The two great books of the Black Power movement were love stories. These were the books that circulated the most widely, reaching hundreds of thousands of Americans, books that set out the ideas and aesthetic that would succeed Martin Luther King, Jr., and define blackness in American culture. Stokely Carmichael was the movement's most talented orator, and images of Huey Newton and Angela Davis became iconic, but Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968) and George Jackson's Soledad Brother (1970) were the movement's outstanding texts. Today these books are occasionally mentioned but rarely read. Cleaver and Jackson are seen as problematic products of their moment, suffering from unchecked machismo, unqualified rejection of their civil rights movement precursors, and a dogmatic embrace of communism, particularly Maoism. Overdetermined by these associations, the literariness, idiosyncrasies, and essential theme of Cleaver's and Jackson's books are forgotten. That theme is love: how it goes wrong, how it can be turned right, and what an ethics of black love looks like.
While these two love stories have passed into obscurity, in recent years black love has emerged as the moral heart of racial justice movements. “The project that we are building,” writes Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, “is a love note to our folks.”1 She defines “black love” as “building community and solidarity,” overcoming the legacy of slavery and racial injustice to cultivate affection across intra-racial differences, including class, gender, sexuality, region, and age.2 This justice-oriented account of black love has been percolating among black intellectuals, developing beyond the apparent opposition between King's liberal love and black power's radical rejection of it, in rage. Over the past two decades, the feminist bell hooks has argued that the radical self-assertion of black power must be coupled with the vision of harmonious community put forward by King in an expansive conception of self-love in, and as, black community.3 Jennifer Nash has tracked the centrality of black love-politics in black feminism over the past half century: “Love acted as a doing, a call for a labor of the self, an appeal for transcending the self, a strategy for remaking the public sphere, a plea to unleash the radical imagination, and a critique of the state's blindness to the violence it inflicts and enables.”4
By revisiting Cleaver's and Jackson's writings as love stories, offering accounts of black love, we find a quite different way of thinking about black love than we find circulating in black activist and intellectual communities today. What emerges is a more theological account of love. Rather than seeing the Christian-driven civil rights movement transforming into a secular, Marxist-oriented black power movement, and the two synthesizing into the vaguely spiritual black love talk of today, I suggest reading the black power movement as deepening the civil rights movement's theological engagement even when explicitly Christian language is absent, and I worry that black love talk as it circulates today is a hollow parody of the theological.5 Turning to Cleaver's and Jackson's accounts of love not only deepens black political-theological reflection, it also challenges Christian ethical reflection on love that often continues to take King as an exemplary theorist of Christian love.6 Cleaver and Jackson attend to the effects of systemic injustice on love, complicating the picture of a Christian love ethics as offering a path from disordered to rightly ordered love. For Cleaver and Jackson, that path is not just difficult to traverse; it is interrupted by a gorge that requires a radical reorientation—a conversion—to leap beyond.
There are major obstacles to appreciating the insights of Cleaver's and Jackson's texts. Each was written while its author was incarcerated, and to reach publication each had to pass under the eyes of a prison censor.7 Each encourages a sense of immediacy, in part through using the epistolary form, and yet each is carefully crafted, not only by Cleaver and Jackson but also by a network of editors and publishers whose interests and politics differed significantly from those of the authors. Each does include problematic language and ideas that reflect the specificity of the historical moment when they were written, but rather than dwelling on these as limitations of the texts that must be repudiated, the pages that follow will focus on the texts’ overarching moral visions.8 Finally, there is the elephant in the room, the reason the content of these texts is often ignored: both are stories of black men describing their embrace of radical black politics while at the same time falling in love with their white lawyers. Readers usually focus exclusively on the radical politics, confused and frustrated by the love stories. What if we understand the texts’ depictions of politics and love as inextricably intertwined?
