What's love got to do?

Cross Currents, Fall, 2004 by Stephanie Y. Mitchem

One present challenge for African Americans is to locate ways to develop sex education that is appropriate for our children and families. Serious conversations about sex are needed in black communities. Churches may or may not take the lead, but they should not hinder the discussions.

Naming African American realities including social structures and institutions, telling our stories about sexuality, and researching the history that led to the stories are but beginnings of a longer process. They are markers of hope in the middle of the multiple health hazards that sexualities bring to African Americans. So as the title of this essay asks, what's love got to do? Because, clearly, love alone is not enough. As the title obviously references a work by the singer Tina Turner, moving away from abusive relationships is a step. Yet it is not enough for individual black women to resolve their own love lives--it will not be enough to prevent the next generation from becoming victimized or colonized. Neither is wrapping these issues in religious language adequate to their resolution.

Instead, the sacredness of black women's bodies and selves must be recognized: imaging God and mother with black women's faces. Imaging beauty in black women's bodies. Recognizing homes made by brown work-hardened hands. Finding love in all these places is only a beginning.

* Portions of this essay are taken from African American Women Tapping Power and Spiritual Wellness, forthcoming from The Pilgrim Press. Used by permission of The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, OH.

Notes

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "Income 2001: Table 1, Median Income of Households by Selected Characteristics, Race, and Hispanic Origin of Householder," www.census.gov/hhes/income.> 2. National Center for Health Statistics, United States, 2002 with Chartbook on Trends in the Health of Americans. Hyattsville, Maryland: 2002.

3. Paul Finkleman, "Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion" in The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1997), 131.

4. Ann L. Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures" in Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life, edited by Louise Lamphere, Helen Ragon, and Patricia Zavella (N.Y.: Routledge, 1997), 374. 373-399.

5. Traci C. West, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (N.Y.: New York University Press, 1999), 135.

6. This view has been prevalent in spirituality studies, developed by authors such as Daniel J. Levinson and Erik Erickson in their human developmental theories. For a refutation of these ideas from a feminist perspective, see Carol Gilligan, "In a Different Voice: Visions of Maturity" in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, edited by Joan Wolski Conn (N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1986), 63-87.

7. Jacquelyn Grant, "The Sin of Servanthood and the Deliverance of Discipleship" in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, edited by Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993), 199-218.