Greetings lovers, and welcome to our online community! I’d like to say first off that I'm extremely proud of each and every person in our community that has shown the bravery and courage to come out of the shadows and embark upon this path of living a life of abundant love. We Black & Polyamorous not only have of the great fortune of existing in this penultimate time of awakening and singularity, we also have the distinct honor of witnessing and being a part of this cultural shift as well.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, once said, "The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed." This struck me as a powerful quote, because the management and control of the dispossessed is us…THE DISPOSSESSED IS US. Black America is dispossessed from education, dispossessed from their homes, dispossessed from their self-dignity and respect, and most of all dispossessed from the thing that all humans require in life…LOVE.

We may not have control over much, but LOVE is the most powerful and most accessible thing we’ve been removed from. Love can bring strength to our families in ways that we have never experienced before. But, much to our chagrin, society has placed a larger dollar sign on our right to bear children than they have on our right to bear arms - and we wonder why the violence has not stopped in our communities?

We are social, sexual beings by nature that thrive in familial communal settings. This is who we are. Having LOVE in our lives and having FAMILIES is a god-given human right, with everything else being extra. We must understand that the current paradigm we live in has conditioned us to view these rights as a COMMODITY, and it has sold us on the idea that love and family cannot happen unless we own this or possess that.

As a people, disenfranchisement, mass incarceration with Jim Crow-like laws after release, substandard schools, and gentrification has diametrically cut us off from basic human necessities in this country, leaving LOVE and FAMILY as an experience only to be had by a rare and privileged few.

Polyamory may be many things to many people, but, as a black man, I see it as an opportunity to break free from the chains that have bound us for so many years, by empowering us to shed the way we’ve done things in the past and embrace true freedom for ALL through loving with intention and compassion. By coming together, pooling our resources, protecting each other, and making our homes a true place of refuge from the tyranny that has plagued us for so many years, we can elevate ourselves to a place where we too can "afford" LOVE and FAMILY.

LOVE

Ron Young