Disordered Love
Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson occupy privileged positions in the pantheon of black power revolutionaries. Both were incarcerated in California at the age of eighteen—Cleaver on a marijuana charge, Jackson for stealing $70 from a gas station—developed radical politics while in prison, and reached a huge audience beyond prison walls. Cleaver was eventually released, became the Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, moved to exile in Algeria, split with party leadership, converted to evangelical Christianity, returned to the United States to serve a prison sentence, converted to Mormonism, and spent his last days holding court at Berkeley cafes.9 Jackson, whose prison sentence was indefinite, never saw freedom. He was appointed a field marshal of the Black Panther Party; in August 1970 his younger brother Jonathan was killed while attempting to free him, and a year later George Jackson himself was killed by prison guards during an alleged escape attempt.10 Cleaver's prison writings first attracted attention when they were featured in the left-wing Catholic magazine Ramparts, and Soul on Ice consists of some of this cultural criticism, excerpts from letters to his attorney Beverly Axelrod, and Cleaver's own early musings on race relations composed before he had found an audience.11 Jackson was already a figure of great public interest, one of the three “Soledad Brothers” charged with murdering a white prison guard in a widely publicized case, when the collection of letters to his parents, brother, and friends was published. Both were organic intellectuals, reading as widely as possible and critically analyzing anti-black racism. Both argued that the American prison stands in continuity with American slavery and segregation. For them, racial injustice was not accurately described as a public policy issue calling for policy fixes, or even fixable with new social norms. Racial injustice was so deeply entrenched that a radical reconfiguration of social, and especially economic, arrangements would be necessary before justice could prevail.12 By telling their distinctive love stories, Cleaver and Jackson showed how anti-black racism is sustained by a perversion of the desires of both blacks and whites, with disordered love at the individual level (both romantic love as well as love of worldly things and ideas) resulting from and contributing to unjust social arrangements.
For a time, Eldridge Cleaver was confined to the prison psychiatric ward. The staff wanted him to discuss his relationship with his parents. Cleaver wanted to talk about racial injustice. Eventually he learned that the only way to return to the general population of the prison was to stop talking about racism, but Cleaver knew it was racism that had caused his nervous breakdown. The breakdown happened when he saw a picture of the white woman who was said to have flirted with Emmett Till, precipitating Till's widely publicized lynching. “While looking at the picture, I felt that little tension in the center of my chest I experience when a woman appeals to me. I was disgusted and angry with myself” (23). Two days later, Cleaver's mental health was in a state of total collapse. From the perspective of the white prison psychiatrists, mental health was related to rightly ordered loves; that right ordering began in childhood with the parents and then continued as loves extended out into the world, to other individuals, to objects, and to ideas. Cleaver argues that such an approach ignores the way that anti-black racism casts a shadow over all affect, and over libidinal desire in particular, for both blacks and whites. The racial order shapes what we are able to feel and how we feel; all other factors that form us, even our parents, take a secondary role. Much of Soul on Ice consists of developing an account of just how racism disorders love, offering an explanation for his reaction to that picture of a white woman—all in the context of professing his own love for his white lawyer.
