Clearly, commitment is a necessary component for creating loving relationships.

Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.

Let's face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism.