Anatomy of a Mango: Flesh

This is the second essay in Anatomy Of A Mango, a series where Dani peels back the sweet, tart layers that have led to her “fruitful”, healthy sexuality.

Sex, for me, is very much about the exploration of another body and how that exploration leads to a different understanding of myself. I consider myself to be quite in touch with my own sensuality. I am, in turn, very in touch with my sexuality and what it means to be sexy. This assuredness didn’t just come out of nowhere, I had to work for it. Seek it, fight for it in my own way. I am a fat, Black, lesbian woman; four identities that have been notoriously met with hostility and violence.

In sexual relationships, as I said in the last essay, women of these identities are often put into boxes of either a mammy figure or a fetishized body. The question of personhood is not given space in these kinds of encounters. Being of these identities can make it difficult to accept oneself and value your person, your body, your happiness. Having sex in this body, I have come to learn a lot about myself and what I will or will not tolerate. Being someone who has shared my body with many people, I can tell you that through each one I have journeyed to an understanding of my deepest desires and what fulfillment I want in my life. This ventures beyond sexual fulfillment and extends into almost every aspect of my life.

One of the ways in which I have sought and found comfort in my own body was through random hookups and unattached sex with multiple partners. We live in a culture that sees sex between unpartnered individuals as void of substance and any real value. Monogamous, long term love is believed to be the only way to engage in healthy relationships with others. It is the natural end to a life of “dating around.” However, I have learned things from hookups just as I have learned from long term relationships. Even little love affairs that last two weeks or only one night can be educators.

However, I have learned things from hookups just as I have learned from long term relationships. Even little love affairs that last two weeks or only one night can be educators.

I am always seeking more self-knowledge, but I’m not necessarily ready to enter into a serious relationship with someone. I want to continue to have fun and engage in smart, safe, hoe activities! There is so much we can open ourselves up to when we start to question the mode of relationships we are supposed to value most.

This time we find ourselves in the fall of 2014. After a brief battle with homelessness and graduating from college, I set out to live on my own for the very first time. I had a seemingly legit job. The house I moved into was owned by a nice enough white lady who put one of those HRC equal sign stickers on her fridge when I moved in. I felt like I had finally found where I was supposed to be. I threw dinner parties and made custom cocktails for my friends. It was, on its surface, a great life.

One day at work we had done a little “get to know each other” training about how we deal with conflict. I forget most of what this thing was about, but the gist was that if you responded to conflict in a certain way, you were supposed to stand in a group with others who matched that. I stood in my selected group and watched as a short, Black woman with locs danced across to her side of the room with people that “gave in” during a conflict. She quipped, “ask my girlfriend, she always gets what she wants.”

My attention was immediately captured. Not only had a spotted another gay in the room, but she was cute. She had a girlfriend, but that was of no consequence to me. (I was a different person then, living a vastly different life. I’m not exactly proud of that but it is what it is.) We’ll call this woman C. C and I met and hit it off pretty well from the beginning. I liked her sense of humor and that she seemed incredibly into me, so very into me, in fact , that soon her long term relationship was over and we were spending time talking outside of work. C was really beautiful, and I was flattered to have someone spending so much time thinking of me. At the same time, I was courting two other women from our workgroup, but it was C that caught me.

The first time I invited her over to my house we had discussed chocolate and wine, and so it was the theme of the evening. She brought the chocolate and I supplied the wine. The sexual tension between us was palpable. I didn’t stop to think that maybe she’d need some time to recover after ending a long relationship. I didn’t think about anything but getting her into my bed. Eventually, I had enough of laughing and leering at each other as we sipped from our wine glasses, and so I asked, “What did you come here for?” She laughed and suggested we move the party upstairs. I happily obliged and led her into my bedroom where it didn’t take long for us to fall into a makeout session.

Kissing C was a little like drowning. I liked it and hated it all in one swoop. It felt vulnerable and raw, and so I turned my face away and proceeded to kiss her neck, allowing my tongue to flow over her deep brown skin. C was the first squirter I had been with, and I learned that day that making a woman cum imbued me with an incredible sense of power and dominance. Once I got going it was hard for me to stop. I wanted to hear her whimper, scream, beg me not to stop. We fucked without abandon for what seemed like hours.

I was the dominant partner and I loved being in control. I loved that she was bratty and teasing, but would eventually do what I told her to do. When I made her beg, she begged. When I told her to crawl, she would crawl on her knees toward me, she wouldn’t touch me until I told her to. When she did touch me, my body felt alight with desire. There was a flare in the pit of my stomach, the flames flashing, and licking, the more desperate she was to touch me the more excited I grew.

When I made her beg, she begged. When I told her to crawl, she would crawl on her knees toward me, she wouldn’t touch me until I told her to. When she did touch me, my body felt alight with desire.

C and I would continue to hook up on and off for about two years, even after we stopped working together. Our end was fairly terse, she got into another relationship but still wanted to sleep with me without her partner’s approval. By this time I had changed my life quite a bit, and so being the other woman didn’t sit well with me. I politely declined and we haven’t spoken to each other since.

When I had entered a sexual relationship with C, I was still very young and struggling with insecurity. She once called me out and said I was “addicted to being wanted” and that was true — I wanted that outward approval and the desire of others to feel okay with myself, I needed it. My inclination toward self-hate was strong and I completely relied on the validation of others to fuel me. Whatever confidence I portrayed was surface level, it did not sit or permeate the flesh.

What C did for me, though, was capture my delight for dominance. Always a soft-spoken, kind, person, I expected sex to be me succumbing to the wants of my partner. I was surprised to find myself so comfortable stepping into the role of top. I found that it was a role that suited me greatly, and so I was able to carry it through many more relationships. Being a femme top is something I love having as a part of my identity. It defies “traditional” modes of sex and relationships, even in some queer circles. Knowing that I could take a dominant role in sex made me more comfortable taking those roles in other areas of my life. In work, I sought more leadership roles and was able to come out of my shell so to speak around the students and parents I worked with. I wasn’t just the quiet one anymore, I could take charge and be in control when it was called for.

