Conversational red herrings (five): love trumps hate

Or in other words, "Let's all sing Kumbaya!"

Here's  a few quick reasons why I say no, there will be no Kumbayas here. Love does not trump hate and my dulcet soprano will not be offered to soothe your savage breast (or your guilty conscience). Feel free to clutch your pearls at my willingness to say that out loud.

Here's the thing: singing Kumbaya will change no policy, but then shifting the status quo is not what you're about is it? Quite the opposite in fact. Your intent when you deploy this phrase is to reap two benefits. First, you mean to reap the social benefit of appearing to be concerned about oppression. [You aren't but you get to score the point.] Second, you slyly get to disclaim any responsibility for acting to address it because after all, you are very epitome of the love which will trump hate aren't you? Your love is all that it will take to redress 21 generations of wrongs. Uh huh. Hark! I think I hear the first bars of Kumbaya in the distance.................

What you want is the plausible deniability that this and other similar platitudes give you. You deploy this silly phrase hoping that the not-too-discerning listener will hear only the words. And they do hear only the words and they applaud your New Age philosophy. More discerning listeners hear much more than just those words though. They hear, "I don't want to talk about my complicit silence and inaction. No, what I want to do is to throw the responsibility for peace and rapprochement on you, the victim. Now sing along with me! Kumabaya mah Lord!".

If you ask me, these love trumps hate-rs have zero interest in doing any of the work required to make those words meaningful. They're not really after meaning any way. Love trumps hate (LTH) is lazy faux optimism  (faux-timism?) and, as I've had cause to say recently, lazy optimism is wholly useless.

As with the other four red herrings I've written about [here, here, here and here], this particular herring is lobbed into conversations to stop any honest reflection on what America has done to her own people over the course of hundreds of years. LTH is the ugly status quo masquerading as enlightenment.

Love trumps hate is a lie. Here's the truth:.

Truth 1: Kumbayas will not save POC's lives

We still die prematurely, whether  because of the violence meted out by state actors (Eric Garner or Khalief Browder to select just two) or through a series of unfortunate events that follow Erica Garner, and Khalief's mother Venida.

If the circumstances of our Blackness in America don't shorten our lifespans, our healthcare outcomes are impacted by the places we call home, the care we are able to access and the overall social environment in which we live.

Love can't fix that. Love won't trump any of that.

Truth 2: Black folk have 1/13th the wealth of White families and a rousing chorus of Kumbaya won't fix that

Between the casual racism that keeps us from jobs, separates us from economic security, prevents us from advancing when we do have work and the more noxious kind of racism that deliberately underpays us, there's little hope of POC ever catching up. The POC/White wealth gap is a runaway freight train. It's gone and it ain't stopping cuz y'all ain't paying no reparations and all you do want to do is sing and pretend.  

There's no way for us to secure our children's and our communities futures without a foundation stone of economic security first being laid. Love won't lay that foundation. And ain't no key you can sing Kumbaya in that will help either. Stop trying to baffle me with that particular brand of bullshiggety. 

from Demos

Truth 3: Environmental racism and capitalism kill. Kumbaya ain't the answer to those either

The environments in which minorities and the poor frequently live were built by racism and toxic capitalism (pun definitely intended) and are sustained by ongoing ~isms of various kinds. Flint isn't the only place facing a water crisis. 

Multiple minority and poor communities struggle with water challenges much like those seen in the developing world, but we don't talk about that because not only are minorities invisible, poor people of any color are invisible too. It has ever been thus. "Love trumps hate" is yet another way of avoiding extending that invisibility. It's a way of disclaiming any culpability and shirking all responsibility for righting wrongs.Love trumps hate my hindparts.

Love won't fix any of that, neither will love fix the pipes that must be replaced once toxins have damaged them. Money will fix that. Political will will fix that. Not-so-common decency could fix that but love? Love in action maybe but this namby pamby love-trumps-hate-let's sing-and-hug-it-out foolishness? That serves only as a salve to the conscience. Listless lazy love don't-bother-me-with-the-truth love trumps nothing.  

Mouthing the words "Love trumps hate" affects none of the outcomes that matter. Those words (absent any action to give them weight) don't move the needles of hate, oppression, disenfranchisement, patriarchy, misogyny, transphobia that harm POC routinely. 

Love trumps hate my big toe. But carry on with that. We see you.