Pláticando about Love at the Kitchen Table

Abstract

In this paper two Women of Color academics employ and blend Chicana Feminist Pláticas and Kitchen Table Talk methodologies to engage in a culturally rooted dialogue about the power of love in education. They explore their journeys towards studying love, love in praxis, and ultimately, argue that love is a practice for cultivating and sustaining our collective well-being.

1. Introduction and Context

we are each other’s harvest:

we are each other’s business:

we are each other’s magnitude and bond [1].

Women of Color feminists have long insisted on the power of love and argued that it should be centered in our lives and movements as a political practice necessary for our collective liberation (e.g., [2,3,4,5]). In the field of education, scholars have contended that care and caring relationships are crucial determinants of effective teaching and lead to positive academic student outcomes (e.g., [6,7,8,9,10]). More recently, Scholars of Color have advocated that we heed the call of Women of Color feminists, arguing that given the current conditions of schooling for Children of Color, they need more than care—they also need love (e.g., [11,12,13,14]). These scholars have illustrated the ways in which love is a form of politicized care (e.g., [15]), a pedagogical commitment (e.g., [16,17]), and a practice necessary for healing (e.g., [18,19,20]). We (Sharim and Autumn), two Women of Color educators and academics, join this lineage of scholars researching and illuminating the power of love as a practice necessary for working with Children and Communities of Color. Through this paper, moreover, we argue that love is not just a necessary tool for educating our children, but a practice integral for our collective survival and wellness.

The power of relationships is echoed by interdisciplinary scholars spanning the fields of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, public health, and medicine [21,22,23,24,25,26,27] who have situated [loving] relationships as integral to our physiological and psychological well-being. While the aforementioned scholars (and many others) have made important contributions to shaping the landscape of love in education, there remains space at the metaphorical and literal kitchen table to continue exploring what love looks and feels like in praxis. The need to discuss love as a practice necessary for our well-being becomes pronounced when we consider the growing bodies of research that have discussed the ways Children of Color are currently navigating the anti-Black, racist, and spirit-murdering functions of schooling (e.g., [28,29]), and reporting higher rates of mental health distress and alarming rates of child trauma which have the potential to cause long term impacts in terms of both physical and emotional health [30,31]. Research is abundantly clear that there is an urgent and imminent need to (re)focus our attention on the well-being of our children (e.g., [32]). In this paper, we draw on our own experiences, epistemologies, and research to engage in a blend of Chicana Feminist Plática (CFP) [33] and Black Feminist Kitchen Table Talk (KTT) (e.g., [34]) to explore our individual journeys to studying love, how we conceptualize it, and most importantly for our field and for our children, how we see love as a praxis for cultivating and sustaining our collective well-being.

2. Methods

This paper blends Chicana Feminist Pláticas [33] and Black Feminist Kitchen Table Talk (e.g., [34]) to explore how two Women of Color scholars who study love [11,19,20] envision and embody love as a practice for cultivating and sustaining wellness. Chicana Feminist Pláticas (CFPs) are both a method and methodology that seeks to challenge and disrupt the objectivity of “traditional” research [35]. According to Fierros and Delgado-Bernal, CFP are grounded in five principles: (a) the research draws upon theories of race and Women of Color feminisms; (b) has a relational principle that honors participants as co-constructors of knowledge; (c) makes connections between everyday lived experiences and the research inquiry; (d) provides a potential space for healing; and (e) relies on relations of reciprocity and vulnerability as well as researcher reflexivity [33]. More recently, I (Sharim) have built upon this work to argue that given the ways research and methods have long been anti-relational and utilized as weapons for harm (e.g., [36,37,38]), our research methods—and pláticas specifically—should not only provide a “potential” space for healing but should prioritize fostering and sustaining the type of loving community that is foundational for healing [39].