Cleaver, who had spent time in the Nation of Islam, read widely in Marxism, and was clearly influenced by Nietzsche, developed an idiosyncratic theory that blended racial and economic analysis. Modernity requires society's elites to use their minds, not their bodies, so elites celebrate those activities associated with the intellect and denigrate physical activities. On Cleaver's account, the distinction between elites and manual laborers maps on to the racial divide: elites are white and so associate whiteness with the intellect and blackness with physicality. Not all whites are elite, but because whiteness is associated with the elite, middling whites are all the more eager to identify themselves with the intellect and distance themselves from the body. This dualistic set of associations both undergirds anti-black racism and has harmful effects on relations between the sexes, Cleaver argues. Women are placed in impossible positions. White women, as white, must reject all that is associated with the body; white men who, according to the racial order, are supposed to desire white women have their desire thwarted by white women's rejection of their own bodies. Black women embrace their bodies and desire social advancement or security so would naturally pair off with white men, if it were not for the social prohibition on miscegenation. Similarly, white women look to black men when they desire sensuality that is not repressed by white men's (racially motivated) rejection of physicality.13
On Cleaver's account, the affective distortions of the racial order are most dramatic in the case of the black man. Because the black woman has been systematically denigrated, reduced to the status of an animal, and because the white woman holds the promise of social advancement and serves as a symbol of freedom, desire for (and self-protective aversion from) the white woman pervades black male life and loves. Because of this, Cleaver considers the white woman demonic: “The Ogre had its claws buried in the core of my being and refused to let go” (19). Her effects are “like a cancer eating my heart out and devouring my brain” (149). Before any other ethical or political formation can happen, Cleaver finds it necessary to “repudiate The Ogre, root it out of my heart” (19). His mental breakdown offers the opportunity to do that—but the prison psychiatrist does not allow it, forcing Cleaver to speak only of his parents, leaving the fundamental social-psychological problem intact. On my reading, Cleaver argues that the specific case of racialized erotic desire is at the root of a more general disordering of loves caused by American racism. The only options Cleaver thinks he has are to follow the rules, guided by alien affect, or to rebel. When he was briefly released from prison, Cleaver began raping white women. As he later observes, the form rebellion can take is itself shaped by the racial order: his desire to rape white women was an evil result of an evil system rather than a means to achieve liberation from that system.
Cleaver argues that love, at its best, involves a complicated joining of equals, but this is absolutely impossible when race and class have already shaped how we see ourselves and others. The love that we encounter in this world, the racialized world, is not really love at all in the sense that its shape is given by the world, not by the self—and so it does not point beyond the self. Jackson develops a similar point when he writes that his father has never displayed “real sensitivity, affection, or sentiment” (240). Jackson does not offer an equally elaborate analysis of entangled racial and class dynamics, but he does argue that whites and elites “have reduced all life to a very dull formula” with the result that “all natural feelings have been lost” (40). In general terms, Jackson asserts, elites are anxious about surprises, so they create abstractions through which to understand the world, and then they confuse those abstractions for the world itself. The world they live in is supposedly entirely legible by reason; feeling is superfluous and distracting. Jackson would likely endorse the more specific claim that, for the smooth functioning of the modern, capitalist order, there must be regularity and predictability—including in the affective domain, in the domain of loves.14 Moreover, affect circulating among a group, for example, the love of blacks for other blacks, has the potential to complicate this atomized order and so must be discouraged. Humans naturally love those who are like themselves, so the racial-capitalist order must actively discourage black-directed love (41).
Both Cleaver and Jackson present themselves as militant atheists. However, what they mean by atheism involves a rejection of all that is associated with the racial order, and institutionalized Christianity is associated with that order. For them, Christ-like love as it was taught by the preachers they encountered means love shaped by the racial order. Cleaver illustrates this vividly when he describes his youthful Catholicism: “I chose the Catholic Church because all the Negroes and Mexicans went there. The whites went to the Protestant chapel” (40). The juvenile prison where Cleaver was then housed required attendance at a religious service, so Catholic he became. Jackson had a similar youthful experience with Catholicism: he “sang in the choir because they made me,” but his main church activity was stealing wine (3). For Jackson, Christianity was just another abstraction that was taken too literally by whites. At its best, religion could be used practically by blacks, and Jackson harangued against those blacks who took useless religious doctrine too seriously. For Cleaver, the desire to worship Mary and Jesus, imagined as white, and the desire for salvation through them, is clearly a product of the disordering of black loves by the racial order. He could hardly be more explicit on this point: he writes that “during coition and at the moment of her orgasm, the black woman, in the first throes of her spasm, shouts out the name of Jesus. ‘Oh, Jesus, I'm coming!’” (157). Whether or not we agree with the specifics of the analysis here, it certainly seems to be the right sort of analysis: seeking out and challenging idolatrous reductions of the wholly other to the racial order.
