Teach Me How to Love: Black Feminist Thoughts on Ethics, Education, and Environmentalism
Although I haven’t taught a class on music (yet), every class that I teach has a soundtrack. Some of these soundtracks have been compiled in collaboration with my students, but most serve as a method of meaning-making or symbolic inspiration for the lectures and topics I want to explore. In this vein, I have spent the summer working on a few classes that focus on ethics and environmentalism through the lens of love, care, and the revolutionary potential of mothering. Specifically, the song that has inspired my current syllabi is Musiq Soulchild’s “teachme.”
In developing the course “Black Feminist Thought,” I found this song fascinating because of the gender politics that undergird the artist’s narrative. Diving deep into the lyrics, “teachme” is the story of a man addressing his girlfriend or wife as a student of love. In this relationship, his social conditioning as a man is standing in the way of his emotional ability to connect with his partner. But, instead of doubling down on this patriarchal understanding of masculinity, the…