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This morning on Twitter, Mia had a few words for white people who “disagree” with PoC about racism. It’s funny because it’s true.
While many in our community post about how Caitlyn Jenner is so courageous for transitioning, they are somehow blinded to seeing the real heroes before them. Real courage is being the lone voice in a room full of fake allies and still speaking up. Real courage is putting your immigration status and life on the line to fight for your immigrant trans sisters. Real courage is crashing a party at the White House to demand liberation for your people.
I’ve always believed that I should be kind, above all other things. Treating people with respect in this unjust world sure isn’t a bad thing. At times, kindness can be courageous, can be loving, can be bold. It’s kept me safe, helped people around me feel good, feel comfortable.
Only there’s nothing good or comfortable about sitting with white supremacy as it destroys our communities. Being nice has its limits. It can’t mean facing racism with a smile, trying my damnedest to kill it with kindness while it comes at us with bullets.
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“I found a new community of queer people of colour, queer brown people and queer desi people. But for most of these people, religion was not important. It was never spoken about and it taught me not to speak about it. I understood religion in a way that was so tied to culture, heritage and language, it became something I acknowledged in a different way. Something that was in my past, something that I let go of.”
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“When I see us, as oppressed people, talking a lot about survival, but
not talking as much about joy and happiness, I wonder…what are we
surviving for?”
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People are illogical in their bigotry: how can one support Bruce Jenner while simultaneously shaming and attacking Amiyah Scott (who has always been a lightning rod for transmisogynoir, for daring to be herself) and Laverne Cox, or any trans woman of color? The same people cheering “YAAAAAS BRUCE! LIVE YOUR TRUTH!” were calling Amiyah a “man” and “a fake woman” just two weeks beforehand. The same people cheering Bruce today will be erasing black trans women tomorrow.
White definitions about how to deal with trauma are steeped in the privileged assumption that you have been told by the world that you are fully human. That you have been told that you can heal, can hurt and can access help. As a Black Queer person living under these oppressive systems, that is not something I have been told. Before I could begin to heal, I had to learn to access the humanity I had been denied under these systems.
“After I’d just had my hair cut, I bounced along my college reception on a bubbly cloud. My friend gasped, stuck a hand out and patted my hair.
My spine stiffened. I pulled away.
She grabbed me again. I felt jolted out of my body, my skin crawling. More people crowded in. I told them, first laughing, to stop. They didn’t. They never did.”
There are so few resources for people of color, period. Not to mention our vibrant intersectional identities and creative work. We either have to make spaces for ourselves – often unsustainable and without funding – or push past one another to get into positions of opportunity. And even our victories face outward. The acknowledgment serves to prove that we matter to people in power, even if we know that these are our stolen resources handed back to us. I’m not ignorant of the ways oppression sets us against our own, but how do we work against the impulse to covet and tear each other down?