Liberating Relationships

• Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

  “The radical strategy is to love.”
   
  Writer and activist adrienne maree brown continues, in a 2013 blog post, “We are in perhaps a dark age. Our legacy might be that we maintained and remembered the way to love. Vulnerability, attachment, care, attunement, these are the ways we remember. We have to remember to feel.”*
   
  We are arguably even deeper into what, almost ten years ago now, brown called “a dark age.” There’s a shift in the air, promising and terrifying. The question of what to do in the midst of this turning looms large. Traditional activism -- organizing, advocating, taking to the streets – is not always accessible or possible for all kinds of good reasons.
   
  Minding my own behavior, though, is always possible. And some of the best work I can do for a more equitable and less violent world is in my relationships.
   
  It’s not hard to find research and strong thinking in support of this belief. Scholar and teacher Linda Potter Crumley argues that “communication is both the cradle and the crucible of social justice,” and relationships are where “social justice is constituted and sustained.”   Buddhist teacher Kate Johnson writes, in Radical Friendships (2021) “through wise relationships, it is possible to transform the barriers created by societal injustice.”
   
  Writing in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) adrienne maree brown suggests that what she terms liberated relationships, “are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community.”
   
  That’s powerful medicine right there, and it does not always go down easily. In my experience, these kinds of relationships are never consistently easy. With grateful respect to adrienne maree brown, I think of these relationships as liberating, rather than liberated, because they are constantly pushing against a long, long history of limitation. When I am in relationship – with friends, family and colleagues – whose experience of the world is strikingly different than mine, I have to keep paddling against that wind. Liberating relationships require my loving, alert attention all the time.
   
  Social Psychologist Kiara Sanchez and her colleagues suggest that part of the reason that kind of attention is necessary lies in what they call  “threatening opportunities.” In three separate studies, Sanchez and her colleagues found that both white and Black-identified people saw the life- & society-changing opportunity in multi-racial relationships, and they saw risks, especially in disclosing their particular experiences of being white or Black in the world.
   
  The key to balancing those risks was facing together what Sanchez and colleagues describe as “race related parts of each other.”  Without “acknowledge[ing] and try[ing] to understand” those aspects of one another’s lives, they suggest, inter-racial friends risk failing at friendship in critical ways.
   
  In a keynote speech at the 2021 St. Louis Racial Equity Summit, adrienne maree brown said, “Consider what love does in the face of dishonesty, faithlessness, and repression: love tells the truth.” Part of what it means to be in liberating relationships is to tell the truth.  It’s also critically important, especially for the person in the relationship who has benefitted from a particular history or current systems, to hear the truth, often painful, uncomfortable truth. 
  
  In my experience it also means celebrating joyful realities, cultures and customs when those are not available to me.  Even my adult stepdaughter, with whom I’ve shared a household and great love since she was 8 years old, has beloved cultural touchstones associated with being a Black woman that are not for me.  My response, in the interest of a liberating relationship with her, is not to feel left out, but to simply, graciously be glad for her. 
   
  Grace is part of liberating relationships. Humility is as well. So is building the muscle to sit with deep grief.  So is accountability, forgiveness, sometimes reparation, always compassion.
  
  In that keynote, brown continued, “Love invites us home, love says we belong, unconditionally. Love does not demand our perfection, because none of us have that – love sees the effort we have made on behalf of our people, our species.”  Liberatory relationships require effort, accepting imperfections and mistakes, our own and each other’s, eschewing guilt in favor of acknowledging harm and demonstrable commitment to change.
  
  Like so much else about changemaking, liberating relationships require personal practice, returning again and again to this mutual endeavor. Shaking off the distractions of guilt and despair to return to love.
  
  I know little for certain, but I know the feeling when my loves, my friends, my colleagues and I are in that particular circle of light that is a liberating relationship. I know our effort with one another is more than a small thing. I know we are a part of an ever-emerging “abundant justice.”
  
  My curiosity about how to get better at this practice was the seed of the idea for the ILI Multi-Racial Relationships Project.  I talked about it with two people dear to me who are also in multi-racial families.  We dreamed the project into being and the ILI is now its home.  This is joyful work for us, hearing the stories of multi-racial families navigate the myth of race and the fact of racism every day, balancing love and rage and at best, returning to grace.
  
  The interviews we've conducted already affirm the belief we started with:  there is a collective wisdom in these stories that will inform the deeply urgent work of building our capacity for liberating relationships. There are few other stones so sturdy on the path to justice.
  
  This week, we launch an awareness campaign to bring more attention to this project.  To reach the goals of this campaign, we need to widen our circle of support, and we’re asking for your help with that effort.  The centerpiece of this campaign is a video featuring four people telling their stories of living in multi-racial families; today is its public debut. 

  ILI Blog readers are critical to our effort to get the word out about this campaign, and this campaign will lead directly to real, systemic change. We hope that together we can encourage more and more people to take up the practice of liberating relationships, to engage in a radical strategy of love. Here’s a link to the Project Page - thank you for sharing it widely!

  
  * all of the references in this post are available in the 2/25/22 issue of Intersections, The ILI newsletter, which can be accessed here.