To further disrupt normative approaches to educational research and honor our cultural and racial differences while building solidarity, we also sought methods for our collective theorizing that deliberately drew on Black Feminist traditions, lived experience, and improvisation. We turned to what Green et al., Toliver, and the Black Girls Literacies Collective describe and model as kitchen-table dialogue [40,41,42]. As Dillard explains, the kitchen table represents the “serious and powerful theorizing, revolutionary thought, and sense-making that Black women have done for millennia” [43] (p. 138). Like Chicana Feminist Pláticas, Kitchen Table Talks are deeply culturally rooted and draw on several principles: (a) critical consciousness; (b) joy that disrupts anti-Blackness; and (c) ancestral creativity and imagination [44,45]. In many Black American homes, the kitchen table has long represented a place where Black women come to prepare and share sustenance, care for each other’s hair and hearts, engage in recreation, gossip, and political planning, and receive healing [44]. Kitchen Table Talks are steeped in the histories of our elders and ancestors and create a space for storying, sharing, loving, and healing. Within the academy, scholars have taken up Kitchen Table Talks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, cultivate more rich and nuanced dialogic spaces of learning, and disrupt white heteropatriarchal ways of learning and knowing [44,45,46]. In recent years, I (Autumn) have begun to build upon this work, thinking alongside scholars to position Kitchen Table Talks as a loving and culturally responsive form of theorizing that can and should be used in our research with folks whose voices have historically been left out of theory building [47,48].

Thus, seeing Pláticas and Kitchen Table Talks as similar yet distinct cultural and methodological practices that bring much needed disruption and care to academic conversations, particularly in relationship to concepts such as love and wellness, throughout this paper, we fuse both pláticas and Kitchen Table Talks “to create a cross-cultural space of conversation” [49]. Drawing on Black and Chicana Feminist Epistemologies [4,49], we center our cultural intuition, the unique theoretical sensitivities we bring as two Women of Color, which is built upon our personal, communal, and professional experiences, existing literature, and analytical research processes [50]. This cultural intuition informs our methodological blending of Chicana Feminist Platicás and Black Feminist Kitchen Table Talk and our decision to engage these methodologies not only as a means of collecting data but as a space in which rich theorizing occurs [34]. Specifically, through this plática/Kitchen Table Talk, we draw on our own experiences and expertise as Women of Color, educators, and researchers to theorize love as a praxis of wellness. Following in the tradition of others who have shared their full transcriptions of pláticas and Kitchen Table Talks as a practice for theorizing through the blending and enriching of data and analysis (e.g., [50]), we offer the following transcription of our plática, organized around the major questions we engaged: how did we come to study love, how do we understand love as a praxis of wellness, what does love look like in praxis, and how do we practice love in the day-to-day as a method for sustaining our own well-being? We believe that presenting the data and analysis blended in this format not only exemplifies the potential power of pláticas and KTT as a methodological site for cultivating loving relationships and sustaining our well-being, but also illuminates the complexity and nuance that we find is integral to conceptualizing love as a practice for [our] wellness.

3. Pláticando about Love at the Kitchen Table

How we Came to Study Love

Sharim: So, we can just start with our first sort of question, which is how did we even come to study love, when, and why?

Autumn: I can’t believe we’ve never had this conversation before.

Sharim: Yes!

Autumn: Feels wild, do you want to start? You want me to start?

Sharim: You can start.

Autumn: I think academically the way I came to study love was that I was working with a group of Black high school girls on a project of digital literacy, just really trying to understand what their literacy practices were and how they define them. And I was with them for a few days, and at the end of it, the very last thing, I asked, “Is there anything else you want me to know?” One of the girls was like, “I really wish they taught us how to love ourselves”. And it felt, in that moment, like it was out of left field because I was like, “We just spent all this time together. You are starting a whole other conversation”. But I understand now why she saved it for last because it was another conversation that needed its own space.

And it put me on this trajectory of what does this mean for Black girls to contend with learning to love themselves in a space that hates them and is teaching them to hate themselves? And so academically, that’s what sent me on the trajectory. And it made me think pedagogically, too, about what it means to be in community with Black girls and center love. If I think about my own upbringing, I grew up in the Black church, and growing up I was fascinated by scripture. And specifically, I was fascinated by who Jesus was and how He acted in the world. And my question was always, “If God is love, then how is God showing up? What does it mean to move in the world as love?”

So for me early on, love was a way we are. It’s a way we move. It’s a way we embrace the people around us. It’s a way we show them support, meet needs, challenge social structures and resist oppression. It’s all of those things. And it felt like this natural transition for my work to go to this place. It was relational, it was political, it was all of the things that, for me, were not often talked about when we think of love. It’s often romanticized and that is the way that I, too, learned about love outside of that context and my own reading. And so when she brought up this question, it was a really beautiful opportunity for me to sit with it and return to questions I had at a very young age. So I thought, “one, that’s a great question. I would love to learn from y’all what this means to you, but also what have I been taught about love? What do I need to unlearn about love?” And even the fact that my first encounters with it were in the Black church meant there are some foundational things that I learned that really do shape how I love and how I’m continuing to learn to love. And also there were some things that I had to unlearn and am continuing to unlearn.

