7 February 2026

Under U.S. fascist rule, Black love is often described as a personal ethic of self-care, chosen family, and community resilience. But it is also transnational: a radical, border-crossing practice that insists we are bound to one another across oceans, languages, and histories of extraction. Black love becomes the discipline of seeing, hearing, and understanding the shared humanity and interconnectedness of the Black diaspora—not as a metaphor, but as a lived obligation.

That’s why Darnell L. Moore’s line lands like a mandate in my spirit at this moment: “Loving oneself and being loved while navigating the violence that harms black people’s psyches and well-being is a survival tactic that requires work. Staying alive when you’ve been counted dead is love.” Survival is not solitary here. It is communal. It is global. When Black people are “counted dead,” that counting happens through systems that travel across policing tactics, military aid, resource theft, media scripts, and the steady manufacturing of whose suffering is legible. To love under these conditions is to refuse the empire’s math.

This is where bell hooks steadies the practice: “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” Loving well includes how we hold each other across distance. How we speak of Haiti without pity or caricature, how we witness Sudan without turning catastrophe into background noise, how we name the grief and resistance of the Democratic Republic of the Congo without collapsing it into a single story, and how we care about Black diasporic siblings being abducted by ICE within our very own shores. To love well is to refuse selective attention. It is to train our minds and spirits to stay present with Black life everywhere, not only where it is convenient, trending, or profitable. Not when those affected share selected traits of our own social identities.

Love also strips away the lies that make disconnection feel normal. James Baldwin tells the truth: “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” One of those masks is American innocence, a long-held fantasy that our safety is unrelated to someone else’s vulnerability. Another is American exceptionalism, the belief that our local struggle is the only real one. Under fascism, those masks become tools of control. Love removes them so we can recognize: the same world that brutalizes Black communities here often profits from Black destabilization elsewhere.

That recognition can be terrifying, because love brings us out of hiding. Zora Neale Hurston writes, “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” And Toni Morrison clarifies that love is not a fall but a rise: “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.” Rising in love means rising into a sense of responsibility that urges us to move from empathy to analysis, from grief to solidarity, and from outrage to organized care.

For African Americans, this is especially pressing because we sit in the seat of empire. Even when we are oppressed within it, we still live inside its infrastructure. We are socialized and rewarded into its passports, consumption, institutions, and narratives. We have to contend with the hard spiritual fact that proximity to imperial power can dull our senses, tempt us into comfort, and reward our silence. Here Elyse Ambrose offers a compass: “I do know a little bit about truth… I am invited to live into that truth.” The truth is that our liberation is braided with the diaspora’s. Living into it means practicing attention, refusing dehumanizing rhetoric, supporting transnational movements, and rejecting the idea that our freedom can be purchased with someone else’s captivity.

And we remember, with Christina Sharpe, that “we did not simply or only love in subjection and as the subjected.” We have loved as world-builders. Black love is radical because it insists on relationships where the empire demands isolation; it insists on shared humanity where fascism demands hierarchy; it insists, again and again, that Black life—everywhere—deserves to be fully seen, fully heard, and fiercely protected.

– Reverend Terence Mayo, Director of The CLGS African American Roundtable