“Loving Flesh”: Self-Love, Student Development Theory, and the Coloniality of Being

Baby Suggs’s sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one’s flesh in a world where “yonder they do not love your flesh.” Morrison’s (1987) careful and deliberate use of “flesh” denotes what Spillers (1987) wrote about as a self before captivity. Morrison’s reminder suggests that even if the body is free, those formerly enslaved must wrestle with the unconscious, internalized seeds of captivity supplanted as psychic trauma (Oliver, 2004). Higher education contexts, as extensions of white supremacy, are rooted in colonization (Wilder, 2013). On this premise, daily, Black students are contending with the afterlife of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) externally and internally. Building on Baby Suggs’s plea, I was particularly interested in how Black students “love [their] flesh.” I explored the potentialities of Black literary works to provoke onto-epistemological development and intervene on colonizing scripts in the student development theoretical canon and in the lives of Black folx. I took up this work by conducting a Black feminist analysis (Christian, 1988; Smith, 1979) of one student’s exposure to Black literary works (Christian, 1988; Gordon, 1997) and the meaning made from that experience toward a praxis of self-love (Baszile, 2018).