Sharim: That’s beautiful. I love that it’s really young people stewarding us towards considering the role of love. For me, I think I have similar experiences—I’ve always been in love with the idea of love, and then I remember getting to San Francisco State and Ethnic Studies taught me so much about love and what it meant to love myself, love my people, love my language. And we were reading bell hooks and Angela Valenzuela and she was talking about caring and I think intuitively, I was always drawn to the notion of relationships—like I wouldn’t have graduated high school and gone to college if it wasn’t for my counselor’s secretary who was one of the only Latinas on our campus who mentored me to go.

But, I don’t think I really committed to studying love until I started working with young people, and I always say I really journeyed towards love by studying trauma. And I’d had all these experiences with trauma as a young person. But it was really when I started working with young people as a teacher apprentice and I felt like I saw so many of my own survival responses echoed back to me, mirrored back to me through young people, that I began studying trauma. And at the time, hardly anybody was talking about trauma yet. And I don’t know if you know, but I wrote the first version of my first love paper at 18 years old, when I was apprenticing at that high school. I was a baby myself.

And at the time, it felt like everybody was sort of conflating trauma and PTSD. And they’re fundamentally different things. And everybody was really obsessed with talking about the trauma in our communities, which is so important still, AND the thing that stood out to me most when we were all reading Bruce Perry, who is the person credited with first identifying child trauma, was the way that he was saying that the number one sort of determinant of whether trauma becomes post traumatic, and the thing that helps young people heal the most is access to loving relationships. And so then I became really committed, like, “Okay, well, I want to love young people, what does that mean? And how do young people KNOW that they’re loved? And how do we come to know love? How do we come to define love? And who’s in conversations with young people about what that looks and feels like for them in the classroom?” And so it was really trauma that got me to love, to wanting to study the intricacies of it.

I also can’t believe we have never had this conversation.

[Laughter]

Autumn: Right? Yeah, it feels surreal. I think if I think about it, there is a portion of what has driven me to study love that is also rooted in trauma. Given the fact that we (the girls and I) were in this very white dominant charter school and the young lady said what she said… She was thinking of some experiences at that moment. Anybody who’s ever read anything I’ve read knows I’m going to talk about my mama. That’s my girl! And she was somebody who taught me to love, and her experiences were rooted in trauma. She integrated a school as a child and was very vehemently taught not to love herself by the teacher. And not only had to unlearn that for herself but had to unlearn it for her children.

So she was very intentional about teaching me Black history and where I came from and the legacies of so many Black folks and inventors and kind of laying the groundwork, you know what I mean? I don’t know if she ever used those exact words, but that’s what it was. Love. It was like, “I’m going to teach you what it means to love yourself so that when you go out in this world and experience the things that I have, nobody’s going to convince you that you’re unlovable. No one’s going to convince you that all the Black folks you see around you are unlovable”.

Sharim: Oooooh, YES! So I love that because, one, I feel like you unveiled three really important things that are not talked about enough in the literature. And one is that part of the function of schooling is to make Children of Color hate themselves.

Autumn: Mhmmm

Sharim: And that what that does to young people’s nervous systems is very much trauma– what your body has to do to survive walking into a place every single day that tells you that you are unworthy and unlovable is unhealthy for our nervous systems. It is literally making us sick, making us unwell. And that is the function of schooling, at least in this country at this moment. And with all these [Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, Anti-LGBTQIA] bans, right? Like we are legalizing this kind of harm for children. And two, is the role of things like Ethnic Studies and Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogies in helping us to see, learn, and love ourselves and our people. And three, what your mama did for you—and James Baldwin talks about this and so many others—is that love is protection. That love is a shield. That love is armor against a world that does not love us. Alright, so how do we cover our children in protection? How do we armor them up…so that they can continue to survive and thrive. Despite having to matriculate in these places that are making them unwell. Making us unwell.

How we are Understanding and Defining Love as a Practice of Wellness

Autumn: Yeah. What tools do we give them? What language and people and texts do we introduce them to? What do I even want to say? First of all, your point about schools teaching our kids to be unwell and internalizing this, it is disgusting and it’s wild to see it happen and sometimes to feel helpless in stopping it. Because it goes even beyond introducing them to anything. And even if I am a teacher and you feel loved in my class, you may only be in my class for an hour a day. I do it in the ways that I can, or we do it in the ways that we can, but how do we help children to understand beyond this classroom space you are loved and you are worthy and you are deserving of love everywhere you walk in this building. You come in here and you know that, but I also need you to know when you walk out this door and go into these hallways and go into this teacher’s class down the hall, who I know might to try to ruin your day. I still need you to know that you’re loved. What does that look like in practice?

