“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
How have you been hiding?
There are so many ways and reasons why we hide. As public as my platform has been, my dreams explicitly showed me how I’d still been hiding in certain areas of my life. Even without dreams, though, you probably sense that urge to hide away certain parts of yourself, maybe in specific settings or just in general.
It can be in the most subtle ways like avoiding eye contact with someone, not expressing your opinion at a party because it’s contrary to what everyone else is saying, or not texting a person when we feel inspired to text them out of fear that they’re not interested in hearing from us.
My word this year is freedom, which is why I’m glad we decided on the book title: Colorism: The Politics of Skin Tone and HOW WE GET FREE.
When I think of “freedom,” hiding feels like the opposite of that. Hiding feels like a form of repression and bondage. The opposite of being free within ourselves (à la Jewel Parker Rhodes).
At a birthday dinner two weeks ago, I told a few women that I’d consolidated my answer for “how we get free” down to one word. Zora Neale Hurston’s quote affirms that one word: Love.
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
Official Book Launch for COLORISM
July 7th from 7-9pm ET at Gladys Books and Wine in Brooklyn, NY.
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I hesitated (hid) to tell the folks what my word was because I know so many people roll their eyes and think “love” is too sentimental and not practical or realistic enough for political or societal change. They think love “doesn’t get shit done.” What’s ironic, is the very systems people claim they want to dismantle—patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism—are the very same systems that conditioned them to believe that love is weak or ineffective.
I invite anyone who has that belief, even slightly, to interrogate whether that is or has to be true. Consider whether the very systems that discouraged your imaginative powers are now benefiting from your inability to imagine a different way to exist and to create.