America, Where Is Your Love Ethic?

By: Bishop Marcia Dinkins, Ph.D.

Dear Beloved Community,

I am sharing this not as a statement meant to provoke, but as a lament meant to be felt. What follows is an invitation to pause with, to grieve what has been lost, and to reckon honestly with the kind of nation that does not have or value an ethic of love. I ask you to read slowly as I ask: America, Where Is Your Love Ethic?

America,

As I sit with what is unfolding across this country and watch ICE raids that tear families apart, the denial of food and medical care, attacks on the most vulnerable, and the steady normalization of harm, I am reminded of bell hooks’ All About Love and her call for what she names a love ethic.

bell hooks reminds us that love is not a feeling or a slogan. It is an ethic, a way of being rooted in care, responsibility, truth, and justice. A love ethic shapes how we structure society, how we protect those most at risk, and how we tell the truth about harm. Which leads me to ask:

America, where is your love ethic?

You speak often of freedom, justice, and democracy. You appeal to morality, invoke values, and speak of greatness. Yet your policies tell a different story. Your systems reveal a deep moral fracture. Your silence, at times, is as loud as your laws. A love ethic is not sentiment. It is not charity. It is not rhetoric reserved for moments of tragedy. A love ethic is a commitment to life, to dignity, to protection, especially for those most harmed by power, neglect, and violence.

What is being called leadership right now is the absence of that commitment.

So, America, I ask again—where is your love ethic?

In the absence of a love ethic, what we are witnessing is trauma at a national scale, while collective grief is denied. Loss is minimized, renamed, and politicized. There is no pause for mourning, no space to reckon, no permission to stop and name what has been lost. And politicians move on, manufacturing false narratives, politicizing people’s pain, and denying the nation the dignity of grief. This is harm layered upon harm.

And it demands more than outrage; it demands lament.  To lament is not our weakness; it is our witness. It is the voice of grief that speaks when justice has been delayed, denied, or deferred. This country has been lamenting silently from its very beginning—absorbing violence, burying loss, and moving forward without ever fully reckoning with what has been taken. Moments like this do not stand alone; they carry the accumulated weight of what has never been grieved.

This moment is not new. From the founding of this country, violence has been written into its formation and carried forward through policy, practice, and neglect. What we once believed belonged only to history is resurfacing in the present. From slavery and genocide to forced removal and segregation, from broken treaties to mass incarceration and environmental sacrifice zones, this nation has repeatedly decided which lives are expendable:

Black bodies.
Indigenous bodies.
Brown bodies.
Poor bodies.
Disabled bodies.
Children’s bodies.
Bodies in need of care, safety, food, shelter, and dignity.

And now, we are seeing something else made visible. When people refuse silence when they name injustice, interrupt violence, and refuse complicity–harm does not stay neatly contained. White bodies, too, are being targeted, surveilled, and killed when they stand against white supremacy rather than benefit from it. This does not erase the histories of racial violence that made this system possible; it exposes how the system ultimately consumes anyone who threatens its power. What has long been inflicted on Black, Indigenous, and marginalized communities is now revealing itself as a broader machinery of control and punishment.

Again and again, harm is normalized, explained away, and folded into the machinery of governance. Black communities have lived with the weight of this continuity across generations through enslavement, lynching, segregation, environmental harm, economic exclusion, and the ongoing assault on life and dignity. This is not to elevate one grief above another, but to name how patterns persist when they are never interrupted. What happens to Black communities has often revealed what a nation is willing to tolerate and what it is willing to repeat.

What we are experiencing now is not a departure from that history; it is part of it. The present moment is carrying the past forward, unresolved and unnamed. And yet, even within this long history of harm, there has been persistence. That persistence is not accidental. It is rooted in community, memory, faith, culture, and an unwavering belief in our shared humanity. Even now, amid grief and exhaustion, there is hope, not shallow optimism, but hard-earned hope forged through struggle. A hope that insists another way is possible.

This is why stories matter. Holding grief, naming harm, and refusing erasure are not abstract work; they are how we remain human in the face of systems that would rather forget. Listening to lived experience exposes the patterns that are often denied or minimized. These stories do not narrow our concern; they widen it. They call us toward deeper humanity, shared compassion, and collective responsibility for justice.

We are not watching this pain from a distance; we are living inside it, carrying it in our bodies, our communities, and our collective memory. We are mourning lives lost, futures stolen, and the steady erosion of our shared humanity. And we are not calling people to a public gathering or a formal event. We are calling one another into mourning. We refuse a politics that demands silence instead of sorrow. We refuse to rush past grief or dull its edges. To lament is to stay with loss long enough to honor it, and to recognize the lives taken not as abstractions, statistics, or talking points, but as sacred and irreplaceable.

In my faith, I am taught that when life is taken and justice is denied, the ground itself bears witness.  There is blood on the ground. It is not quiet. It is not settled. It is not healed.  The blood is now crying out from streets and hospital rooms, from prisons and borderlands, from neighborhoods stripped of care and communities treated as disposable. This blood is not symbolic. It is real. It is heavy. It has soaked into the land beneath us and America, what have you done?  You continue to walk over it, the government walks over it, policy walks over it, and political ambition walks over it. Decisions are made above it. Budgets are balanced on top of it. Power is preserved by ignoring it. Lives are lost, shortened, or abandoned and then explained away as necessary, inevitable, or unfortunate. This is how injustice becomes normal: not only through cruelty, but through distance, language, and law.

Still, the blood cries out.  It is calling out for truth, accountability, and justice that honor life rather than power. It refuses to be managed, rushed, or buried. It will not be silenced by elections, speeches, or slogans. And it is not only blood that cries out. It is the cutting of bodies, the breaking of bones, the dismembering of lives until what remains is no longer treated as human but as a message, a warning, or a weapon. We know this violence. We have seen it before. When a body is violated, left unnamed, denied burial, and stripped of grief when a woman’s life is taken, her death explained away, and her body turned into a rallying cry rather than a life mourned, something sacred is destroyed.

We are witnessing that same violence now. Bodies reduced to symbols. Suffering politicized. Grief denied. This is what happens when a nation refuses to see, name, or grieve the dead: it uses their bodies instead.

We do not turn away from this cry. We grieve it. We hold it with care. We reject the lie that this suffering is accidental or unavoidable. We name it for what it is. And we insist that a nation cannot claim moral authority while making decisions that cost lives and refusing to reckon with that harm.

America, this is a reckoning, and it is not without love. It is a love that refuses denial, that interrupts violence, that insists on truth before reconciliation and justice before peace. Because love—real love—interrupts what is killing us. Love tells the truth, power tries to bury. Love remembers what the nation would rather forget. Love demands justice.

I say it again – America, where is your love ethic!

Yours in Love,

Bishop Marcia Dinkins, Ph.D.

Founder & Executive Director 

Black Appalachian Coalition