There are many rules to having safe hookups, many of which I have broken. Don’t meet someone alone at your home for the first meet up? I’ve done it. Tell a friend your location/who you’re with? I keep my hoeing pretty private (save this essay series). Even with my risky behavior, I’ve had thoughtful experiences that have taught me a lot about myself and the kind of sex I like to have.

About two years ago, I met J on tinder. J was in a great band who happened to be touring through my city, and was looking to have fun. I, of course, offered myself as the fun. I enjoyed offering myself as fun for many touring bands. At the time I met J, I was housing insecure, “subletting” a room from someone I didn’t know. This fact was a source of embarrassment, but when J arrived all of that embarrassment disappeared. J did Muy Thai which I found out from browsing her Instagram. Her body was incredibly strong; when we made out I climbed on top of her and she squeezed my thighs with her hands, marveled at my tits, let me wrap my hands around her throat. She moaned with pleasure as she searched my body and asked what I liked to do.

We eventually agreed on getting ourselves off separately then coming together at the end. We practiced orgasm control and denial, finally being pulled back to each other’s bodies and having orgasms together. Before we came to this conclusion together, J had violated a boundary. She tried to do something that is a huge no for me in any and all sexual encounters. I jumped back, shocked and hurt, she immediately jolted up and apologized profusely. It took me a minute to get back from reeling over the incident, but I was able to within a matter of minutes. This was an awkward and triggering moment, but not one it was impossible to recover from.

When this moment happened with J, I was so surprised by the force with which I had said no. The way both my voice and my body reacted to protect me from a boundary being violated

When this moment happened with J, I was so surprised by the force with which I had said no. The way both my voice and my body reacted to protect me from a boundary being violated. After that we were able to have a fulfilling sexual experience, but only because I had communicated my need at the moment and didn’t just suck it up and take something that I didn’t want. In the past, I would have cut sex short after something like this. We had done a bad job of outlining our do’s and don’ts before we actually had sex, so I decided that conversation was the better alternative.

During that experience, I learned the importance of having those conversations, that even if you are in the heat of a sexy moment you should still stop to have a dialogue about what you can and can’t do. Having these conversations makes it easier to enjoy the body of another without mishaps that can turn into triggers. It also can add to the building of anticipation and desire between the people involved. When I think back on my night with J, I remember it fondly. Later, her band was back in town and we talked, but a night of partying steered her in the opposite direction. I often fantasize about our paths crossing again and the thought stirs me.

Before J, there was H. H was named after an R&B and soul diva which was the first thing that drew me to them. There was a particular photo in their Tinder bio that struck me and left me a little starry-eyed. H and I talked very briefly. They were only in town for a little while and so we decided it was best to get straight to business. We didn’t meet up in person in a public place beforehand. I invited them to my empty apartment within hours of that first message exchange. H was more masc than most of my partners, but the attraction was intense. We exchanged brief hello’s and then I led them upstairs to my bedroom. There was no fumbling over how to get started, no shyness or reservation: we sat down on the bed and began kissing.

I had plans for that afternoon with H. I decided that I was finally going to center my desires. We talked breathlessly over the things that we could and could not do, still kissing and removing our clothes as our boundaries were laid out. I straddled them and rode them until my thighs began to shake, I felt diligent and powerful in my focus to make them cum, hear their cries of pleasure. I jumped off and proceeded to go down on them, asking if they wanted fingers, they moaned yes and I proceeded to reach toward ecstasy. With my tongue and my hands, I was able to bring them to orgasm. I relished in the tightening and pulsing around my fingers, the explosion of wetness and tremors.

After I was done making them cum, they asked if they could return the favor, and I coyly said yes. They scooped me from under my body and threw my legs around their neck. H went down on me for at least an hour before I finally came.

It was the first time anyone besides myself had ever succeeded in bringing me to orgasm.

I remember the feeling of the orgasm mounting in my body, the warm rush of fluid, my shaking thighs. All of my muscles tightened around the scream and I laid back on the bed exhausted. I felt like I had accomplished something monumental. After many partners who hadn’t succeeded in bringing me to that point, I had started to believe that orgasms were impossible for me. This was not due to my partner’s lack of desire or diligence. I had an acute problem with relaxing enough to be pleased. People trying to pleasure me made me tense, my mind wandered or focused too intently on the task at hand.

For a long time, I had sex just to bring other people joy, because other people wanted me and that was enough. I didn’t want to be touched or paid attention to — in some ways, sex was a way for me to disappear into another body. I didn’t want to be seen, I diminished myself to an experience for other people. When I made the shift to bring my own pleasure into the conversation, things finally started to change for me. I began to love my body and see it as something worthy of feeling bliss. The sex got better and more fun. The people that I laid down with had mutual respect and care for me.

My body has always been a tough place to live in. From battling fatphobia to physical and sexual trauma, it had never fully felt like my own, the skin and fat and bone of it all felt foreign and in the hands of someone else. Having a body like mine, one steeped in a political and personal history of violence, it is often hard to imagine how that body can be met with anything but harm. So when I go into these sexual encounters and am touched with fervor and delight, how can I help but feel as though it is a radical act of reclamation, even if I only know very little about the person? Bodies like mine aren’t often included in conversations around sexual freedom. I am supposed to hide, to not believe in my own sexual prowess and power. We own our bodies, and who we get to share them with can be an important emotional step toward self-confidence. It seems contradictory to say I learned how to view my body as my own by sharing it with strangers and friends, but it is a truth that I revel in.

We own our bodies, and who we get to share them with can be an important emotional step toward self-confidence. It seems contradictory to say I learned how to view my body as my own by sharing it with strangers and friends, but it is a truth that I revel in.

Being a person who has a lot of sex comes with its own stigma. Especially as a lesbian, for whom the stereotype is that we get into long, committed relationships and stay until things get toxic. I’ve only had one real relationship and the rest of my sexual life has been hookups or one night stands. What I love and learn about these encounters are the parameters of my body, its strengths, and boundaries, what pleases it. I get acquainted with what I desire in a more intimate way, what I like to touch and taste. Random sex and hookups (when done safely) are great learning experiences on top of being fun and sexy!

