@RiJayden: My opinions on Black Lives Matter are all kind of torn. The best way to sum it up would probably be to say I support their cause but not their individual actions (or, with respect to queer PoC, their collective lack of action). I can already tell this comment is going to be TL;DR, and I’m sorry, but I need to vent and organize my thoughts.
I completely support the fundamental goal of Black Lives Matter and their demand to fix a system rigged to perpetuate a cycle that keeps PoC at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder by making the rest of society suspicious of them, encouraging shit like racial profiling, and enabling the grossly disproportionate incidence and severity of police brutality against PoC, then blaming them for all of this and using it as a justification to keep them at the bottom of the ladder. And I totally 100% agree with both their criticism of said system and with the principles of fairness, equality, and social justice that make fixing it a moral obligation of society. Thing is, BLM has no organized, governing structure, and that makes it a lot like Anonymous: able to be a force of good and bad at the same time, depending on wherever their collective mindset and actions lead them. Unfortunately, the collective aren’t steering BLM very well right now.
I became wary of the BLM collective when a minority started peddling transphobic and homophobic bullshit, but the rest of the collective showed no sign of scrambling to dissociate BLM from that anti-queer bullshit and make it crystal clear that it has no place in BLM (or even civilized society as a whole). They made no effort to use their louder collective voice to drown outand thereby effectively silencethat bullshit and excommunicate the individuals perpetrating it from the rest of BLM.
But sure, whatever. LGBT issues aren’t the focal point of BLM, so I could let that slide. However, when I truly took time to notice the actual visibility of queer PoC in BLMor, more accurately, the near-total lack thereofI completely rejected the legitimacy of BLM as a voice for PoC. I have a very hard time accepting this level of invisibility and shrugging it off because “Well, that’s not what this group is about.” Black and queer are not mutually exclusive, so at least a small but visible part of BLM should be about that and reflect it. If the narratives of queer PoC are not a welcome, visible part of BLM’s discourse, then BLM is not a legitimate voice for PoCit is a heteropatriarchial, binarist mouthpiece for a select group of heterosexual cisgendered PoC whose voices are in line with heterosexist binary norms (which, ironically, were defined earlier by the same white social hegemony BLM stands against now).
There are not words for how incredibly awkward I feel calling this shit out as a white man, but as a queer man, I refuse to ignore it or cave into objections that it is not my place as a non-PoC to define what BLM ought to be. Fuck, I ain’t even saying what BLM ought to be; I’m just stating what BLM has to do to actually be what it is positioning itself as. I have friends who are black and queer, and they deserve better than this. And this is probably the only race discussion where “I have black friends!!” is not a hilariously disingenuous evasion of the topic at hand.
TL;DR: Intersectionality motherfucker, have you studied it?
