From fear to hope: learning from BIPOC in hard times—Covid 19, climate collapse & racial violence

Abstract

In the urban, modern world, most people lack anything they can call 'community', a 'commons', a WE. They are fully individualized. Formatted by the school and all forms of education to accommodate themselves into a competitive, individualistic world, they acutely suffer the consequences of the current collapses, climatic and institutional. Many of them are falling into conditions of extreme misery and deprivation. Even those in better conditions, with a guaranteed income and a good job, are affected by the current plague, as isolation and divisiveness rage violently around them, driven by Global Fear. It is a divisiveness of ancient hatreds converging with modern ones, feeding their capacities for despair. We ask: how to heal from these illnesses exacerbated by COVID-19 times? This essay explores hospitality as the antidote to globalized fear. It explores the art of organizing hope, drawing upon the courageous autonomous efforts of BIPOC around the world. Through acts of radical hospitality, flowering into friendship, ways of embracing radical differences are revealed, warmly and kindly hosting the otherness of the other.