If you see everybody as having redemptive qualities and being capable of redemption, then conflict isn’t as big a burden because it’s not me against you, it’s a question of how are we going to work this out. How one relates to conflict is determined partly by whether you see the people on the other side as your enemies or you see the institutions as the problem. The most contemporary way that people are thinking about as a measure of resolving conflict and rebuilding community is restorative justice. The issue is not to be without conflict, but to be able to resolve conflict, and the commitment to community is what gives us the inspiration to come up with ways to resolve conflict. The truth is that you cannot build community without conflict. One of the things that has always made me sad is the extent to which civil rights struggles, black power movements, and feminist movements, have, at times, collapsed at the point where there was conflict, and how conflict between people in the groups was often seen as a negative.

He had a profound awareness that the people involved in oppressive institutions will not change from the logics and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way. Martin Luther King was my teacher for understanding the importance of beloved community. In other words, those of us working for instituional change endeaver to become a beloved community among ourselves as we are striving for all of society to exemplify the beloved community. The beloved community defines the relationships among those working for change and also the desired result of these efforts. This concept assumes a group effort to change social institutions and an effort to make the means of that struggle consistent with the ends. It seems that, in a lot of ways, the beloved community is a concept that has come out of struggles for liberation in an attempt to express how the process of liberation can be infused with love. Love has been a huge dimension of your work and also liberation.

In our last conversation it seemed like we were lightly dancing around that concept because we talked about the topics that you have dealt with in your writing. I thought it might be constructive for us to talk about the concept of the beloved community.

Bell hooks on teaching