Solidarity Is Love, and Love Is a Struggle
The Rigorous Solidarity Our Movements Need
Reparationists —
Sending you love on this Juneteenth.
Recently, I’ve found myself returning to the question not of what we’re fighting for, at times, that is pretty clear, but how we stay in the fight, together.
This has brought me to the topics of solidarity and love. Though not the surface level type of love or solidarity, not the kind we often see flattened by brands, but the kind of love that bell hooks insisted must be planted and tended to.
Today, I returned to BLIS’s first research report, titled "Fabric of Repair." We wanted to understand how people respond to stories about Black Reparations, Indigenous Land Back, and what happens when we braid those stories together.
Our most striking finding was that the braided narrative, the story that wove together the demands of both movements, was the most effective. It didn’t dilute either story; in fact, it strengthened both of them. When participants saw these struggles not as separate fights, but as linked liberation struggles, their support for both increased.
From a research perspective, it has, of course, left me wondering: why?
Did the braided narrative show people not only what we’re fighting for, but who we’re fighting alongside?
Did it prompt folks to hold space for each other’s pain and possibility?
Did it call on us to love beyond our own liberation?
Perhaps.
And that is what I will explore in today’s opinion section, which I’ve titled “Solidarity is Love. And Love is a Struggle.”
The type of love that we need in this moment is not sentimental or sweet.
It is not the kind of love that is expressed through hashtags or reposts.
It is a discipline, an art, and a practice.
It is a type of love that chooses to stay in relationship when it would be much easier to walk away.
The type of love that pushes us to show up for a struggle that might not center you or your people, but a recognition that it does shape your future.
Paulo Freire refers to this as “armed love,” which I interpret as a love so profound that it is willing to confront injustice with a blend of tenderness, passion, and determination.
This kind of love, and the solidarity it produces, threatens the very architecture of supremacy.
And today, that architecture is evolving. A new wave of authoritarian narratives is rising, spun by an oligarchic government, offering punishment instead of justice, isolation instead of care, and erasure in place of truth.
But, if I’ve learned anything in this last year of building BLIS alongside my brilliant colleagues, it’s this:
The kind of love we’re spreading;
A slow, deep, and disciplined type of love,
Is worth struggling for.
And anything worth struggling for,
Is worth everything.
BLIS is creating a space for struggle, love, and practice together, through our first public-facing capacity-building initiative, which we’ve dubbed the Solidarity Gym (more information about it can be found in our Opinion section). You can sign up here if you’re interested.
With Radical Love,
Trevor
News Recommendations
USA Today: Juneteenth renews call for reparations for African Americans, advocates say
11 Live: On slave reparations debate, Fulton County grapples with complex questions of eligibility and cost
New York Times: Maryland Governor Vetoes Reparations Bill
NBC: Maryland Gov. Moore defends reparations decision, talks about Commanders stadium
Market Place: On reparations: How much is owed Black Americans today?
Baltimore Beat: Opinion: Why We Can’t Wait For Reparations
KCUR: What has Kansas City's reparations commission done?
KQED: Checking in on California’s Reparations Effort
KQED: Newsom Pledged $12 Million for Racial Justice in California. What Now?
NJ.Com: Reparations in New Jersey: Council to present findings after 2-year study
HuffPost: On Juneteenth, Wes Moore Wants To Focus On The ‘Work Of Repair’ For Black Americans
Opinion: Solidarity is Love, and Love is a Struggle
Love isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind in policy debates, but our new research at the BLIS Collective has led me to reconsider the role of love in shaping transformative policy and the solidarity required for those policies to be implemented.
I’ve titled this piece 'Solidarity is Love,' and Love is a Struggle to recognize that love in the context of social movements is not a soft feeling, but a fierce discipline.
It is the daily, often unglamorous work of showing up for one another, even when it’s inconvenient. It is choosing interdependence over isolation, accountability over avoidance, and collective liberation over individual success or comfort.
In our report, Fabric of Repair, we sought to understand the role of different narratives about Black Reparations and Indigenous Land Back on Black and Indigenous audiences. One finding stood out: the braided narrative that linked both Reparations and Land Back proved the most effective at boosting support for both causes.
When presented with a story that wove these struggles together, respondents who backed Reparations and Land Back each rose by 4 percent, more than any of the standalone videos we tested. In other words, when people saw their liberation framed within a shared tapestry of repair, something resonated with them. Furthermore, when Black participants watched a video solely about reparations, they became more supportive of the Land Back movement and vice versa. We refer to this as the Narrative Spillover Effect; learning about one reparative movement increases support for the other.
