Love Crafts Countries: Loving beyond the White Divide—A Story of Blackness, Korea, and Transformative Power on the Damascus Road

This love story is about competing visions of love: one grounded in white supremacy, white heteropatriarchy, and contempt and another predicated on mutuality, solidarity, and intersectional redemption. COVID-19 has placed the world on the road to Damascus–a moment of crisis that can bring about clarity of vision, conscientization, and liberation. The Damascus Road held the transformative power to mutate Saul from a blind genocidal massacrist into a revolutionary, radical adherent of redemptive love. This is the story of a Black GI and a Korean woman who found love during the Korean War, not on white heteropatriarchal terms of hypersexualization and sexual exploitation, but rather an intersectional interconnectedness grounded in the spaces of the subalterns–those in the margins. In this historic pandemic moment, people can continue in silos of hatred and contempt and surely die, or find a mutuality of connectedness and the redemptive power of solidarity and live.