Love Left at the Frontline: The Politics of Black Love Denied ~Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh
"Love is the greatest revolution," bell hooks whispered to us from the margins of America's loudest barricades— yet so many of our comrades never learned the tune.
I have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Black men who could smell state violence in the wind. However, when it came to intimacy, when it came to holding one Black woman's trembling hand under a blood moon, they grew mute, their tongues tithing devotion to "the people" while their hearts starved at home.
I did not learn this merely by observation; I knew it by loving. Several years ago, in a cramped and dim locally-owned bookshop, I met "Ayo," a poet whose verses could unzip the heavens. His voice reverberated against book spines that whispered revolution, and I swear the whole room shook. Ayo was electrifying, and I had to know him. If he were Saturn, I was a tiny piece of ice, in a celestial orbit, hoping to collide. Our conversation afterward felt like two meteors meeting: hot, inevitable, cosmic. Our relationship grew throughout the years, with me offering vulnerability in his disorganized bedroom. At the same time, he strummed a guitar, never really making eye contact. However, I still returned. For years, I returned to that bedroom, or his car, or sometimes, rarely, a restaurant- but only if he was performing there. Did I feel loved in return? At the time, yes, if only sparingly. Now? I am not so sure it was love, maybe limerence, and his desire for a devout fan.
However, when I finally confessed, soft-voiced, palms sweating, that I wanted to explore our mutual desire, he looked away. "Sister, my love belongs to the struggle." His words took my breath away. How could a man so fluent in liberation believe love was a finite ration? And sister? Really? But he always did speak in jive, and it was that cadence that was my undoing, even through rejection.
The Reservoir Myth
bell hooks called this illusion a "love ethic" deferred—a refusal to anchor political praxis in the daily labor of caring for one another (hooks, 2000). In Salvation: Black People and Love, she warns that movements without tenderness re-enact the very hierarchies they seek to upend (hooks, 2001). Nevertheless, many Black male revolutionaries continue to drink from what I call the Reservoir Myth: the belief that love is a single body of water, and every kiss siphons precious gallons from the collective well. White supremacy amplifies that myth, humming scarcity into our skulls: There is not enough joy to go around, so hoard your passion for the picket line.
Nikki Giovanni kept trying to smash that lie. In her legendary 1971 televised dialogue with James Baldwin, she argued that Black men need spaces to be tender "so you can get to be the man you ought to be" (Giovanni & Baldwin, 1971). Baldwin nodded, admitting that love is "the only responsibility" worth taking. Yet half a century later, many of our brothers still eschew that responsibility, wearing their martyrdom like a second skin.
Broken Homes, Broken Movements
History offers an example: Fred Hampton, brilliant and beloved, died before his son could utter "Baba." Even men who survived the long '60s often left their lovers piecing together rent money. At the same time, they served turn after turn on the lecture circuit. Their sacrifices were real, but so were the mortgages, the packed-school-lunches, the night-terrors their children shouldered alone.
When fathers are ghosts, mothers become border patrols against despair. They stretch checks, mediate tantrums, and nurse their loneliness in silence. That dual labor, economic and emotional, mirrors the plantation's afterlife: Black women still carry the weight of multiple bodies, still believe they must be "strong" enough for everyone. Love politics evaporates in that heat, replaced by survival choreography: get yourself (if there is time) to therapy.
Exhaustion in Black Masculinity
Some brothers counter: We do not neglect love by choice; capitalism wrings the softness out of us. They are not wrong. Standing at the intersection of racism and patriarchy, Black men endure assaults that no romance novel can anesthetize. Giovanni herself wrote, "Deal with yourself as an individual worthy of respect and make everyone else deal with you the same way" (Giovanni, 2024). But respect is hard to harvest in a nation that greets your presence with suspicion before sunrise. By dusk, the average Black man is so tired he can barely feel his pulse, let alone sync it with a partner's heartbeat.
However, exhaustion is not an alibi for lovelessness. bell hooks insisted that patriarchy scripts men to equate vulnerability with weakness, a lesson lethal to intimacy (hooks, 2004). If the state imprisons the Black male body, patriarchy often imprisons the Black male spirit. A love politic is our jailbreak.
My Story, Continued
After Ayo's rejection, I catalyzed my grief in poetry of my own. But grief leaked through my heart like a pen too full of ink on paper too thin to hold its weight. At a protest, I watched a comrade cradle his infant daughter between chants of "No justice, no peace," and I burst into tears. That tiny fist wrapped around her father's locs was the revolution I craved: a love so abundant it watered both household and boulevard.
Months later, Ayo called me. He had been reading books on love, he said. "I thought pouring into you would drain the movement," he confessed. We met at Lake Merritt, light rippling off the water like sequins. We did not become lovers, too much scar tissue, too many ghosts, but we became co-conspirators in tenderness. Moreover, that experience brought me to the writings of hooks and Giovanni, and honestly? That is pretty priceless. Maybe even worth the heartache.
Toward a Replenishing Source
What would happen if Black male revolutionaries embraced Giovanni's challenge and risked softness? Imagine community meetings where men not only debate housing policy but also practice holding infants; marches where organizers schedule cuddle workshops alongside security trainings; radical budgets that allocate stipends for therapy, couples counseling, and father-child retreats.
This is not utopian fluff. Studies in trauma-informed activism show that movements with robust emotional infrastructure suffer fewer burnout casualties and boast higher retention rates. A love politic is strategic: it sustains the people who maintain the struggle. Love is hydration, not a reservoir but an underground aquifer, constantly replenishing as long as we stop drilling holes of neglect.
A Call-Back to Baldwin and Giovanni
Rewatch the Baldwin-Giovanni dialogue today, and you will notice Giovanni leaning in, almost pleading: "We deserve our roses, Jimmy." Baldwin answers, "I love you," voice cracking under the weight of that simple sentence. Two intellectual titans modeled vulnerability on national television, which was movement work. Yet we rarely teach that clip in activist trainings; we prefer fists-in-air photos. Love politics gets archived in the appendix.
Concluding Benediction
I leave you with a dare: Audit your revolution for romance. If your syllabi cite Che but not hooks, revise them. If your rallies rage but never rejoice, choreograph a slow dance on the courthouse steps. If the revolutionary man beside you can quote Audre Lorde's "erotic as power" yet flinches at committing to date night, invite him to study the erotic as daily bread.
For years, I cradled a tender heart where Ayo's absence bruised it, but to this day, it sustains itself with stubborn optimism. I believe Black men can unlearn scarcity. I believe movements can practice abundance. Every cradle rocked in love is a strategic blow against empire. In the words of bell hooks, "To love is to act" (hooks, 2000).
So let us act like love is inexhaustible because it is.
References
Baldwin, J., & Giovanni, N. (1971, November 4). A dialogue. In SOUL! [Television series]. WNET. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lbz0PZ5vJk
Giovanni, N. (2024, December 10). A life in quotes: Nikki Giovanni. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/dec/10/nikki-giovanni-quotes
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
hooks, b. (2001). Salvation: Black people and love. William Morrow. hooks, b. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love. Atria Books.
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Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh is a Black, Egyptian, and Indigenous writer whose stories live where love and imagination meet. She writes to compost empire, tend to grief, and root us in the futures we deserve; whether through poetry, essays, or magical tales of connection and return.
She lives on Ohlone land, known as Oakland, California, where she tends to her writing, her community, and the small everyday magics that keep love alive.
