Why Beloved Community: Kevin Lewis
“[Community is] the coming together of a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and ‘to delight in each other, and make each other’s conditions their own.”
- All About Love, bell hooks
If you plan on watching the first season of Lovecraft Country or haven’t finished it yet, this is a warning. Avoid the introduction to this blog post because it might spoil a story for you, if you care. There’s the warning. I want to frame the reason that I chose and continue to choose Beloved after nearly a year around the story of Hippolyta in episode 7.
In the world of the fictional sci-fi show, Lovecraft Country, Hippolyta is a Black, working class woman who is pushed to set aside her dreams for her partner and children, forced into smallness, and struggles to find her place in the larger [mystical] fight against what we now know was whiteness and white supremacy. In episode 7, Hippolyta gets magically transported into what appears to be another dimension’s holding cell where she comes into contact with a beautiful otherworldly entity/guardian of the universe, Beyond C’est. Hippolyta appears to be trapped in this cell as Beyond C’est persistently demands that Hippolyta names who and where she wants to be in this new universe. Of course, Hippolyta initially struggles with this demand until she finally states her desire to live out her earthly life’s dream to be on stage with Josephine Baker. After she declares this, she is immediately transported to a new universe and lifetime in which she performs and spends time with the one and only Josephine Baker. As Hippolyta begins to understand that she can be anywhere and anyone, she gets transported through several other dimensions and lifetimes where she ultimately gets to live out all of her possibilities and dreams.
During her initial journey to the universe with Josephine, she’s finally able to live out a life that, at one point in time, only existed in her imagination. She dances, performs, and rests in community with Black, queer femmes who embody a particular type of liberation that Hippolyta never fully experienced. What we find at the end of this episode is a fully liberated and self-actualized Hippolyta who finally feels empowered to name herself and who she wants to be without limitation. She is Hippolyta: the entertainer, the warrior, the scientist, the traveler, the mother. In an excellent blog post about this episode, blogger ShaVaughn Elle, wrote this about Hippolyta’s journey through multiple dimensions: “What flashes on-screen as seconds were several light years of Hippolyta living a life she never thought was accessible to her. It makes me wonder what would we choose, if it was as simple as naming where we wanted to be.”
At a young age, I felt pretty free and comfortable in who I was and the way I expressed myself. I mean, I am a Leo and a middle child so it was high drama all the time. It wasn’t until I got older and became more aware of the world around me that I began to internalize how to shrink and ‘protect’ myself from feeling totally isolated. Since we know that humans have an innate desire to belong, I learned what I needed to do to feel a sense of belonging in a world that implicitly and explicitly showed me that there was no place for all of my authentic identities at once. I learned that I needed to hide. I needed to shrink because I didn’t believe this dark-skinned queer Black guy from Detroit had any other choice. I understood that community meant that there were pieces of me that I needed to shrink in order to survive. What I now know is that the shrinking and lack of agency was a symptom of internalizing anti-blackness and white supremacy. In my adult life, this manifested as impostor syndrome, doubt, internalized oppression, and grind culture. Anti-blackness tricked me into believing that I have to place limits on what’s possible for me. Anti-blackness and white supremacy will have us believe that to feel belonging means that we have to shed the pieces of ourselves that might make others uncomfortable. But is that what community really means?
What is so incredibly important about Hippolyta’s episode is that her journey to liberation and self-actualization was not done alone. She explored, expressed herself, and named herself in deep community with others throughout her different lifetimes. Community was a central part of her journey to unlocking a power that was always already within her. What I know to be true about the Beloved Community is that it is not an organization that requires me to conform or change pieces of who I am to be successful or belong. We push ourselves to take the masks off and be vulnerable in our work because that’s a part of what it means to be an authentic community.
Before Beloved, I assumed that I would always have to work ten times harder to fit into a space that was designed without me in mind. I didn’t know what was possible. And if I think about Hippolyta’s episode, I thought about how sometimes it takes literally being ‘transported’ into a place or environment that you didn’t think was real in order for you to truly explore what you’re capable of doing. This environment can initially be scary and uncomfortable, but is ultimately necessary.
So let me tell you what’s both very real and scary about working at Beloved.
One of the first things that my current manager told me when I started at Beloved is that some of the behaviors and professional things I learned over time might’ve helped me ‘win’ back then, but they will not work at Beloved. That was terrifying to hear, because who doesn’t want to win, right? I definitely wanted to be pushed in my DEI journey, but within certain limits... because I’m a firm believer that once you know better, you can’t go backward. What has been challenging and real since I started here is the unlearning process as a “DEI person”. The amount of internal work I’ve been doing to unpack how white supremacy and the myth of professionalism has impacted so much of my personal and professional life has been hard and rewarding.
Beloved is not a place that requires your smallness. In fact, it requires the opposite. It is an organization that requires me to expand, to critically think, and to bring all of myself - in service of something greater. Being in this community has pushed me to rewire how I approach this work, and continuously pushes me to find how to bring myself into the work that I do. A huge part of that has been reconnecting to myself and learning how to tangibly dismantle white supremacy culture within the locus of my control. In fact, I would sometimes feel resistance out of being afraid of something new in the same way that Hippolyta felt resistant and scared of naming herself for the first time. In a world that nourishes itself off of anti-blackness and exploitation of people, it can be scary to work in an organization that is committed to dismantling what is the norm in society and in our workplaces.
Ultimately, Beloved is a possibility model. It’s a living result of what happens when Black queer womxn lead. Doors open for the rest of us. Doors that only lived in our imagination. James Baldwin once said that “the space in which I’ll fit will not exist until I create it.”I made a conscious choice before Beloved that I was going to choose where I wanted to be, where I wanted to do this work, and have agency over who I wanted to be in the workplace. What I’m learning every day is that I have choice and agency, regardless of what the delusion of white supremacy culture might have me believe. Having agency over our lives and work is particularly revolutionary and necessary for those of us who have been denied or criminalized for it for centuries. Simply put, I deeply believe in what Beloved is working toward. Our approach to DEI doesn’t simply live in the ‘intangible,’ as many people think DEI is just about abstract feelings. What we challenge our clients to do is push their DEI work to be operational in impactful ways. We also challenge ourselves to consider how integral rest is in working towards our collective liberation. If liberation from oppression is the goal, we view rest as a key ongoing strategy to aid in collectively reaching that goal. We do not wear exhaustion as badges of honor at Beloved, especially if we are in this fight against white supremacy for the long haul.
I can’t close my thoughts about choosing Beloved without saying that we aren’t the perfect community, but that’s probably what makes it even more worthwhile. It’s in the imperfection that communities struggle together, all while committing deeply to a shared goal. In the case of marginalized people, it is the shared goal of liberation. I don’t feel the pressure to be perfect to do the work that I’m passionate about. Being here pushes me to be humble in the fact that even as a ‘DEI professional’, there are still so many areas of privilege and incongruences that I have to interrogate. That’s what makes the work sustainable and impactful for me. It is through being so unyielding in our Beloved principles that we can stand firm in our grounding theories, like Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, when they come under fire across the country. Being principled and grounded is what helps us be clear with clients about the work they must do before engaging with our projects. Being principled is what opens up possibilities for self-definition and expansion.
This is why I chose Beloved. Simply because we don’t have time for shrinking over here. We’re gonna wear our bonnets, dance joyfully, take naps, and love ourselves through the work until we all get free.