Sharim: Sighs

Autumn: And at what point, when we’re coaching teachers, when we’re observing teachers, when we’re working with teachers, when we are even engaging in our own practice, are we asking questions directly related to love? At what point does that become a criteria for you to be in this role as a teacher? Thinking about even becoming a parent down the line, right, if you don’t love my baby, they don’t need to sit in your classroom. And not just my kid, all the kids. Why are you here? And if you’re not here to love these students, you can go.

Sharim: I think that brings us to an important point, though, that I think a lot of the adults that I know and teachers that I know would say that they love children.

Autumn: Mhmm

Sharim: And bell hooks talks about this, that part of the reason people can do that is because we don’t have a common definition. Right. So, when we’re thinking about tools, we’re thinking about how do we support folks to do this? I think even in the literature in education,

Autumn: There’s no agreed upon definition.

Sharim: There’s no agreed upon definition. Exactly. A lot of folks talk about love but don’t define it. We still conflate care and love quite often. And I think that that lack of definition or framing is impeding our ability to really train folks up to do this work with children.

Autumn: Okay. So I want to ask you how you define it? But before I do, even if we have a definition, I feel like what often happens in teacher education, if you come up with a definition or a framework, we can feel like this is a checklist, I’m doing all the things.

Sharim: [Sighs] Yes.

Autumn: So let’s say we define love, and then it’s like I checked it off. What do you mean I’m not loving students? What happens then?

Sharim: So it’s interesting because on one level, we got to move beyond thinking about love as just a feeling. And also we can’t talk about love devoid of feeling, right? We have to be in right relationship to emotionality I think in our conversations about love. I have a long definition that I’ve developed with students I have taught, and I won’t actually say it all, but I think the crux of it is that it’s really about interdependence. And that it’s about interdependence that leads to our collective survival, to our collective healing, to our collective joy and to our collective well-being.

Autumn: Mmm

Sharim: And I think about it, sort of, like for example your mom armored you up. I also think about Indigenous communities that have long cultivated communities that are interdependent and maybe didn’t call it love, right, but it was a way of being in loving relationship to one another for the purpose of their continued survival and well-being. And so I really think about love in that way. How does this make us collectively more well? How do we resist, transform, disrupt or dismantle what gets in the way of our being well?

Autumn: I think that’s a beautiful definition. And I wonder, is there a right and a wrong way to practice love? I don’t know.

Sharim: Yeah, I mean, I think it comes back to having a shared understanding. A definition. Because to be clear, abusers also believe that they love the people they’re abusing, right? I think that’s why the framework is so important. And I think it’s also why this idea of do you love or not is sometimes fraught. And I think a better question might be how do we all become better at loving? How can we all grow our capacity to love? Knowing that again, even physiologically, people who have healthy loving relationships live longer, right? There is something that is happening in our body. And so again, love goes beyond this sort of feeling like, “Oh, I feel good. They love me, right? I’m actually more well. You are literally contributing to the longevity of my life when you love me in X, Y, and Z ways”.

Autumn: Yeah. Yeah.

Sharim: How are you defining and understanding love in this moment?

Autumn: So I have spent more time thinking about self-love than love in general. And when I think about self-love, I think about all of the parts of self: the spiritual, the emotional, the physical, the communal, and what it means for all of those parts to kind of be in harmony, and for us to pour into them in a way that allows us to pour back into our communities and to other people. So even the self-love is connected to the folks that we’re connected to.

And part of it is because if I think of the legacy of Black or Indigenous folks in particular in this country, self-love is preservation. It is survival. Audre Lorde taught us that. It is all of those things, and it’s doing them without succumbing to the work of the oppressor, the colonizer. It is loving from a place of indigeneity, ancestry, from… It is loving so that we can survive together. It is loving for futurity.

Sharim: Yeah, you love for a future, Indigenous folks say for seven generations. James Baldwin, his letter to his nephew says that too, that “you have to survive for your children and your children’s children”. It’s beyond the, again, one-on-one. But I appreciate the focus on self, because I think self is important in the collective, and vice versa. That the collective teaches us to love ourselves, and then loving ourselves allows us to contribute to the collective in more profound ways.

