When Justice Loses Its Compass: The Danger of a Movement Untethered from Love
“The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.” — bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions There is a danger in the pursuit of justice when we forget the very people for whom we seek it. When the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging becomes so consumed with being right, we lose sight of what is good and risk becoming the very thing we seek to dismantle. Those who have experienced harm can, in their pursuit of liberation, reproduce that same harm only dressed in different language, justified by different beliefs, and carried out under a different flag. When the work of justice is no longer tethered to something bigger than itself, when justice movements lose their compass, they can easily become another p erformative, self-serving game in the Oppression Olympics. And it may sound cliche, but I would argue that the safeguard against this is love. Love must be the compass. It is the something greater, the thing that movement...