Learning to Love
Christian ethicists agree with Cleaver and Jackson that human love is disordered and that disordered love is closely tied with injustice. Cleaver and Jackson can help sharpen Christian ethical reflection on the question of how love can become more rightly ordered.15 The prison psychiatrist Cleaver mentions presents one, characteristically secular route: reflection on formative childhood experiences. Christian ethicists are necessarily more open to additional sources of moral formation: community, new experiences, introspection, and of course revelation. Yet many Christian ethicists (for whom King is often a paradigm) present the ordering of love as a quantitative task, suggesting that loves can be more or less rightly ordered on a continuous path to the divine. For example, Edward Vacek's important study of Christian love describes this process as a “gradual conversion to coresponsibility,” and he writes of growth in love involving repeated cycles of frustration, reformation, harmony, and new frustration. Gradually, the individual's loves become more closely aligned with God's loves, expanding to include more aspects of the world.16 Eric Gregory develops an Augustinian account of human beings as, ontologically, “bundles of loves.” However, “in a fallen world,” these loves “are disordered, misdirected, and disproportionate.”17 They point in all different directions, as it were, leading to spiritual and moral chaos; Christian faith gradually restores order—in an aesthetic sense, closer to beauty than rigidity—to these loves, and so to ourselves. On Gregory's account, King realizes that the United States is “in need of refreshment through active practices of love.”18 Segregation contributed to the disordering of loves; the civil rights movement contributed to the right ordering of loves—all presented as if on a quantitative scale. Rather than conversion from disordered to rightly ordered loves, Gregory writes of “an education in loving rightly,” a “spiritual therapy” that incrementally improves the ordering of loves.19
In contrast, Cleaver and Jackson hold that however much work of moral formation happens, unless anti-black racism is addressed loves will remain fundamentally disordered. In other words, there must first be a qualitative rather than a quantitative shift in the ordering of loves, given the shadow that anti-black racism casts over our social world. The question, then, is what it looks like to address anti-black racism in moral formation, a daunting task when anti-black racism is understood to be so deeply rooted and so pervasive. While Cleaver and Jackson do not write in explicitly Christian or even spiritual terms, they describe this transformation in a way that sounds like conversion, a dramatic turning away from one way of understanding and living in the world and toward another way. Cleaver and Jackson describe this process, but they also perform it in their books, showing readers how the authors’ own loves—both romantically and more broadly—take a new shape as they undertake something like a conversion.
When Cleaver first went to prison, he “was in love with” marijuana (18). During his initial stint in prison, Cleaver became a rebel, trying to extract his mind from the racial order by fighting directly against whiteness—first white ideas and white gods, in prison, and then through rape of white women when he was released.20 “I became an extreme iconoclast. Any affirmative assertion made by anyone around me became a target for tirades and criticism and denunciation” (19). The racial order seemed ubiquitous and suffocating; his only option was to say no and strike out. When he entered prison again, he realized that this anger at whiteness was insufficient. He still remained under the gravitational pull of the racial order. He felt that something was amiss: not that he was guilty for breaking the law but that the act of rape reflected, rather than overcame, disorder. Cleaver suffered another breakdown—“my whole fragile moral structure seemed to collapse, completely shattered”—but this time he did not end up in the care of white psychiatrists. He immersed himself in reflection, social analysis, and cultural criticism, which held the promise of allowing Cleaver “to save myself” (27). His task was not unlike that of the white psychiatrist, but he acknowledged the way racism cast a shadow over his desires: “I had to seek out the truth and unravel the snarled web of my motivations” (27). Despite Cleaver's sharp rejection of religious ideas, he is comfortable describing this practice as a path to “salvation” (29).
