Carrying the Torch: Choosing Love Over Hate in A Divided America

Carrying the Torch: Choosing Love Over Hate in a Divided America:

A Confession

I grew up in a house where racism wasn’t whispered — it was declared. It was casual and constant, the air we breathed. My mother, in particular, carried it like armor, handing it down to me as though it were the truth. When I was a teenager, she said words that never left me: she told me she’d “rather see me dead” than with a Black man.

But life, thankfully, has a way of unspooling those tightly wound narratives. My first love was a Black man. He was kind, thoughtful, funny, and loving. He saw me in a way no one had before. Loving him cracked my world open. It forced me to reconcile my mother’s hatred with the fullness of the man in front of me. Nothing about her words matched what I was experiencing. That contradiction changed me forever. It was a testament to the transformative power of love, a beacon of hope in a world filled with hate.

This is my story of choosing love over hate, of unlearning what I was taught, and of carrying that torch forward in a country that still struggles, deeply, with racism. It’s a journey of personal growth, of shedding the layers of hate I was raised with, and learning to love unconditionally.