The flesh of a mango is, of course, the part that brings us the most pleasure. Slipping off the red skin gives way to a sudden, electric orange. It is firm, sweet, and giving. The way the texture of each piece almost matches that of the tongue. There is an explosion of tartness in my mouth each time I eat one. When I reflect on the moment that mango became a sign of sexual freedom for me, I remember the plate of fruit slices before me, how I used my teeth to pull away the meat from the skin. How sticky and slick my fingers got as I held each piece. With each consumed, the desire began to mount in my body as I imagined eating something else. I love the way some strings of it carry and get stuck in your teeth, the way the scent lingers long after. Even if a hookup only lasts one night, its effect can stick with me for months, or even years afterward. The velvet of each interaction sinking into the core of me.

Foolish Child #77: Black Lives Matter Isn’t a Trend

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: July Is a Black Unicorn

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde is a monthly analysis of works by queen mother Audre Lorde as they apply to our current political moment. In the spirit of relying on ancestral wisdom, centering QTPOC voices, wellness, and just generally leveling up, we believe that the Lorde has already gifted us with the tools we need for our survival.

The language of our time traffics in a lot of terminology that’s so commonplace, the words can lose their potency. I think a lot about the term intersectionality in particular, a brilliant distillation by Kimberlé Crenshaw of the multiple positionalities of marginalized folks. What sometimes gets lost in the use of this term is how absolutely exhausting it is to straddle multiple places and boundaries. Intersectionality is active, requiring a constant calibration between the various identity places you hold, choosing which parts of yourself to emphasize or not. An intersection is a geography — but it is also a place of in-betweens.

For me right now, that in-between is the pandemic within the pandemic, the ongoing issues facing Black people, especially Black queer and trans folks. Dwindling news coverage means dwindling urgency and hope for the reckoning we know we need, but fear will continuously be signaled at and never fully delivered.

What I love most about Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn is how she’s able to crystallize the experience of intersectionality — the feelings of exhaustion, fury, disgust, and hope.

In the title poem, she writes:

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn is mistaken
for a shadow
or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

I’m still angry. I’m still exhausted. The ways in which the outrageousness of this moment have begun to take on a sense of normalcy are both necessary and frightening. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still walk free. And let’s be real, they’re probably running around without masks. Lorde’s own sense of depletion, of restlessness and barely concealed fury are evident in this poem. But so, too, is her unwavering belief in our magic. I keep re-reading this poem trying to conceive of what she means by the Black unicorn.

I want to know how were these terms used then, in 1978 when The Black Unicorn was first published. Was Audre Lorde referring to herself as a unicorn? To all Black people? A defining characteristic of the unicorn is its solitary nature. While Lorde’s unicorn is an obvious reference to race, blackness is also a subversion here, because blackness itself is inherently a tether. It’s a tether to the histories of time and space and race that have come to define our journeys on this plane.

The themes of solitude and of a belonging so enmeshed with violence and grief resonate throughout the collection. In the poem “Outside,” Audre Lorde lays bare this tension in beautifully tender verse. She writes:

In the center of a harsh and spectrumed city
all things natural are strange.
I grew up in a genuine confusion
between grass and weeds and flowers
and what colored meant
except for clothes you couldn’t bleach
and nobody called me nigger
until I was thirteen.
Nobody lynched my mama
but what she’d never been
had bleached her face of everything
but very private furies
and made the other children
call me yellow snot at school.
And how many times have I called myself back
through my bones confusion
black
like marrow meaning meat
and how many times have you cut me
and run in the streets
my own blood
who do you think me to be
that you are terrified of becoming
or what do you see in my face
you have not already discarded
in your own mirror
what face do you see in my eyes
that you will someday
come to
acknowledge your own?
Who shall I curse that I grew up
believing in my mother’s face
or that I lived in fear of potent darkness
wearing my father’s shape
they have both marked me
with their blind and terrible love
and I am lustful for my own name.
Between the canyons of their mighty silences
mother bright and father brown
I seek my own shapes now
for they never spoke of me
except as theirs

I read this collection backward and forward, trying to figure out what compelled me to choose it for this month’s focus. Arguably the biggest difficulty of a series like this is determining which piece(s) speak to the present moment we’re in. What I love about The Black Unicorn is Audre Lorde’s continued insistence that our plight as Black people, as queer people, as women is forever a timely issue.

We are more than talking points, more than a trending Twitter topic. The issues we bring to light are at the center of our lives and our attempts to survive our inheritances. I found myself both nodding and wincing at the vulnerability and longing throughout Lorde’s writing. So often as queer Black women we’re required to perform our pain so our humanity can be rendered as real. And while it’s important to remember Audre Lorde is a product of a time that demanded such performances, she nonetheless refused to make herself palatable. Lorde’s message is a challenge for white people to be better and to do better by those whom they oppress.

In “Power,” Audre Lorde continues enacting the need for poetry with this reminder: “The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being / ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.” She goes on to write:

The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color.” and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10″ black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”

Lorde lives in the in-betweens: between power and disempowerment, fury and sorrow, hope and longing, life and death. The activeness and the labor of her intersectional living take their toll; it requires an intimacy with the precariousness of a life in the between. In “A Song for Many Movements,” Lorde writes:

Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation […] Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence.
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

In the same year that this volume was published, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time and underwent a mastectomy. Her cancer is likely traced to the dangerous factory work she undertook as a young woman struggling to make ends meet and speaks to the very heart of intersectionality — because of her numerous intersections, she took the only work available to her, forced to focus on a measure of immediate security at the expense of a longer, healthier life. At the same time, I think of a unicorn as an inherently fragile creature. Always beautiful and majestic, I always understood them as endangered and in need of protection.

My need to read hope and happy endings into Audre Lorde’s work is more evidence of my own fear of my precarity and of my own death. While I do think hope is at the crux of Lorde’s beliefs, it’s a radical hope that we make an impact and force a change on this world while we inhabit it. One of her most well-known works, “A Litany for Survival,” is heartening in that soothes as much as it emboldens.

