Self-love is the mastery of re-definement in a chaotic system that denies you agency. Simply stated, “it is the will to be great when others have done their best to stop your progress.”

In a world where Blackness is parsed out for commodified gain, self-love becomes the touchstone.

It’s this touchstone of reality which allows for a renewing of joy, everlasting that never ceases. This is not a self-love that is garnered by triumph over white supremacy but one engendered by a cosmic shift in one’s thinking of self and community. Therefore, sustainable self-love must always consider the community from which and in which one communes. 

James Baldwin writes, “Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here [America], and become joyless as they have become.” White supremacy is never about trust it’s about greed. And greed run amok will always lead to the destruction. In a revolutionary sense, it’s practically impossible to have self-love if you are housed within white supremacy. I m not talking about in the fight against, I am specifically speaking about those who use it like a superpower—slipping in and out of it when they see it as a benefit for greater accommodations.  There is no self-love in such an event or space.

Self-love is the mastery of re-definement in a chaotic system and white supremacy is a chaotic system that can’t be re-defined, it can only be destroyed.

Its entire project is to hijack the agency of people in order to oppress and control. Love is never the motive it is simply used as bait to lure the “innocent” within its tentacles. 

Self-love is communal, revolutionary and the centerpiece for Blackness to flourish. It seeks to replenish in ways that white supremacy never imagined because white supremacy is not about imagining; it’s about destruction. Blackness lived out in its purest African nature is self-love that transforms. 

Ase’