love & marriage

Some people ended this week on a high due to the SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality, and some remained in mourning for the 9 victims of domestic white supremacist terrorism in Charleston, SC. This morning I find myself wanting to write about love, which has been on my mind for some time now. I went to see Far from the Madding Crowd a couple of weeks ago and left the theater wishing I could name at least one love story that explored the complexity of Black love. There are so many tropes and conventions that are problematic and far-fetched—I don’t know if “love at first sight” is real, but it’s not a compelling plot device. In Far from the Madding Crowd, three men propose to a young, independently wealthy woman after meeting her once or twice. There were a couple of good lines (HIM: “I can give you a piano and a gig.” HER: “The thing is, sir, I already have a piano and a gig.”), but the film still begins with the woman asserting, “I want to be tamed.” Overall, the men don’t fare well in that movie; one ends up dead, the other goes to prison for murder, and the “good guy” who put up with at least a year of foolishness gets the girl (though it’s unclear whether she consents to marriage). I want to see a movie that shows how love evolves over time, and I’d really like to see something that shows the inner workings of a (Black) man’s mind. Maybe that’s why I was so unimpressed with Dope when I saw it last week. The representation of the 3 women in the movie—all light-skinned—is appalling and the nerds don’t really seem like outliers. There’s some bullying, but then the conventions of masculinity kick in and they’re suddenly selling drugs, toting guns, and having hot chicks throw themselves at their feet. Sigh. The premise did seem original but all radical possibilities around gender vanished as the movie progressed. I found myself checking the time and posting my disappointment on Facebook. Wealthy Black men (Sean Combs, Pharrell Williams, Forest Whittaker) funded this film and that really depresses me because it means that THIS is how they prefer to see Black women. I think they should change the movie’s title to Done or Nope…

I can be fairly sentimental but I’m not a romantic. And I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I’m troubled by the hashtag #LoveWins. The right to marry really isn’t about love, it’s about privileging a certain expression of love, and those of us who don’t wed are certainly not “condemned to live in loneliness” as Justice Kennedy opined. I’m glad that people who want to marry can do so legally in the US, but as a single, child-free woman I will never receive the rewards reserved for married couples. This past week many of us celebrated the SCOTUS ruling upholding Obamacare—and that’s something from which I DO benefit—but it saddens me that we’ve all but forgotten that the single-payer system was the best, truly radical option (except for presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders). In this insightful article, “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free,” two scholars break down the ways in which the marriage equality movement deflects attention and resources away from the truly radical goals of social justice movements:

Same sex marriage advocacy has been harmful just like other political strategies that seek inclusion in a violent state apparatus–such as the fight for gay and lesbian military service. Inclusion strategies like these valorize the things they seek inclusion in. Same-sex marriage advocacy has lined up with right wing family values rhetoric and policy to undo the work of our movements to gradually dismantle marriage and separate access to key necessities from marital status. It has aligned with conservative pro-marriage ideas about romance, children, families and care that support the attacks on social welfare programs and most severely harm low-income mothers of color. It has rescued marriage from Left critique and made straight and gay people on the Left forget what our movements have taught us about state regulation of families and gender. (my emphasis)

And then, of course, there’s the way in which the marriage equality ruling eclipsed the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Kimberle Crenshaw’s Facebook post summed it up:

Steeling myself against rage today… the funeral of Senator Pinckney, delayed, now framed as “coming on the heels” of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on same sex marriage. Today’s mind numbing contradiction is being framed as a window into the diversity of the President’s responsibilities, not about the deep, profound, disturbing reality that Black people still live in terror in this country. Nine dead people–killed while worshipping–are now afterthoughts, to be squeezed into the celebration of American Democracy. So now…Black people can marry whomever they please, but we can’t vote, worship, represent our people, swim, shop, or walk the streets without fear of being discriminated against or even killed. So on this day of sorrow and celebration, this is what democracy looks like.

Love, marriage, loss…