For Cleaver, this capacity for critical analysis and reflection has as its prerequisite an initial moment of hatred directed against the racial order in all of its forms. Critical analysis without that hatred would just lead to a quantitative improvement in the ordering of loves—which is really no improvement at all as it is still in the shadow of anti-black racism, and all in that shadow is fundamentally disordered. The critical capacities might tackle the questions whites were discussing among themselves, such as questions about the logistics of desegregation or, earlier, how to end slavery, concealing the deeper problem, that slavery and segregation are part of a grossly unjust racial order. To seriously consider those debates between white liberals and white conservatives is to be drawn into the orbit of that racial order, allowing it to further shape, to further disorder, one's loves. The effect of that initial hatred is to make everything—facts, reasons, affects—seem contingent, changeable, in need of change. It is the emotional equivalent of the intellectual project of genealogy. Radically new possibilities open once the hold of the current order of things loosens. In theological terms, we must first reject father and mother, son and daughter, all that shapes our affective world, before we become open to eschatological possibilities (see Matthew 10:37).
While Cleaver focuses on the role of hatred during this initial phase of conversion, Jackson focuses on ascetic practices. “I must rid myself of all sentiment and remove all possibility of love,” he declares (38). What precisely these practices involve Jackson does not detail for his readers, other than the occasional mention of calisthenics. Their effect, however, he is explicit about: “My mind is fast becoming clear and I am slowly harnessing my emotions” (112). First, Jackson is purged of all loves so that new loves, rightly ordered, might then develop. While Jackson charged that his father could never really feel anything, his father falsely felt: his affect was ordered by anti-black racism. Jackson is suggesting that those false feelings must be purged before true feelings (that is, rightly ordered loves) are able to develop.
Jackson describes his conversion process as involving not only new ideas but also, even more so, a new way of approaching ideas. “I have completely arrested the susceptibility to think in theoretical terms,” he asserts (38). Loosening the affective hold that abstractions have on him, Jackson is able to focus on what matters and what works in the real world, not the world as imagined by whites. This openness allows for a continual process of discovery, of world and self, rather than a perpetual repetition of the same—that is, rather than a perpetual regurgitation of the thoughts and desires of elites. At times Jackson (and Cleaver) seem to embrace an excessive confidence in the self, a valorization of the self made possible by the demonization of the world.21 In fact, both Jackson and Cleaver hold that loves must be ordered by a principle that is neither found in the world nor found in the self. They must be ordered in anticipation of something wholly other: the revolution, the complete overturning of the social order. “Believe me, there is a better life,” Jackson intones (76). This is the ultimate aim of the affective conversion Jackson recommends. With loves transformed so that they become harmoniously ordered in light of the revolution, the self is entirely shaped by anticipation of that moment. “I have completely retrained myself and my thinking to the point now that I think and dream of one thing only, 24 hours of each day. I have no habits, no ego, no name, no face” (122). This makes clear the sense in which Jackson fully embraces his self—insofar as that self is constituted by an other that is reducible neither to the world nor the self. Given the limited content attributed to revolution, and given Jackson's insistence that there is no clear path from here to there, it is hard not to read this as a theological point.
The result of this commitment to what is effectively an eschatological event is to allow worldly loves to be understood as necessarily imperfect. It is only after the revolution that it will be possible for all loves to be perfectly ordered. In this world, today, Jackson and Cleaver must negotiate between the powerful gravitational pull of the racial order, effecting everything and everyone in the world, and a commitment to that which is beyond the racial order. It is in this light that we should read the form of their books. In the sequence of love letters, Jackson and Cleaver offer a pedagogy of desire, inviting the reader to reflect on how the author's ordering of loves improves, and continually reminding the reader that the author is still far from achieving rightly ordered loves. However, post-conversion, having turned their backs on the racial order, Jackson and Cleaver now have loves that are improving quantitatively, steadily moving in the direction of the eschatological. Yet the distance from the eschaton persists, and Cleaver and Jackson remain painfully aware of it—indeed, the resemblance between their beloveds and the white women of their preconversion fantasies makes it impossible to ignore.