Here’s the poem in full:

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.
so it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

What are your interpretations of The Black Unicorn?

Anatomy Of A Mango: Skin

This is the first essay in Anatomy Of A Mango, a series where Dani peels back the sweet, tart layers that have led to her “fruitful”, healthy sexuality.

In the summer of 2016, I was a young, fat, Black dyke on the hunt for community. I spent most of my time with the kids at the non-profit I was working at, and during my off time, I had been living with a slew of strange roommates that I didn’t get along with. When I finally found roommates I liked, who were brave enough to explore our community, they came back to me to rave about a community living house they had found with cool, queer, leaders.

I was the kind of roommate who kept to myself and my little room. After work, I didn’t really hang out much except to maybe head to a bar or share a bottle of wine every now and again. My new roommate, however, was in the service industry and so knew where every party was. He always brought home expensive wines and beautiful people. His girlfriend at the time was a friend from college so we would all hang out, talk shit, and get high. This particular community they had discovered, centered around food as a mode of connection. Members of the household would take turns making meals for themselves and members of the larger community of surrounding neighborhoods.

I notoriously don’t like to eat around others, and was originally skeptical of trusting (mostly white) strangers with preparing food for me to eat. Hearing that the community was headed by lesbians that used to be a couple was enough to get me off the couch and into their door. I sauntered into that house weeks later in a thrifted crop top, flowy shorts, and a necklace that read “Dyke” in bold blue lettering. It didn’t take me long to make that place a home or to start sleeping with the head of the community.

She was the type of woman that domineered conversations, often the center of attention, and happy to occupy that space. When we were just getting to know each other, I innocently texted her that I had gone to the grocery store and found some really good mangoes that I was enjoying eating. She replied:

“Don’t mangoes increase the length and intensity of your orgasms?”

On our first official date, we ate mangoes and drank wine on my couch and had hot, incredibly sweaty sex in my converted closet bedroom. We didn’t make each other orgasm the first time, but it was still one of the best sexual experiences I’ve ever had. When I eat mangoes, I still think about her. I can vividly remember that encounter: the touch and taste of another woman coupled with the tartness of mango still on my tongue. I can’t help but associate mango with sex in some greater way now. The dewy, tender texture of the fruit, the deep red or green skin, the way it gives to the fingers. I once had a friend text me and ask which fruit is more sexual: mango or grapefruit, and its mango, its mango.

I can vividly remember that encounter: the touch and taste of another woman coupled with the tartness of mango still on my tongue. I can’t help but associate mango with sex in some greater way now.

As a fat woman, summers are always hard for me. The heat makes me want to strip, but the size and shape of my body make me want to hide it. After college, I put on weight suddenly, due to battling an eating disorder for most of my teens and early twenties. Growing up as a fat kid, I had begun to tie my sexual attractiveness to my thinness. So, putting on that weight made me feel so incredibly vulnerable, so stripped and bare that I couldn’t be missed. My skin felt taut and a blazing red. Sudden weight gain, especially when coupled with an eating disorder, can be one of the most disorienting experiences for anyone to go through. It felt like my clothes had stopped fitting overnight, and that all eyes were on me when I entered a room. One of the biggest challenges I face to this day is that I cannot bear to be seen. It’s a constant fluctuation between attraction to myself and finding who I am utterly repulsive — with the latter coming on like strong, persistent blockades.

Overwhelmingly, the messaging we place on fat bodies is one that is diminishing. We are told that we are unattractive; when we eat what we want, we are scolded. When we eat within different dietary restrictions, we are laughed at out of a presumption of futility. The same goes for whether or not we are actively exercising or not. The general attitude towards fat people is that whatever you are doing it is never enough, because why would you be fat if what you are doing was working? Fat women are stripped of our sexuality through being made into mother figures, that maternal situating often paired with becoming an emotional dumping ground and a stripping of personhood. If we are not desexualized then we are fetishized by chasers who want to fuck is in private, but not claim us in public. Despite notions that we are more progressives and tolerant than our straight counterparts, these dynamics can show up in gay relationships too.

My first sexual experience with a woman was with another fat woman. She was my good friend’s sister, who had come to visit him while we were still in college. I remember her face was bright and heavy-eyed, she had lighter freckled skin with tightly coiled sandy brown hair. We stood on the steps of my college’s ABC house (Association for the Advancement of Black Culture) when I coyly asked if she was into women.

“I like girls, I like guys, I’m kind of into everyone.”

Later that night we partied hard as we usually did in those days. We ended up crashing in the basement of the house with her friend. Somewhere in the night, we laid down next to each other, each of us so aware of the other’s body. My head still lightly spinning from the alcohol and the drugs, I stared out the window as her fingers slowly started to trace my back down to my thighs.

“This is it,” I thought “I’m gonna have sex with this woman.”

I tentatively rolled over to face her. We kissed; it felt warm and natural, a kiss far above the many I had shared before. We stumbled to our feet still gripping each other and she led me by my wrists to the other room where there stood only a table and a deep-seated, rounded chair. I thought I would take control in the moment — my desire for her, and for the experience felt all-encompassing — but she pushed me into the chair without hesitation. Our clothes came off in a blur; when her mouth found my breasts I screamed and she quickly covered my mouth. Our bodies, so similar in shape and color, collided together and fit perfectly. It was like we already knew each other so intimately.

She touched and kissed my stomach and I felt butterflies instead of the intense impulse to recoil. I held her hips and pulled her deeper into me. When her head finally descended between my legs, I held it there as if my life depended on it. It was the first sexual experience I had where I felt okay in my body. Up until then, for whatever reason, I had only had encounters with conventionally thin people. This was not out of my lack of attraction to different bodies, but they seemed to be the only ones interested in me. Having put on weight, I thought no one would find me attractive again, and being proven wrong was blissful.

There is a different level of intimacy and affirmation that I have found when having sex with other fat people. Thin people approach the fat body like a series of insecurities. They see the swell of a stomach or rolls of fat on the back and assume that you hate those parts of your body, and so they touch those parts of your body with that malice or avoid them altogether out of fear and repulsion. It comes off as shame at being attracted to you and your body.

