I guess one shared human experience is the desire to be loved. Surely there must be exceptions and I am not implying every person ever has desired this (I am wary of universal axioms) but it does seem that humans, throughout history, have sought associations and forms of organization that hinted at this shared need: we form communities, familial ties (either by blood or affinity or sometimes both), friendships, partnerships, etc. Even the Nation-State is funded on some lose idea of shared love (the love of the land, the love we are supposed to feel for those who share the borders of the Nation-State by virtue of being in the same space and supposedly similar culture). I quite believe that most people do crave some form of experience involving love (not to mention the love one feels for one\u2019s partner or children).\u00a0<\/p>\n
I live in a place where it has been made obviously clear that some of us are not deserving of love. The love that the Nation-State reserves for its subjects is spared to some of us. We are told we are Other. The law codifies our Otherness in no uncertain terms. We are to comply with these marks of Otherness by following specific declarations and pathways. Our children, even if they are born here, will bear this mark of Otherness (they call us \u201callochtoon\u201d, which means exactly that, \u201cone who is not of the land<\/em>\u201d and it is not reserved for immigrants, you can be coded \u201callochtoon\u201d for generations and if you are Black or Muslim, it\u2019ll be for ever). We are not actively hated. There aren\u2019t calls for hunting or open aggression. It\u2019s not that we have to actively fear for our safety on a permanent basis (though that happens sometimes but it\u2019d be disingenuous to claim it\u2019s a matter of policy encouraging it). We are simply unloved. The unloved share a space of \u201cnot hate\u201d but \u201cnot love\u201d either. It\u2019s this active exclusion that implies we are not worthy of the shared love but it stops right before it actively turns to hatred. It\u2019s the indifference sitting on the shoulders of our Otherness. Most of us also look the part. We can be singled out by visual queues (you are Black; you wear a veil; your hair is \u201cethnic\u201d; you dress differently; you speak with an accent; your outward markers are culturally alien).\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSos una desamorada<\/em>\u201d, my mother used to hurl it like a weapon against me when I acted in an uncaring fashion. \u201cDesamor<\/em>\u201d, there is no word in the English language that can express this sentiment accurately. Unloving comes close, though. To be unloving is to be careless, to be indifferent, to not acknowledge the bond that should unite us. I didn\u2019t accurately understand the meaning of it until I experienced it. Until, that is, I saw it become the basis of political systems. Unloving, I contend, is the basis of the institutionalized racism, the basis of the exclusion, the root cause of \u201cnot being allowed to belong\u201d. \u201cYou are unworthy of love; you are unloved<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n