Cleaver is clearly aware of the ways that his love toward his white lawyer may be led astray. “Of all the dangers we share, probably the greatest comes from our fantasizing about each other. Are we making each other up? We have no way of testing the reality of it” (137). On the one hand, Cleaver is referring to the physical constraints imposed by his incarceration that prevent cohabitation; on the other, the prison, like the racial order as a whole, encourages fantasy and prevents “testing the reality”—since all loves remain fundamentally disordered. Cleaver's love language focuses on anticipation and possibility; the love of which he writes is in the future rather than the present. “What an awesome thing it is to feel oneself on the verge of…really knowing another person” (137). Once again, the nominal obstacle is the prison walls, but the real obstacle is the prerevolutionary, or pre-eschatological, context. It is only in the future that true knowledge of a lover, and of all things, will be possible.
Where Cleaver's love is directed only at his white lawyer, Jackson's first love letters were sent to his family, then he opens himself to romance with his white lawyer, then he spreads his love more broadly, with multiple correspondents (including, famously, Angela Davis). Like Cleaver, he worries about distortion and fantasy. “I am uneasy thinking that you may be attracted to the tragedy of me,” he writes to a black woman friend (271). Jackson at times scolds his parents, tells them that they do not listen carefully enough to him, that their love is still ordered by anti-blackness, and at times praises them for seeing the world in light of the revolution. “Though I care about your feelings I care more for your well-being,” he tells his mother in one letter (45). While Jackson himself often displays remarkable self-confidence, after Jonathan's death he realizes that he had related to his mother wrongly, that she had, in fact, formed Jonathan to resist the racial order. In short, the right ordering of loves is an ongoing process for both Cleaver and Jackson, but that process cannot begin until a radical break with the racial order is made.
Black Love Ethics
In describing his total commitment to the revolution, Jackson explains how love between two individuals (such as the love that forms the frame of his book's narrative) might be possible. “I feel no love, no tenderness, for anyone who does not think as I do,” he asserts (122).22 Jackson does not think that it is legitimate to love anyone because of facts about them, or for who they are. (Cleaver would likely agree.) He only believes it is legitimate to love someone when that person also allows her loves to be ordered in light of the revolution. In fact, the right response to anyone who does not view themselves in this way, the right response to anyone who allows his or her loves to be ordered by the current racial regime, is hatred—in Christian terms, hatred of blasphemes.23 Jackson describes his ideal mate as all uti, no frui: “The only woman that I could ever accept is one who would be willing to live out of a flight bag, sleep in a coal car…own nothing, not solely because she loved me, but because she loved the principle, the revolution, the people” (227). In other words, romantic love is possible when all loves are rightly ordered, arranged not by the racial regime but in light of a future moment of total transformation.
Cleaver dedicates Soul on Ice to his white lawyer with the words, “To Beverly, with whom I share the ultimate love” (viii). According to Cleaver, Beverly Axelrod is “a rebel, a revolutionary who is alienated fundamentally from the status quo, probably with as great an intensity, conviction, and irretrievability as I am alienated from it” (32). As was the case with Jackson, for Cleaver love between two individuals is only possible when that love is subordinate to the love both share for something else, for the revolution, salvation. The lawyers who Cleaver and Jackson loved were both immersed in the black liberation movement, even though they were white. (In fact, both were Jews with relatively dark complexions, and at least Axelrod, whose law office was in an all-black neighborhood in San Francisco and whose law partner was black, was sometimes confused for an African American herself.24) Whiteness and blackness only hopelessly distort desire if affections have not been disciplined in light of the revolution.
This account of ultimate love, directed beyond the world and constitutive of the converted self, this account of love that is theological in everything but name, sharply distinguishes the ethics of love embraced by Cleaver and Jackson from the accounts of love circulating in black activist and intellectual circles, on the one hand, and in Christian ethics circles, on the other. In contrast to both, Cleaver and Jackson recognize the radical otherness of the ultimate object of their loves. They never try to describe it; they never paint a picture of “beloved community.” Words are inadequate for what it is; it is only the effects of such love that we can observe. It has three components: first, a radical break with the racial order; second, practices of moral formation that attempt to sustain a way of life orthogonal to that order; third, perpetual self-criticism directed at the ways the racial order continues to shape our loves. Cleaver and Jackson are in a privileged position: the prison cell, and the position of racialized minority. From these spaces of confinement and marginalization, the limits of other approaches to the ethics of love become all too apparent. The gradual attunement of love, becoming progressively more just, sounds absurd when there is a metal door (or the barrier of race) between you and the person (or aspects of the world) with whom you are supposed to become attuned.
