Excerpt from an interview with Michelle Alexander during Krista Tippett's 'On Being' show
PROF. ALEXANDER: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this notion of “revolutionary love” and what that means. And it’s something that I spoke with Vincent Harding quite a bit about. And I think for me what it means to be fully human is to open ourselves to fully loving one another in an unsentimental way. I’m not talking about the romantic love, or the idealized version of love, but that the simple act of caring for one another, and being aware of our connectedness as human beings, and also the reality of our suffering, and the reality that we make a lot of mistakes, and we struggle and we fail.
That’s all part of being human. We suffer, we love, we struggle, we fail, and then we love again. And I think trying not to imagine that we’re anything more or less than that, as human beings struggling to love and find our way, making mistakes, but still yearning for a deeper connection and a sense of purpose in our lives is what being human is all about. Now of course, so many people, not just in the United States, but around the world, are struggling on a daily basis just to survive.
But even among those folks, what I have found is that there’s love to be found. There’s joy there. There’s suffering. There’s redemption. All of it. And that’s what it means to be human. And if we are going to evolve spiritually, morally, as human beings, we’re going to lean in to caring more, and loving more for one another, and honoring our connectedness, and our oneness, and resist that impulse, that fear-driven impulse to divide and label and react with punitiveness rather than care and concern.
Great gist, thank you