"Just Love the Hell Out of Everybody"

This photo was sent to me by a friend out on a walk last night.

This church is in Minneapolis.

Two miles from where George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020.

I visited this memorial last August. By then the location was being tended by the community as a sacred site. It’s emerging as George Floyd Square.

Here’s a photo I took in August. This is the first time I’ve shared it.

So what does it mean to ‘love the hell out of everybody’?

Or to have the hell loved out of us?

Conversations with a friend, Rev. Dee Adio-Moses, come to mind. I write about her in the foreword to the anthology Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by white Women, where Dee says,

“We need to see ourselves in others, and to see that others are also in us. The first thing is to want to do so. The same humanity that’s in you is in me. And then we have to practice. Over and over and over.”

It’s worth noting that Dee’s perspective contradicts the concept of whiteness that defines one group of people as superior to all 'others'.

Who wants to join me in loving the hell of whiteness out of each other?