We knew anecdotally that activists see different struggles as intertwined, but this data helps us see that the general public does as well. The question now is: why does that happen?
Perhaps it is because the braided narrative carries an undercurrent of love, recognition, care, and commitment. The evidence we found from our experiment serves as a reminder that solidarity is a political act, and when practiced effectively, it will bind fates and futures.
Solidarity As a Form of Love
To call solidarity love might sound lofty, but thinkers from Paulo Freire to bell hooks have long made this connection.
“Actually, what the reected ones need — those forbidden to be, prevented from being — is not our tepiditiy but our warmy, our solidarity — yes, and our love, but an unfeigned love, not a mistrustful one, not a soppy love, but an ‘armed’ love.” -Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope
Freire recognized that deep solidarity is an act of love armed with action and commitment, not merely a passive affection. In a similar vein, bell hooks cautioned us that solidarity should not be confused with support. “Support can be occasional,” she wrote, “It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.”
In other words, solidarity is love in action. Love that doesn’t just show up when it is easy, but stays present over the long haul. This kind of love isn’t about sentimentality; it is, as hooks suggests, a rigorous practice of consistently aligning with others as a political act.
Fred Hampton also understood this well. The young Black Panther leader said it plainly: “We’re not gonna fight racism with racism, we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.” Hampton formed the Rainbow Coalition in 1969, which brought together poor Black, white, and Latino folks in Chicago under a shared banner, proving in action that solidarity must transcend racial lines and strike at the heart of class oppression.
This multi-racial alliance terrified the establishment, and it is no coincidence that Hampton was assassinated shortly after he began to unite a cross-racial coalition under a common struggle against capitalism. History shows that when we build solidarity narratives that bridge divides and are grounded in love, we challenge the very structures that uphold systems of domination.
Today, thinkers like Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the architects behind the Green New Deal and Director of the Climate Policy program at the Roosevelt Institute, echo these sentiments. In a recent interview with Olúfếmí O. Táíwò, Gunn-Wright argued that we have to look at our movements as an “omnicause,” a recognition that the issues we face are deeply interconnected, and must be fought for collectively.
Solidarity, then, is not just a strategy; it is a reflection of the belief that our movements are, and must be, in love with one another.
Division is Their Weapon, Solidarity is Our Antidote
I’m writing this piece in a moment of profound cultural division and narrative warfare. We are living in times when fear is stoked daily—fear of migrants, fear of critical race theory, fear of trans people.
As we argue in The Fabric of Repair, this is not new for the United States. This country was built on poisonous stories created to stoke fear and entrench inequality. The foundational narrative that Black and Indigenous people were “savages” was used to justify slavery, genocide, and land theft.
Today’s authoritarians have simply updated the script, preaching that one group’s gain must mean another’s loss. And since division is their weapon, a solidarity rooted in radical love must be our antidote.
Yet building that kind of solidarity doesn’t happen by wishing it into existence. ‘
It requires practice.
It requires space.
At BLIS, we often say that solidarity is a muscle. It can be stretched, strengthened, and sustained.
It means learning how to show up for each other’s causes, listening before we speak, coordinating across differences, and holding each other accountable in a collective struggle toward the liberation of all people who suffer under racial capitalism.
Practicing Solidarity, Practicing Love
But how do we bring this type of love to life, particularly in an era when technology constantly pulls our attention in different directions?
Next month, we’ll be launching our first public-facing narrative capacity-building initiative: the Solidarity Gym—a political education space designed to build cross-movement narrative power and strengthen our practice of solidarity.
In this Gym, love is at the core of our work. We’ll stretch our empathy, lift each other’s stories, and build the stamina it takes to stay in this struggle for the long haul.
We’ll use the space to turn love into action and build new connections where old structures have sown distrust. Through the Gym and our forthcoming membership base, we hope to deepen the commitment of movement workers to one another and to the collective liberation we all deserve.
To claim that solidarity is love, and that love is a struggle, is to call for us to fight for each other as fiercely as we fight for ourselves. It means refusing to abandon or discard each other, and recognizing that the path to liberation is not paved with comfort, but with commitment.
In struggling for and with each other, we build strength, we build a sense of belonging, and we cultivate a form of radical love. And this type of love is one that is certainly worth struggling for.
You can sign up to participate in our first Solidarity Gym here.
