who we be
kristina clark | she/her
Greetings! I am honored and excited that you found LOVING ROOM, this commitment to Black ancestral healing and transformation through African diasporic, decolonial aesthetics. A little about me—I find joy in warm sunny days near / in water, beads, small smooth stones, incense, natural fibers, and the earthy rhythmic eloquence of natural dye prints in traditional textile design. I love to cook and break bread with friends and chosen family. In another life I danced and played liberatory musics of resistance to colonial oppression from the Black diaspora in Latin America (México, Cuba, Perú). I am a solo mama to two beautiful children. I dream a world where my kids, our communities and the generations to come experience robust belonging, dignity, safety, and abundant love.
A life-long lover of literature, I have been dreaming this project (which I originally called “Living Room”) for over a decade, going all the way back to 2012. At the time I was working on my MEd in Curriculum + Instruction at the University of Washington, and I was simultaneously a bilingual paraprofessional and BSU advisor serving youth at Garfield High School. I spent my days immersed in the theorizing and daily lived realities of the ways Black youth encounter and produce knowledge in institutional spaces. I witnessed the possibilities and limitations of reading Black-authored texts in white-directed learning spaces. I took note of the way Black students were consistently policed in libraries (in and out of school), frequently getting kicked out for literally “not having a pass” (!!!); for talking, laughing, being loud—for being kids, and being Black.
Reflecting on all of the above, I savored the truth of Black ways of knowing and being, that fact that our epistemologies do not consider learning to be an individual act taking place in isolation. Reading alone in silence, taking a test alone in silence, does not suffice as a measure of what it means for us to know. Echoing ubuntu, I know because we know. I verify validate value repudiate in dialogue, dialogy, dialogically. We meet, we converse, we share, we reflect, we digest, and we approximate the truth. What could it mean for our youth to access a literary space that nurtures the entirety of our radiance? A space that encourages us to read, to know, and at once to stay bold, bright, and Blackity-Black-Black-Black? What kinds of books would such a place house? What would this space look like, sound like, smell like, feel like? And, how to activate the space in a way that could honor our ancestors as much as these ancestors to be?
I have imagined, curated LOVING ROOM in response to these questions. In choosing the name, an obvious reference to “living room” and a perhaps less notable homage to Ilé-Ifẹ̀ (lit. “House of Love” in Yoruba), I am invoking a vessel that can buoy us, as Black people, toward embodying the Love Ethics that bell hooks so clearly delineates for us. LOVING ROOM exists to nurture a #BlackLoveEthics. I hope you find a home here, with joy, dignity, and melanated ease.