Autumn: It does. And I think this sounds kitsch sometimes, but I’ll hear people say, “You can’t pour from an empty cup”. But if we think about the times I feel most unloved, or even the times where I am most self-critical, most self-deprecating, those are also the times where I am unkind to other people. I am not loving towards the folks in my life, because I literally have nothing left to give in those moments.

Sharim: I’m wondering if it can be both though, like maybe it doesn’t have to start with self or starts with community. It’s both. In and out. Simultaneously.

Autumn: Right, but that’s what I’m saying, too. Even if I think about… My mom had to unlearn what the teachers taught her to be able to love self and love her children, and love community at the same time. It is multidirectional!

It’s not necessarily linear. We pour into each other. I’m thinking about Gwendolyn Brooks. We are each other-

Sharim: [excitedly] Each other’s harvest.

Autumn: Yeah! We just are.

Envisioning Love as Praxis

Sharim: I love that you brought Gwendolyn Brooks into this, and that poem in particular. Because she says, “We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s magnitude and bond”.

I’m thinking particularly about how you cannot harvest without optimal conditions, and how harvest is usually an indicator of whether the land is well. Whether we poured enough into it for a harvest to occur. For there to be magnitude, for there to be abundance. I think we talk about love in relationship to healing. But we don’t talk enough about this relationship between love, and harvest and wellness in particular—not enough. I want to spend a little bit of time teasing that out.

Autumn: I think I’m coming back to what you said earlier in the conversation about how schools are teaching children to be unwell, and making them unwell. Think about a garden and the work that goes into it. It is making sure that the soil has the nutrients that it needs. It is making sure that you are keeping predators out of the garden. It is making sure that it is getting enough sunlight and rain. That the fertilizer it’s getting is the right kind of fertilizer. Because not all fertilizer is right for that particular plant.

Sharim: The plant needs different things.

Autumn: I was about to say! It’s making sure that there are companion plants next to it. Some plants, if you put them together, they’re going to flourish. Others, if you put them together, they cannot survive together. I think about all of these factors, and what it takes to cultivate a harvest, and what it means for us to cultivate schools in a way that allows us to be each other’s harvest in those spaces.

Sharim: Yeah. What I will say is, what I appreciate about you saying let’s be each other’s harvest, is that I also think what little literature exists about love is about how to love students, and it puts a lot of onus on teachers. I am less interested in the teacher being the holder of love, and more so in how do we create beautiful, loving spaces where children love themselves more, love each other more, love their families more, love their communities more, so that when we’re talking about it as protection–they leave every classroom, every school day so armored up, because they are just so loved and loving, versus “how do I the teacher love all my students, and they love me and…”

Autumn: It makes me think of Alexis Young’s work earlier (at a conference we attended together), and how she was talking about the bathrooms in the school, and what those communicated to students about how they’re loved. She said, “This bathroom, I wouldn’t use it. Why are students made to use a bathroom that looks like this?” That’s not love. “What’s on the walls? Why does it look like this? They can’t bring their food from home? The food that somebody who loves them, made for them?”

I do wonder if because adults create the structures of the school, some of it is on the adults?

Sharim: Oh, a lot of it. But that goes back to what Kris Gutierrez said in that conference as well, about what she learned from Paolo Freire. That you can be the authority without being authoritarian.

Autumn: Authoritarian, yeah.

Sharim: I don’t have to be the holder of love, but I AM responsible as the adult for creating spaces that are loving.

Autumn: Correct, yeah, yeah. What does it mean even to create a space? Let’s dream for a minute. If we create a school that is loving and nurtures this space of harvest, what does it look like? What does it feel like?

Sharim: Oh, open hallways, airy, sunlight, lots of natural light.

Sharim: Lots of windows.

Sharim: Color, food. People who look like our students up on the walls, their ancestors literally watching over them, reminding them that they are a part of something larger than themselves, that they come from lineages and legacies of brilliance and of beauty. What else?

Autumn: I think ancestors, both those named and those that are often unnamed in schools.

The ancestors that they might learn about in a school setting, but also the ones that they bring from home and put up on the wall themselves. I definitely think about food. Food is always something I think about when I think about working with young people. Because it is such a way that as Folks of Color, we express ourselves, that we show love for one another through sustenance.

Sharim: Because it’s literally life giving. I am literally providing you with something that you need in order to be well.

Autumn: Yeah. Yeah…Time for play.