In the latter days of our relationship, the sex with the community leader became marred by this shame. She started making unwarranted comments about the way I ate and how much food I consumed. Suddenly, it was “too hard” to make me orgasm so she stopped trying. I would lie in the dark and touch myself next to her while she dozed off to sleep or lazily played with my chest if I asked her to. She was conventionally attractive in every way: white, blue-eyed, fit. She would often suggest we go on a relaxing bike ride, then spend the grueling twenty-mile ride out in front of me, not caring how far I fell behind. Our relationship had become toxic, she could only see the differences in our bodies instead of the powerful intimacy we had once shared. The dynamics in our emotional relationship filtered into our physical relationship which is when I knew it was over.

Many thin people can’t do so because that would mean letting go of the myth that they are more desirable, more deserving of love, and superior to their fat friends and lovers.

The fact that our sexual relationship was once fruitful is proof that fat and thin people can have good sex, but there has to be a fight to address internalized fatphobia. Many thin people can’t do so because that would mean letting go of the myth that they are more desirable, more deserving of love, and superior to their fat friends and lovers. Holding on to that superiority, in a way, makes sense. When you’re gay, you often feel disempowered in the world. If you’re fit and gay, you hold on to the thing that gives you access to power the most — just as white gays covet their whiteness. One of the issues with holding on to that sense of superiority in sexual relationships is that it makes you bad at sex.

I’ve had bad sexual experiences not solely based on my thin partner’s incompetence and narcissism. It also, in part, had to do with my own insecurities about my body. I was never more aware of the scope of my body than when I was with smaller people. Thoughts would race through my head: are they going to make a comment about my body, am I sweating too much, if I get on top will I hurt them? The messaging about fat bodies had gotten to me.

The intersections of my life as a fat, black, woman came to a head during experiences with sex and dating. With smaller people, I often relegated myself to the realm of a goofy Black friend and not someone that they could actually see themselves with in public. Having been a person that was once skinny, I thought I would be more attracted to me and so other people would fall in line. That wasn’t the case. Even as I went from a size 16 down to a 2, I couldn’t grasp on to the confidence I thought I had worked hard for.

When I made the slow trickle back up to a size 14, I would wear the same black hoodie and sweatpants in public even on hot summer days. I ate in secret and often in excess, I addressed my every move with derision. Being fat, I had to learn how to shrink myself, to become invisible in public spaces. That meant wearing nondescript clothing, curling into a ball on the bus so other people weren’t afraid to sit next to me, being painfully mindful of how I looked while eating in public spaces (and also more often than not, eating in private.) In sexual and romantic relationships, it meant completely ignoring thin and muscular suitors out of an assumption that they would never be into me. On dates, I would wear my best clothes but make sure my arms and legs were covered.

I’m not entirely clear on how I made the switch from black sweatpants to the bold woman that showed up to a stranger’s house in booty shorts. I think, in part, I was just hot. Sweating away the hours was miserable. I do know that one thing that helped change things for me was consuming media that had bodies that looked like mine. The body positivity movement really started gaining steam as I exited college.

Following Instagram and Tumblr accounts of fat women of color not only helped me to see my body type reflected in ways that were powerful and sexy, but it also began to chip away at the fatphobic idea that fat = not healthy (later on I would adopt the idea that whether or not fat people are healthy is of no consequence, that even if we only eat “bad” foods we are still deserving of respect and to be left the fuck alone.) Their bodies were struck into yoga poses or spread in glorious, sexy positions. It was like the world had begun to shift, or at least, the world I was creating for myself.

Not long ago, I had a hookup with another fat person. We met on Tinder, where the first line in my bio used to be “don’t talk to me if you hate fat people.” They responded, “who hates fat people, I will fight them!” which made me laugh because they had huge cheeks that gave their face that cherubic innocence. I had just ended a relationship and had my heart wrecked by a rebound. One night, they invited me over to eat Oreos and watch movies with them and their roommates, we were basically neighbors at the point so I walked over in dowdy dress, not sure what to expect.

The evening went on and eventually, their housemates trickled out of the room and to their own beds. I stayed, with my legs crossed, and decided to make my move. I plainly asked, “did you invite me over here to make out or not?” They seemed flustered by my boldness but quickly replied yes, and so they pulled me into them. In what was one of the most dyke-y sexual experiences I’ve ever had, we had sex on their bed with a dog and cat watching from their separate posts in the room. I straddled them, letting the plush curl of their lips find my neck, my nipples, the folds of my stomach. We had a brief struggle for the top, my desire to be explored and pleasured overcame me and I allowed myself to be put on my back.

I once wrote that the point of touch is to be made, to have your body outlined by your partner. When another fat person touches me, it is to be made whole.

On top of me now, they kissed me, and they were fucking good at it. Their tongue traced my lips and met my own. They hurriedly took their own clothes off and I could make out the glory of their body in the dark. All of it moving toward me in a way that made my stomach jump with anticipation. Our stomachs rubbed together as their fingers found the space between my legs, tickling and teasing until I begged for more. When they began to use their tongue it felt as though I couldn’t catch my breath. As if the bed itself were unstable and falling. It wasn’t long before I had an orgasm, screaming into a pillow so as to not wake their roommates.

These experiences with fat people are always grounded in a space of affirmation, whether moved by tenderness or roughness. I once wrote that the point of touch is to be made, to have your body outlined by your partner. When another fat person touches me, it is to be made whole. They do not try and leave out the rolls, the stretch marks, the softness, and dimples. There was no shying away from the form that night. There is nothing sexier than that: being fucked and fucking someone who is secure in both of your bodies.

Being that we are currently in the midst of a global pandemic, I haven’t had any particularly grand hookups lately. The last one I had was probably in March before things really gained steam. I’ve gained weight recently, and I am again in a space where I am battling the impulse to demean myself — those old ideals do not disappear overnight. What I can do now is lean on my fat friends, look at our lives, and the communities we’ve built and feel joy. Here’s the thing: even in my worst moments, I know I’m hot. I know there are people who would fuck me at any weight just to say they got the chance to. It probably sounds arrogant as hell but I’m entitled to that arrogance. When you’ve been put down for most of your life you get to be a little cocky every now and again.

