All you need is love

Love is a dirty word, at least in professional circles. It is thought of as unboundaried to say that you love the people you work with.

But in our experience, love is what gets us through. Love is strength. We don’t mean romantic love, but the active, conscious, revolutionary “love ethic” that the US author and activist bell hooks (stylised in lower case) taught us about. She tells us that “we can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed”. This is something we try to live on our site at the Museum of Homelessness in Finsbury Park, London.

We have a lot to stand up against. This year, the growth of fascism has directly affected our community, with the criminalisation of homelessness increasing as numbers rise. In June, the co-founder of software firm Palantir held a conference in the US calling for the forced detention of homeless people. Camps are proposed in Utah in anticipation of this becoming law. The thinktanks and donors funding this are also active in British politics. We have grave concerns about this political tide. 

Our most recent exhibition, Criminal, traces this back to the early 1600s, when land in England, Ireland, the Caribbean and the Americas was being systematically seized and enclosed. The loss of the commons began in earnest. This process created two things: mass displacement and a need for labour to build the plantations in the colonies. Our research crew identified that homeless people from England were some of the first people transported to the early colonial systems to carry out the backbreaking, and often lethal, work of building the plantations. 

We call this the homelessness Big Bang. Criminalisation was key to the making of the modern world. Dehumanising constructions of vagrancy in the 1500s allowed for criminalisation and transportation in the 1600s. The dehumanisation playbook created for poor and travelling people in Britain was, a short while later, used in the construction of anti-Black racism and the creation of the transatlantic slave trade. These intertwined processes are echoed through history. Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act was used to stop and search young Black men in 1980s Brixton, leading to the 1981 uprisings. 

The way that the homelessness Big Bang happened shows how it is impossible to think about homelessness and criminalisation without also thinking about racism and anti-immigration sentiment. Today, a popular far right trope is to say that migrants are taking all the resources in luxury hotels, while British veterans die on the street. 

The only way to respond to this is with the ethics of love. History shows us that people from all nations found solidarity in the early plantation period, despite strategies to divide them. We see this too on our museum site, where people who some believe should hate each other work side by side and take deep care of each other. 

For us, as the leaders of a special museum site, it means we have to be extra careful about how we model the ethics of love. We need to deeply reflect on our own responses, explore what accountability means and dig in for courage. Fighting fascism does mean protesting and speaking out, but one of the most powerful things we can do is build communities on hooks’ love ethic, creating communal bonds that are impossible to break. Museums are a potent space to nurture this. In a society that has been almost stripped of the commons, we have an important role to play.

Matt and Jess Turtle are the co-founders of the Museum of Homelessness