Sharim: Joy, joy.

Autumn: … and time for joy. When we were on the walk earlier, we were talking about the shrills of childhood. Just hearing the laughter, the noise, the discussion, the discourse. Hearing that happen, as opposed to walking into school and it being silent. I don’t want to do that. Where are the children? Why is this so quiet here?

Sharim: A place where kids can be kids.

Autumn: Where kids can be kids. It is. Lots of circles, I think, where even the teacher is part of the circle, and on level with the students. We’re all learning together, and we’re working this thing out together. We’re determining our questions together, and finding answers together.

Sharim: With teachers who believe that no child is expendable, that every child is… When Wayne Yang talks about it, he describes it as being integral to the ecosystem. But I’m thinking it’s essential to the harvest, and part of the harvest. That every young person is sacred and necessary, and teachers who have done the work to love themselves so they can model for children what it looks and feels like, to see people who love themselves and love their people, love their culture, love their language.

Autumn: Yeah, yeah, and are not bringing self-hate into the school and then projecting it onto the children and calling it love.

Sharim: It’s just reifying that Ethnic Studies, and all of our cultural studies, and all of these things they are trying to ban such as Critical Race Theory are so necessary in schools for learning to love ourselves and love one another. All of these bans are really an attack on our wellness, and an attack on our wellbeing.

Autumn: It’s intentional, and we know that. Because when we’re not well, we don’t resist. We don’t, we just… It’s easier for folks to be complicit when we’re not well. When we’re worried about basic function, and survival.

I’m a yogi, so I’m going to bring chakras into it. Our root chakra is all about our basic needs of food, shelter, and the sense of knowing that we’re loved. All of those things come from our root chakra. If they can destabilize those, then everything else up from there on is not going to be well. If that’s the case, we’re not worried about our connection to others, creativity. We’re not worried about love, we’re not worried about speaking our truth. We’re not worried about what intuition is telling us, or what Spirit is telling us. We’re not worried about any of those things if we’re not well. It’s knocking all of that out. It really is an attack on wellness to take all of Ethnic Studies, arts, DEI, CRT, LGBTQIA texts, all of these things out of schools. It is literally an attack on our total wellbeing and our humanity.

Sharim: I think people use metaphors a lot. But that’s a literal attack on our lives. If wellness is directly tied to the longevity of our lives, then to attack these things is literally to contribute to the premature death of Black and Brown children. Not metaphorically. Our love challenges that.

How We Practice/Embody Love to Sustain Our Own Wellness

Sharim: One of things that I wanted to get to, is about how we actually practice love, how we embody it. We are a Latina woman and a Black woman navigating super white spaces, navigating the academy, which we know is harmful to Women of Color. We’re doing love research, which already is super feminized and not always valued and we’re doing it with Students of Color at a time when race-related research is under attack.

And I think part of what we’ve said throughout this entire conversation is that we actually have to engage in love as praxis and that we do it despite how messy it is, and I’m glad actually that we engaged in a plática/kitchen table talk, because we went all kinds of ways and it’s nuanced and it’s messy, and I actually really appreciate that about love. So with all of that, how do we still practice it with ourselves, with each other, with our folks in order to sustain our own wellbeing as we continue to navigate the toxicity of the academy at a time when we know that all of these attacks on our work are coming down.

Autumn: You want to start?

Sharim: Yeah, I could start, and then we’re just going to have to go back and forth, because I definitely don’t have a fleshed out answer

Part of it is just if we start with what you said, the physical, I call it in my work “tangible love”, but the sort of… How do I attend to myself? I make sure I’m fed, I try to drink my water, get eight hours of sleep. Actually, I don’t, that was a lie…but I try.

[laughter]

I value sleep, I should say instead. I box to make sure I’m moving my body, and really, because I find boxing to be meditative. I make sure that I commune with my ancestors, that I check in on my people, I go to therapy—shout out to my therapist.

Autumn: Big shout out, double tap.

[more laughter]

Sharim: Also, that I’m in nature. So, I think those are some of the ways that I think I do that with myself, but I also know that none of those would matter… No, sorry, let me not say that. Not that they wouldn’t matter. None of those would be enough if I also didn’t have you, folks like you, the types of spaces that we’re in together, if I didn’t know that I wasn’t doing the work alone.