When I’m feeling a way about my body I take a long shower, put on some oil or body butter, and spend a good chunk of time in the mirror looking at the things I do love, and giving love to the things I struggle with. I put on my favorite lingerie and take nudes that I send to crushes, former and possible future lovers. These singular moments with my body are a way to view myself as sexy, not attached to anyone else, not basing my attractiveness on other people. That way, when I do come together with another body, it is with self-assured confidence that isn’t reliant on the assumed opinions of others. But it is in those moments, with others, where my body can become lively again. Where I can feel and be felt, realized and reddened with heat and sweat and slaps. Sex with other fat people is where I can begin to heal and decolonize my desire — to become more of myself, rolls and all.

When I touch the skin of a mango I think about the flesh inside of it, how my fingers press into it softly when it is perfectly ripe. I think about how easy it becomes to push back that skin to reveal the glorious fruit beneath, its fullness and tartness. Its smoothness gives way to the anticipation of being fed. The bright colors, how the red blends to marigold and surrenders into green. Just the gradient of color makes you hungry and expectant of something sweet. I’ve taken to thinking it’s synonymous with pleasure and weight. Its heftiness is so pronounced as it swells in my hand. Oftentimes, the heavier the mango, the sweeter it is, coupled with the sharp scent it emits from the stem. I try to take this attitude and turn it toward my own body and the body of my lovers, to treat us like fruit that is wanting to be tasted.

Europe’s CuTie.BIPoC Festival Is a Life Raft in the Sea of Whiteness

Foolish Child #75: The Instructions Are Right There, People

Black In Space: A Virtual Black Pride Experience

Black Pride is an opportunity for my community to celebrate our resilience, honor our history, and organize for a better future. This year, instead of celebrating Memorial Day weekend with my community in-person, I did it on Zoom. I attended afro-futurist art shows, alien burlesque performances, and intergalactic dance parties, all from the safety of my couch. Black in Space: A Virtual Black Pride Experience gave Black queer folks an opportunity to come together, as the COVID-19 health crisis requires us to socially distance.

Credit Daniela Tai

The History of DC’s Black Pride

The first Black Pride in the nation took place in Washington, DC in 1991. Dr. Nikki Lane, a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, detailed the origin story of Black Pride during Black In Space’s opening ceremony. Lane explained, “Black pride was a public health intervention. It was [a response to] the refusal of the state and LGBT rights movement to recognize the value of Black life.”

Washington, DC was once home to some of the most popular Black gay clubs in the country, the most notable being The ClubHouse, founded in 1975. Lane said, “[The ClubHouse] was modeled after the exclusive New York City clubs where you had to have a membership to get in. At its height The ClubHouse had 4,000 members.”

At the time, racial discrimination at white gay clubs was rampant — Black patrons were either refused entry or required to provide multiple forms of identification to enter. To cultivate a space where Black folks were not only welcomed, but celebrated, The ClubHouse held a yearly event called The Children’s Hour. The Children’s Hour took place every Memorial Day weekend, and was “an annual night of partying and celebrating Black gay, lesbian and trans culture,” said Lane. The Children’s Hour would continue until 1990, when The ClubHouse closed its doors in the wake of many of its members dying from complications of HIV/AIDs.

The first Black Pride would fill the gap left behind by The ClubHouse’s Children’s Hour. Led by Welmore Cook, Theodore Kirkland and Ernest Hopkins, a group called the Black Pride Committee put together a day long festival that “would bring attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis, while simultaneously calling attention to the white washing of general pride celebrations.” Lane described, “the first Black Pride celebration was held on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend at Banneker Park in Northwest DC, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Their mission was to raise funds for organizations serving Black folks affected by HIV/AIDs. They were also interested in disseminating very important information about HIV/AIDs prevention to the folks attending the events. Just over 800 people attended that first event, [and since then] Black Pride has blossomed to become a celebration that happens all across the country.”

You can learn more about that first Black Pride on A Celebration of DC Black Queer History created by Black Youth Project 100 DC Chapter.

Black in Space: A Virtual Black Pride Experience

Credit Daniela Tai

Black in Space: A Virtual Black Pride Experience followed in the legacy of the first Black Pride event. When it became clear that our community could not come together in person, co-creators Lee Levingston Perine and Patience Sings began to put together a five day virtual Black Pride experience — in only six weeks. Lee Levingston Perine has been an event curator for over a decade, and close friend Patience Sings is part of musical duo BOOMscat. Together they cultivate events through Makers Lab, an LGBTQ centered collective that throws some of the baddest, Blackest parties in DC. I interviewed Perine and Sings about Black in Space, and curating virtual experiences for Black folks during the pandemic.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Samantha G (@shebesamanthag) on May 7, 2020 at 9:02am PDT

What made you decide to put on Black in Space?

Perine: I’ve been creating space in DC since 2008, and during Black Pride specifically since 2012. This year we were going to do a series of programming called “Say it Loud,” and The Rona happened and I was going to scrap everything. But then I thought folks need to come together. Black in Space was actually the name of the party we were going to have on the Sunday of Black pride, and so we took that and made it the name of the festival. It was supposed to be one day of activities and somehow it became five.

Sings: We did not plan to do a five day festival. It was given to us. It was over one hundred artists that we worked with.

Lee Levingston Perine during festival planning Credit: Carter

How did you make sure Black in Space was accessible?

Sings: We had American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters — Billy Sanders and Dina Hobbs — for every event. We wanted to make Black in Space a space for all Black queer people, as accessible and supportive as possible.

Listen you have never been in space like this!!! thank you Billy and MIM!!! #blackinspace pic.twitter.com/ZxCB2Z1al0

— Makers Lab (@makerslabdc) May 22, 2020

Perine: People said they’d been to events with interpreters before, but they hadn’t seen Black interpreters. Billy and Dina were such a huge part of this event.

Sings: They made the experience for so many folks — they really showed how accessible spaces benefit us all.