By the time Soul on Ice was published, Cleaver's relationship with Beverly Axelrod had disintegrated—he had fallen in love with the black activist Kathleen Neal, a decade younger than Axelrod, whom he would go on to marry—but he chose not to change the book's dedication. The “ultimate love” remains, and it continues to shape both of their lives, even if their lives have moved apart. Axelrod, who had been a leading light in the Bay Area political scene, was broken by the end of her relationship with Cleaver. She retreated from public life, spending some time in the Caribbean before returning to activist work outside of the public spotlight. Cleaver promised her a quarter of the royalties from Soul on Ice, but he stopped paying her; she sued but never received the funds. Cleaver's split with Black Panther leadership over their degree of militancy—the Bay Area leadership was focusing on community organizing, Cleaver in Algeria wanted immediate, violent uprising—accelerated the party's downward spiral. George Jackson's lawyer, Fay Stender, fared worse. On some accounts, Jackson had asked her to smuggle weapons into his prison, and when she refused, he found a new lawyer. Nine years after Jackson's death, his political associates, seeking revenge, invaded Stender's home and shot her, leaving her paralyzed. Unable to find relief from the pain, a few months later she would commit suicide.
Are these reasons to question the love ethic put forward by Cleaver and Jackson? Or are these further reminders of just how far our world is from that eschatological moment when all loves will be rightly ordered? It is hard to say: we are, after all, dealing with literary texts, necessarily partial and polished, not biography. It could have been that no one was quite so committed to the revolution as they purported to be, the pulls of the racial order and mundane pressures overcoming the anticipation of a time beyond. It could have been Cleaver's and Jackson's publishers that molded their words into the form of love stories, a genre so familiar to American audiences. Even if that were so, even if the relationships between Cleaver and Jackson and those they loved remained primarily at the level of fantasy, the ethics of love they develop remains instructive. It offers a framework that can be filled in with various specific practices of renunciation, moral formation, and self-criticism. Whatever the details may be, this framework, this theology, offers a reminder of just how pervasive anti-blackness is, and it motivates us to think and live beyond our familiar ideas and feelings, to explore how we might be affectively shaped by an orientation to the radically other.
Finally, a curious feature of the love expressed in the writings of Cleaver and Jackson is its focus on the mundane.25 In part, this was necessitated by the genre. In prison, there were practical measures to be considered, shoes, food, books, Christmas gifts, and updates on family. “I got the nuts and cake today, thanks, socks and handkerchiefs also,” Jackson writes (42). In the next letter, he scolds his mother for sending him a card depicting white people. “I guess she just can't perceive that I don't want anything to do with her white god” (42). Critique and everyday affection coexist. This practical care and concern for family are the foundation on which the possibilities for conversion and critique are built, but it is a foundation that never disappears, even once Cleaver and Jackson have been radicalized. Perhaps it is in these practical matters, in the responsiveness to those with whom we find ourselves in relation, that we see a counterpoint to the conversion-focused account of love at the center of Cleaver's and Jackson's narratives. Perhaps this represents something analogous to natural rather than revealed religion, a tendency for selfless concern and affection beginning with family and extending to others, a tendency that is repressed when we are gripped by abstractions sold to us by elites. Perhaps such natural loves offer a necessary counterbalance to the revealed, a check on the epistemic hubris entailed when one believes oneself to be responding to the wholly other. Such natural love remains when illusions ring hollow, when the prison walls remind us of the mundane.
1. Alicia Garza, “A Love Note to Our People,” n+1, https://nplusonemag.com. Garza also suggests, “For us as women who are organizers, there's a way in which our hearts connect to each other and to a real deep love for our people.” Garza's Twitter handle for a time was Love God Herself.