Autumn: I think literally all of those things. If I think about how I sustain love inside of the academy, I spend a lot of time away from it. And even when I’m spending time in it, it’s with people like you, like with folks from CNV (Cultivating New Voices amongst Scholars of Color), with my community in general. Last weekend, my family had a spades tournament. Legit, it was all the family and friends in a place doing something-

Sharim: I saw photos, real cute.

Autumn: that we enjoy together and being us without any of what exists in the academy. And so, being able to be in spaces where I can be Black and carefree and woman and all of these different aspects of myself simultaneously. And also at the same time, sister and daughter, and I can bring my whole self. It is also movement, I value movement. Meditation is important to me, being able to tap into what my body is communicating to me, for better or worse, it’s knowing that if I walk into a space and my heart space starts to get warm, something is telling me I don’t need to be here, and listening to that. That’s really the part, because I can feel it, but that doesn’t always mean I’m going to listen or in the past I haven’t always listened.

Sharim: I’m sorry I had to interrupt you, because I love that part of what you’re highlighting is being well and being in loving relationship to yourself honors and cultivates your intuition in a particular way. My homegirl Tiffani Marie says this all the time, that schooling steals our intuition.

Autumn: It absolutely does.

Sharim: Schools and the academy silence it, and so part of healing, part of loving, part of being really well is like, “My body is telling me something and I love myself and I love my body enough to listen to it, and to trust it”.

Autumn: Yes, literally not to question it, not to be like, “I need to sit in this. Maybe I’ll move past it”. No, my body knows before my brain does. One of the things I always say to my students in class is, “Your body is not going to lie to you. Your mind might try to tell you, ‘I’m done with this pose,’ but what is your body telling you? Listen to that in every moment”.

So, it’s finding ways to be in my body, which also means connecting with nature. For me, it’s water. I need to be-

Sharim: Okay, Pisces.

Autumn: Yeah, very much so. But legit, water, there’s something about the feel of it on my skin that is grounding for me. In the moments where I’m out of my body and in my head, if I’m anxious or stuck in a project or stuck in a conflict or whatever the case is, the water brings me back down to being in my body and listening to what it’s telling me, you know? Like, how does this feel hitting your skin, or how do you feel submerged in it?

I also really love to lift weights.

Sharim: Me too.

Autumn: And there’s something even about the act of lifting weights that reminds me of how strong I am and how much I’m capable of. That is another one.

It’s spending time with my ancestors and in prayer, but also with my elders. My Nana is my girl! If I’m having trouble thinking through something, if I just want to celebrate with someone or celebrate her…she has the wisdom, the joy, the love, all of the things that I seek to embody. Those are found in the elders that I go to, and I need to spend time sitting with them in order to be who I want to be and who I want to show up as in this world. You know what I mean?

Sharim: They loved us into existence.

Autumn: They did. Literally.

Sharim: My nana passed away the day I got into UCLA. And so she has not been here for this part of my academic journey, but in my dissertation I wrote in my introduction, that my nana used to tell me that she used to pray about me long before my mom was pregnant with me. I exist because her prayers brought me here, have continued to protect me.

Autumn: My grandmother literally just did a workshop on intercessory prayer and what it means to pray for the generations that come after you. She is praying for my future children now. And that, it is ancestral love, and I think people who are not in the global majority, they don’t understand this level of this is what carried us through, we are the product of somebody’s prayers.

Sharim: And what is that if not love? What is that if not teaching us about love? I loved you before you were born.

Before you existed. Before I knew you existed, but also I knew you would exist. I loved you into existence. What is that teaching us about what we could do differently in our every day?

Autumn: It’s unconditional, and that’s such a beautiful form of love. And so, spending time with elders, is a way I love on and sustain myself, especially in this space. And it’s a way that I continue to stay grounded in love, because there are moments where I will call an elder with something that popped off in a meeting or whatever it is and that’s who’s going to check me, that’s who’s going to hold me accountable, because they have the wisdom, they have the foresight to be like, “Let’s think about how you might respond in love. How are you going to respond so that at the end of the day the goal that you’re trying to meet, the children that you are working with and for, they’re the ones that benefit?” You know what I mean? So it’s a foresight.

Sharim: Which brings me to or reminds me, hanging out with babies, hanging out with the babies. Babies, the children, the way that they love us, and they do not care about what little article you wrote, they do not care about your meeting. Their love is also so…

Autumn: Pure.

Autumn: A baby’s laughter and a baby’s wonder!

Sharim: Yes, the curiosity. Because they remind us what schools stole from us.

….

