Hope is our covenant: reparations reflections
Reflecting on a reading from bell hooks, Esta Nyeko-Lacek explores how love offers the emotional and ethical groundwork for repair and justice.
“The healing power of redemptive love lures us and calls us toward the possibility of healing... The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope. Without hope, we cannot return to love…Renewing our faith in love's promise,
hope is our covenant."
I chose this reading from All about love, Chapter 12: 'Healing – redemptive love' by bell hooks, because it speaks across many contexts. For me, it directly addresses the nuanced and complex feelings that arise around reparations.
Reparations are about healing and repair, a process that is rarely easy. It can involve discomfort, difficult conversations, and the surfacing of complex emotions. Emotions that are difficult for those living within the legacies of enslavement and for those who represent, inherit, or benefit from the systems that caused the harm.
Harm breaks and damages. The transatlantic system of African chattel enslavement opened significant wounds. Wounds that were economic, political, social, moral, emotional, spiritual, cultural, and institutional. These wounds are not historical concepts. These wounds remain open today. The enduring realities of racial hierarchies, climate injustice, and economic exploitation continue to inflict harm in the present.
The healing power of redemptive love
In the midst of this, bell hooks reminds us of the healing power of redemptive love. She offers a sense of hope amid the noise of discomfort, trauma, and pain, without bypassing or minimising them.
When I shared the reading in the meeting, I invited everyone to receive it in whatever way it landed. I expected it would be felt differently by each person, and that, to me, is one of the great wonderful things of hooks' work. Her writing opens space for a multiplicity of truths, deep reflection, and emotional truth.
Although hooks does not explicitly frame her ideas using the language of reparations, her concept of love offers the emotional and ethical groundwork for repair and justice. She insists that truth-telling and the acknowledgement of harm are core loving practices. Without them, societies, communities, organisations, and individuals remain stuck in guilt, shame, or denial. hooks connects personal healing to collective transformation, which is at the heart of reparative justice: moving away from individual guilt and towards shared responsibility and unified community.
Love in action on the journey towards repair
For me, as a Black person, this means recognising that the baggage I have accumulated from moving through the world as someone racialised as Black does not have to be carried forever. I can lay it down. The shame I once held does not belong to me, and I can choose compassion for myself as part of my healing.
This will look different depending on how you identify and the histories you carry. Still, I invite you to consider how love in action will support you on your own journey toward repair.