Perine: Billy and Dina were open to conversation with us. I made a lot of assumptions — we’ll need you for this portion of the event, but not for the dance party. Billy was like “Well, why not? You don’t get to decide how people engage.” And I was like you’re right!

Why did you decide to make it a sober space?

Perine: I’ve been producing events for a long time, and through a lot of it I was in the middle of active addiction. I’ve been on the journey of sobriety for 15 years, and this is the time where it’s sticking and I’m feeling more myself. The way I’ve always created is by thinking: what are the events I want to go to? I get tired of going to events that are so alcohol-focused because that is still triggering for me. One of the reasons I’ve been able to remain sober is because I’ve figured out the importance of boundaries. I have to have boundaries in the spaces I engage in. If I don’t see the spaces I need, I’m not going to complain about them, I’m just going to create them. Black in Space was our first zero proof experience. As a person in recovery engaging in digital experiences is safer for me because I’m in my house. [To keep the space safe virtually] we asked all the performers to not reference drugs and alcohol in their set.

Left to right: Dina Hobbs, Ignacio Rivera, Patience Sings, Shanéa Thomas. Credit: Lee Levingston Perine

Why did you include political education in the event?

Sings: It is important for our work that we talk about Black folks — Black folks aren’t monolithic, but we have a lot of shared experiences. White supremacy is a shared experience. So we wanted to be clear that Black LGBTQ folks are at the forefront of all of these movements. We don’t just support these movements, we create these movements and we create them with joy. You can’t have Black liberation without Black joy. We talk about liberation and revolutionary ideas with joy.

Perine: When I started producing in 2012, I didn’t use words like liberation. When the folks from Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter DC (BLM DC) started coming to events, I learned from them and was able to grow. So the way that we create has grown too.

What made you decide to donate masks to the DC Mutual Aid Network?

Perine: Folks from BLM DC supported Makers Lab events in the past, and when they saw that we were doing Black in Space, they said “how can we resource your project?” So they offered funds, but then we had a follow up conversation and we asked “What is it that our community needs right now?” The community needed masks. So we made a commitment to getting 500 masks. We didn’t know where the money was going to come from, but it was a commitment we’ve made in how we program: to take care of all Black folks. We also made sure that the masks were made by queer and trans owned businesses.

What was it like connecting with our community virtually via chat?

Perine: Brooke Jay, founder of The Haux Hive was our chat hype person, and she was great.

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A post shared by Brooke Jay – The Sensualist (@lovebrookejay) on May 19, 2020 at 10:19pm PDT

Sings: It was lit in the chat function. It was a good ass time. It kind of felt like an AOL chat room circa 2007 with people that I know and love.

Y’all need to be here for this! Only in #blackinspace #StrappedinSpace community conversation! pic.twitter.com/6M8Q7AKR40

— Makers Lab (@makerslabdc) May 23, 2020

What’s next for Black in Space?

Perine: We’re launching Black in Space TV. Some content from the festival will be available, and the shows will cover a range of themes and feature a variety of performers — afrofuturism, spirituality, music, poetry.

Interviews edited and condensed for clarity.

Year of Our (Audre) Lorde: June’s Uses of Anger

“The connections between African and African-Americans, African-Europeans, African-Asians, is real, however dimly seen at times, and we all need to examine without sentimentality or stereotype what the injection of Africanness into the sociopolitical consciousness of the world could mean. We need to join our differences and articulate our particular strengths in the service of our mutual survivals, and against the desperate backlash which attempts to keep that Africanness from altering the very bases of current world power and privilege.”

“How are we persuaded to participate in our own destruction by maintaining our silences? How is the American public persuaded to accept as natural the fact that at a time when prolonged negotiations can […] terminate an armed confrontation with police outside a white survivalist encampment, a mayor of an American city can order an incendiary device dropped on a house with five children in it and police pin down the occupants until they perish? Yes, African-Americans can still walk the streets of America without passbooks—for the time being.”

“Like the volcano, which is one form of extreme earth-change, in any revolutionary process there is a period of intensification and a period of explosion. We must become familiar with the requirements and symptoms of each period, and use the differences between them to our mutual advantage, learning and supporting each other’s battles.”

“But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”

“For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”

“For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”

Ferguson and Community Trauma: Defining Peace For Ourselves

Feature image via The Guardian
This piece was originally published on 1/12/2005.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Author’s Note (06/24/20): Five years after having written this article, I find myself living in the so-called US capital. Washington D.C., also happens to be one of the most over-policed cities in the United States with at least 28 different police forces operating in the District. Twenty-eight different forces to criminalize a predominantly Black territory. Twenty-eight different forces of occupation to control a city that must play host to the political machinations of every genocidal Head of State, but strategically withholds tools of political enfranchisement from its residents. In this current moment of Uprising, the Police State has fought tooth and nail to target and staunch any liberatory acts that have translated to “looting,” destruction of property, or so-called violence by violently persecuting and prosecuting (primarily) Black people. These attempts to end the so-called violence is so obviously a tactic to silence the one language that the State listens to because it was successful: people were listening. I share this life update that no one asked for because I realize that when I wrote this article five years ago, I overlooked two things that I would like to name now.

I advocated against speaking around violence, but inadvertently spoke around something else important. It is important to name that while police brutality and State violence target people of color, we have to be intentional about when we say “people of color” and when we say “Black”. In the years since writing this and other pieces, a phrase that addresses this phenomenon has become more popular: “Don’t say people of color when you mean Black.” I am leaving the original use of “people of color” to give readers an opportunity for some critical thinking. As you read this piece, I hope that when you encounter the word “people of color” you will pause and ask yourself, “how might Black people experience this differently than other people of color?” For example, people of color are victim blamed for the violence we experience and for the so-called violence we use to liberate ourselves; but, how might the victim blaming take a different form for Black people? What allowances are other communities of color given that are withheld from Black communities?

