit Dr. Jennifer Nash's work for me being able to do that because her essay tracing love definitely shifted the course of my life.
Kendra: bell hooks wrote that “embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all dimensions of love — 'care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge' — in our everyday lives. A love ethic,” she said, “presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well.” How do you embrace a love ethic in your work?
Breya: I try to hold myself accountable to core principles. I never wanna be a voyeur to harm. I never want to inflict abuse on people. I do my best to always see the humanity in everyone, even in really, really terrible situations, and to make sure that what I think and what I believe are grounded in what they need to be grounded in and are not given to me by white supremacist structures.
Kendra: Hate is easy. Lovelessness is easy. They’re traps, laid everywhere, that we can collapse into. What I hear you saying is that doing the work of loving in spite of lovelessness is the work.
Breya: That's the best way to put it. It's so easy to be mean. It's so easy to be cruel.
Kendra: It’s so easy to be mad.
Breya: But to remove yourself from that? It's so easy to do anti-feminist and white supremacist principles, but to do the opposite? Oh, that is work!
Kendra: Right! You say that “they loved us enough to write it all down.” What are some of the core lessons that Black feminists teach us that you really try to uphold in your everyday life?
Breya: I like how Black feminism is always challenging me to move through grace in my relationships with other Black women. I like how it's always grappling with even the ways that we hurt each other as Black women. In my opinion, there's nothing that Black feminism isn't willing to interrogate, and I love that about it. And I really love how there's always themes of courage on the interpersonal and systemic levels.
“In my opinion, there's nothing that Black feminism isn't willing to interrogate.”
Whenever I've needed to learn how to resist something or how to speak back against something, I've always been able to find the words that help me move closer to that. I don't think that I’d even have the type of emotional courage that I have today without the Black feminists who I've read — at all. Like if I didn't discover June Jordan, I don't think that I would be who I am today.
Kendra: How do you see Black feminists and Black feminism propelling us all toward a more loving world?
Breya: I think the first thing that we have to do before we can become more loving is be honest. A lot of messages that we get about love are very vague, they're very empty, and they're not willing to confront the truth; they're not willing to grapple with systemic issues. Whereas the right Black feminism writings are.
When I talk about love, I'm not talking about agape. I'm not talking about the forms of love that absolve people of what they have done to you or what they have contributed to in our society. Really recognizing that difference is really important.
And you don't have to be motivated by a love ethic; it's just what works for me. But if I say that I love the community of women, I love the community of Black women, I love femmes, I love trans folks, I love Black people, then the way that I'm going to engage the world is going to be in alignment with that love. And everything that Black feminism teaches makes me get closer and closer to that.
“… if I say that I love the community of women, I love the community of Black women, I love femmes, I love trans folks, I love Black people, then the way that I'm going to engage the world is going to be in alignment with that love.”
Kendra: Love means checking our actions. Anyone can say “I love you,” but do your actions actually uphold the words and language that you speak to me?
Breya: It’s helpful to have a combination of writers in conversation with each other. It’s like this person is obviously dealing with the interpersonal, this person is dealing with the political, and this person is dealing with both. Putting bell hooks’s and June Jordan's work side by side has always been helpful for me; on one end, I'm getting a lot of more personal teachings (all about love and Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery) and then systemic teachings (On Call: Political Essays and Passion) on the other.
What I love about Jennifer Nash is her take on the Black feminist love ethic and self-ordering:
“Being grown describes a self [that’s] prepared to move beyond itself, a self that recognizes the limitations of selfhood, a self [that’s] prepared for a certain kind of radical curiosity about the social world. The politics of womanism is an active working on the self, preparing it for the labor of social engagement, and for the task of advocating for the ‘survival and wholeness of entire people.’”
I think some people stay, some people never get to the reordering of the self; some people stay in the reordering of the self; a few people get to the moving beyond the self.
Kendra: We need more people moving beyond the self, which is one of the core lessons of Black feminism. What’s your take on issues like critical race theory (CRT) and Covid denial?
Breya: When I think about what's happening in the education system (e.g., them really trying to completely remove Black writers), I definitely think that our opponents understand the power of political education. I found June Jordan and bell hooks texts as young as 15, and it changed my life.
“I definitely think that our opponents understand the power of political education. I found June Jordan and bell hooks texts as young as 15, and it changed my life.”
Breya: That's why when you look at the prison system, there are so many books that are banned from our incarcerated siblings because they — our imprisoners and oppressors — understand what happens when you truly lock someone up and all they have the power to do is read.
Kendra: And the Covid response — at first — demonstrated the possibilities of our economic power.
Breya: We got one little stimulus check, and, you know, people really started to see what could happen to your material reality when your government actually supports you. And they can't let us see that for long.
Kendra: Same thing with student debt. What is a loving Black feminist response to these efforts of erasure?
Breya: I don't know what a loving Black feminist response is on the systemic level because I think what we need is direct action. Like… we need rebellion.
But when I think about community, a loving response to erasure is when, as Black feminists, we refuse it. So we keep upholding each other, we keep saying our names, and we keep citing each other. I gave a teaching for Black Women Radicals, and, for me, it was an act of remembrance. I don't want you to just remember them as figures; I actually want you to undertake their work. Bringing their work with us is the best and most loving way we can combat erasure.
Kendra: Why is reproductive justice so important to this work?
Breya: I'm really dedicated to reproductive justice because I’ve always felt that it was one of the only movements that was truly interconnected. More specifically, the repro justice fight is revealing some of the gaps in the broader Black Lives Matter fight. Not understanding reproductive violence as a form of patriarchal violence and as something that’s deeply connected to state terror is a really, really, really big gap in understanding.
Kendra: Why do we need more non-Black women and people to engage with the politics of love?
Breya: I want more people to engage with more of a loving politic because I want them to move closer to collectivism. That's the goal. And I'm not saying that I don’t want interpersonal love for people, but I think the priority is moving closer to interconnectedness and further away from rigid individualism, especially as Americans.
Every day, you have to work to expand your capacity to care — not your capacity to endure, but your capacity to care — and involve yourself in ways that are good not just for you but for the people around you.
A lot of people think that love and caring are innate, but they’re skills you have to build up. Love is something that needs to be scaled up.
Kendra: Are there any parting words you have to say on why Black Women Know Best? Is there anything else, personal or cultural, that you wanna lift?
Breya: I feel like what I want people to understand is that within Blackness, there's this beautiful and inherent way of knowing because of our positionality in the world.
And whether you have a spiritual understanding of knowing, whether you have a scientific one, a cultural one, whatever your understanding is, I want Black women to embrace that way of knowing far sooner — to really stand firm in the fact that you know and to see where holding that sentiment for yourself will take you.
Journal Prompts:
How can you engage with the politics of love?
In what ways can you help keep Black history alive?
When you think about the “reordering of the self,” what comes to mind? How can you move beyond it?
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