Dangerous Unselfishness: An Agape Framework of Love as a Means to Address Suffering Within Urban Communities and Schools

• In Event: Revisiting and Reinventing a Feminist Freire: Woman of Color Pedagogies of Love

Abstract

A true framework of love has very little to do with sentimental feelings, rather, “it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people.” (West, p. 19) Love is radical, and it is “rooted in a committed willingness to struggle persistently with purpose in our life and to intimately connect that purpose with…our "true vocation"—to be human.” (Darder,p. 498) Essentially, love intervenes. Prophet Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied such a radical urgency towards the suffering and humanization of the oppressed is his ministry when he centralized love. He understood that with a commitment to love came a hypersensitivity to suffering. In his efforts, King was dangerously unselfish. His actions embodied a true framework of love: that any individual who is guided by love cannot allow dehumanization to thrive.

This central purpose of this paper is to introduce and explore Agape Love as a framework that will allow researchers, health practitioners, community organizers and educators to intervene within dehumanizing spaces. This paper closely examines urban schools as critical, paradoxical sites of pain and possibility, places in dire need of an Agape Love framework (Duncan-Andrade-2009). Agape Love acknowledges the constricting nature of white supremacy and the ways in which it creates multiple barriers to justice and equity, the ways in which racism serves as a mechanism that influences access to land, the construction of one’s mind and the consequences on one’s body. Agape Love does not just seek to theorize justice and suffering, but to respond critically, by disrupting the continuing psycho-cultural (Ladson-Billings, 1998), emotional and physical assaults that marginalized folk experience within their communities and schools. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s critical praxis, feminist scholarship (FS), critical race theory (CRT), participatory action research (PAR), and Christian social ethics (CSE), Agape Love works to transform the capacity of communities to confront death and transform the material conditions of the oppressed. (Freire, 1970; Ginwright, 2009; Akom 2011)

Author

• Tiffani Marie, San Jose State University