2. Alicia Garza, “We Gon’ Be Alright: Black Love, Black Resistance and Black Liberation,” Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org.
3. bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 243–50. See also James Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991).
4. Jennifer Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post Intersectionality,” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 19. Nash positions such a love politics as a preferable alternative to the identity politics into which intersectionality may descend. The other important figure, whose cultural stock has recently soared, is James Baldwin. See the centrality of love in The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963).
5. I develop this argument more broadly in Vincent W. Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
6. For example, Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Timothy P. Jackson, Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015).
7. It is possible that some of the material in these texts was smuggled out, rather than sent through regular correspondence, so avoided censorship.
8. For example, in contrast to Huey Newton's embrace of the gay liberation movement, Cleaver associated homosexuality with child molestation (as well as grotesque capitalism). See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 106. Further references to this text are parenthetical. Jared Sexton offers a particularly sophisticated argument that Cleaver's views on sexuality are intertwined with, and compromise, his political project as a whole: see “Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading Soul on Ice,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 28–41.
9. Cleaver published an account of his exile and his first religious conversion in Soul on Fire (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1978). On Cleaver's Mormonism, see Newell G. Bringhurst, “Eldridge Cleaver's Passage through Mormonism,” Journal of Mormon History 28, no. 1 (2002): 80–110. For a biographical overview, see Melanie Margaret Kask, “Soul Mates: The Prison Letters of Eldridge Cleaver and Beverly Axelrod” (PhD diss., University of California, 2003).
10. See Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), ch. 3.
11. Cleaver first met Axelrod when he was looking for a lawyer to persuade the prison authorities to allow him to submit a book manuscript, then titled “White Woman/Black Man” (the title of the final section of Soul on Ice) for publication.
12. Jackson describes himself as “born a slave in a captive society,” adding that “Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life.” See Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 4 and 14. Further references to this text are parenthetical. These themes are picked up from Jackson's writings and elaborated into a general theory of anti-black racism by Frank Wilderson in Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
13. Michele Wallace develops a related schema in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979).
14. For a more elaborate account of the way capitalism shapes the order of love, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
15. This question has received relatively little attention in Christian ethical analysis of love, perhaps because it is largely ignored in Gene Outka's seminal Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972).
16. Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 146–47.
17. Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, 20–21.
18. Ibid., 192. Gregory also addresses the role of love in the thought of Gustavo Gutiérrez, focusing on neighbor love rather than on ideology as distorting love.
19. Ibid., 274.
20. Cleaver notoriously describes “practicing” rape on black women before he moved on to raping white women (Soul on Ice, 26). Both he later understands to be examples of his rage against the racial order, which shapes the desires of all, not just whites. Jackson similarly went through an initial moment of pure resistance: “What I do feel is the urge to resist, resist, and never stop resisting” (Soledad Brother, 126).
21. Consider Jackson's conclusion, “I place no one and nothing above myself” (88) or, more dramatically, “Any woman I may have when I get out…must let me retrain her mind” (116).
22. The epistemic hubris implicit in such sentiments is never satisfactorily addressed by Jackson (or Cleaver). How can he be sure he is rightly oriented toward the wholly other? Any criterion would seem to make the other—the revolution, God—not quite so wholly other, and so suggest idolatry.
23. What Cleaver revisits during his second period of incarceration is the question of how this hatred is to be put in practice, not whether this hatred is legitimate. He no longer believes rape is a proper way of acting on this hatred, and he generally moves toward Jackson's embrace of ascetic practices. This hatred of sinners might be contrasted with, to oversimplify, Christian hatred of sin coupled with love of sinners. But in Cleaver's view, as I reconstruct it, there is no way of seeing or knowing the sinner behind the sin, given the epistemological limitations that racism imposes on us—so we are left only to hate.
24. See Kask, “Soul Mates,” though Cleaver knew she was white.
25. While this is more present in Jackson's book than Cleaver's, see the critical edition of Cleaver's letters in Kask, “Soul Mates.”