Sharim: And the way I think all the people we mentioned, family, elders, partners, cousins, primas–nature too, which loves us without condition, despite how terribly we’ve treated this planet, children, our therapist, that they all just remind us how much love there is, and also that the institution cannot love us. And that our love for ourselves cannot be determined by this place and shouldn’t be tethered to it. And I see so many folks who suffer, who are unwell, because they want the institution to—

Autumn: To love them. And it doesn’t have the capacity to.

Sharim: Right, but our love of self and our love of each other is fundamental for our survival and for our well-being in spite of these places that are going to continue to not love us, because, to your point earlier, they were designed not to.

And so what would it mean for us to sit with the fact that we’re not well, that schools are making us unwell, and then figure out what it really means to love ourselves in this place and back to wellness and back to joy in a way that is sustained and real and focused back to our [collective] harvest. How do we really give each other what we need in order to be loved, to be well, versus this romanticized I love you, so it’s all good.

Autumn: I did yoga on my IG today…

Sharim: Right, and I took the selfie and I put it on the Gram, so I’m super well, and I’ma sell something to you so you can be well, too.

Autumn: To decommodify wellness and love, just for the purpose of, and not as a means to an end, just so that we can be well.

Sharim: Because our survival depends on it, and our well-being survives on it. Beyond surviving, we don’t want to just survive. We want to be healthy and happy and whole.

Autumn: We want to thrive.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

In this kitchen table plática, we centered both our cultural intuition and discursive and meaning-making practices to (a) share our personal and professional journeys, (b) extend current theorizations of love, and (c) conceptualize love as praxis of interdependence necessary to cultivate and sustain our wellness. In doing so, we engaged our full bodymindspirits [51] to theorize from the flesh [52] and consider what it means to embody theory [53] as a form of praxis in our work, our methods, and in our everyday lives. Although the analysis and theorizing is illuminated through the method and subsequent transcription provided above, there are several salient points we would like to further illuminate.

First, while the field of education has made significant contributions to discussing the importance of love in the context of learning, there remains a need to further interrogate what love looks like in relationships, classrooms, and schools. This need is further pronounced when we consider the vast research illuminating the high rates of trauma and issues with mental health amongst children, and conversely, interdisciplinary research that indicates that loving relationships are integral to healing and to overall well-being. As we discussed throughout the plática, this becomes even more urgent for Children of Color who have to navigate racism and other forms of oppression as a part of the social apparatus of schooling. As such, we grapple with the question of whether you can and should teach if you do not love (y)our students. Ultimately, we advocate that loving children should be foundational to teacher recruitment, training, and retention and one of the metrics by which we “measure” efficacy and impact in classrooms and schools. In short, we argue that there can be no real teaching and learning without the practice of loving.

Secondly, through sharing the intergenerational experiences of our parents, grandparents, ourselves, and our students—we illuminate the profound impact that curricular, theoretical, and pedagogical frameworks like Ethnic Studies (e.g., [54,55]) and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (e.g., [56]) play in supporting the development of loving both self and others. These approaches to education create the space for young people to not only unlearn racist and white supremacist notions that contribute to hatred of self (e.g., [57]) but for them to engage in more critical and robust learning about themselves, their communities, and their ancestors which can serve to facilitate loving relationships that can serve as a protective barrier to [further] harm. Further, we argue that if these types of racially and culturally responsive frameworks can contribute to the type of self and communal love that we understand as integral to our health and well-being, then the attacks on Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies must be understood as an attack on our well-being, on our literal lives. This demands an urgency in both our teaching and organizing against these bans (e.g., [58,59]).

As Women of Color scholars who center race in our scholarship and understand the spirit-murdering functions of both schools and the academy [28,60], we are also clear that our well-being is always under threat. This necessitates that we not only theorize about love as a protective barrier, but that we engage in daily individual, interpersonal, and interdependent practices to support love in our own lives. We share the material, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual ways in which we center love to sustain our own wellness as a method to close the gap between theory and practice. To that end, we posit that if love is a practice of wellness, then to continue to invest in systems that are loveless and built on our undoing is, in no uncertain terms, to contribute to our premature social and physical deaths. Love then, is not simply emotive, but a political and life-protecting, life-enhancing, and life-giving practice through which we resist, heal, survive, and thrive together. To love this way requires a commitment to interdependence, to our collective liberation, and to our collective well-being. In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks in the epigraph above, it requires that we treat one another as “each other’s business,” as “each other’s magnitude and bond”. Because we are.