The last thing that I originally overlooked but is glaringly obvious to me now is that I did not speak to the violence of the Carceral State. As my political lens has grown and become more explicitly geared towards decarceration, I think a shortcoming of this article was to overlook the way the prison industrial complex often “finalizes” the work of this white supremacist genocidal project. It is a mechanism of social control to dissuade us from using violence for liberation, it disappears people from our communities, and it reframes our own narratives of freedom by encouraging us to adopt and justify punitive practices within our own organizing efforts. In this particular moment of Uprising, the State is using terrorism and conspiracy charges to cage and destroy freedom fighters. It’s not enough to fight for our right on the outside to heal from and use violence when necessary; we must also fight for our communities who are disappeared behind prison walls.

“There’s blood on many hands tonight — those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day,” the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, said after two NYPD police officers died at the hands of gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley. For police forces across the United States, which exist as emblems of institutionalized violence and white supremacy, the blood of slain officers comes as a surprise. Police officers aren’t supposed to suffer; they are instead promised glory for fulfilling America’s agenda to exterminate and destroy. There truly is blood on many hands tonight and many nights past and future; but, for many of us people of color, we are born in bloodshed and will continue to shed blood for a country that depends on our death for its life.

Violence is a fact of life for far too many marginalized peoples, especially for queer and trans people of color. We speak around violence, like it’s a sob caught in the back of our throats. I want to examine the various manifestations and influences of violence specifically in communities of color. Social forms of violence aggressively prey on our communities, carrying out an orchestrated, intergenerational genocide. Violence also carries with it political impulses, from the violence we face from oppressive systems to the historical uses of violence in various movements. I very much believe that for many communities of color, violence is both a weapon against and a tool to empower us. I don’t want to speak around violence anymore. This is my attempt to overcome an inherited fear of acknowledging the socio-political brutalities our communities face, and to speak about violence.

Community Trauma

Children are more likely than adults to experience and witness violence, placing the roots of our community’s violence in childhood. We like to imagine childhood as an age of innocence and honored humanity, but especially for children of marginalized populations, that innocence is denied to them from the onset of life. In 2011, National Surveys of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) interviewed a group of young people to measure the different types of violence that children experience. The survey determined that in 2011, nearly one-half (41%) of children were physically assaulted within the previous year, and more than half (55%) had been assaulted during their lifetime. The survey also found that children often experienced violence multiple times with 48% of children reporting more than one form of victimization in the past year.

The above statistics do not take into account how race, gender, and sexuality influence the violence that children of color experience, and that police brutality, drug related crimes, and systemic violence perpetuated by the healthcare system, education system, and economy disproportionately influence communities of color. (The NatSCEV study does include a portion about gender in a different excerpt.)

The degradation of the person of color begins psychologically, as children who witness or experience violence often demonstrate symptoms of repetitive traumatic dreams, cognitive confusion, pervasive pessimism, and a “sense of a foreshortened future” (Groves, Betsy McAlister. Children Who See Too Much). The degradation of the person of color begins cognitively, as neurological changes that can increase impulsive and violent behavior lead to “lower cognitive functioning, poor school performance, lack of conflict-resolution skills, limited problem-solving skills, pro-violence attitudes, belief in rigid gender stereotypes and male dominance” (Muscari, M. “How Does Exposure to Violence Affect Children?”).

The degradation of the person of color begins spiritually, with the victim blaming that mainstream society flings at people with a history of trauma. The degradation of the person of color begins intentionally, when a country that has displaced, oppressed, slaughtered, and brutalized so many people of color designs a system to implement the destruction of a individual’s humanity on a community level in the name of white supremacy.

We see violence not only in the crimson of blood spilled far too many times but also in the varying shades of brown on the skins of people of color. To be a person of color in the United States, and in the global narrative, is to be the shadow of violence. Our trauma manifests on a community level, to an extreme that self-perpetuates violence intergenerationally to keep us oppressed. The intergenerational cycle of violence begins as violence breeds trauma. Traumatized children become traumatized adults, and due to structural inequalities that forge barriers between people of color and adequate healthcare that may reduce the harm of said trauma, these traumatized adults are forced to carry the burden of their society-inflicted pain. Trying to overcome a capitalist system that economically disenfranchises people of color, housing inequalities that cage people of color in environmental disadvantaged areas, and a number of other societal hindrances, many of these adults will raise the next generation to the best of their abilities, but these children already inherit the trauma that precedes them. What institutions of white supremacy, like the police force, fail to understand is that if violence is our inheritance, it can also be our birthright. If we can engage in community-level healing to disrupt the power of trauma over our communities, we can turn violence on its head and use it as a tool for our liberation.

Violence as a Strategy

via Golden GatExpress
Women of the Black Panther Party

If I had a dime for every time mainstream media fed the public the most sanitized versions of liberation struggles, I would be able to pay off my student loans in one shot. Hetero-patriarchal white supremacist portrayals of marginalized peoples’ successful efforts for liberation as passive, coded through the language of “non-violence,” is an act of historical violence. It robs communities of their own agency and places the burden of justice on oppressed people’s ability to ask for their humanity just right instead of on the oppressor to recognize the everyone’s humanity. In late November, when a Ferguson grand jury acquitted Darren Wilson in the shooting death of teenage Michael Brown, one of the first things President Obama made sure to emphasize was that angry people of color should be peaceful. Asserting that he has “no sympathy at all for destroying your own communities,” President Obama pointed out:

“There are productive ways of responding and expressing those frustrations, and there are destructive ways of responding,” Obama said. “Burning buildings, torching cars, destroying property, putting people at risk — that’s destructive and there’s no excuse for it. Those are criminal acts. And people should be prosecuted if they engage in criminal acts.”

The rhetoric of peaceful protests that the faux progressive, white supremacist State promotes is a distortion. Peaceful protests, most eagerly invoked in reference to the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, were a strategy, not a cure-all or a default method for liberation. In fact, even when Civil Rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Bayard Rustin championed nonviolence as a tactic, they were actively engaging with violence. The nonviolence of protesters in the 1960s only furthered their cause to the extent that the violence of white supremacists remained present.

Revolutionary organizations and individuals also used violence as a direct strategy in their work. From the Black Panther Party, to the American Indian Movement, to the Stonewall rioters, marginalized people make gains through “violent” means as well as nonviolent methods. The mainstream argument that violence will not achieve liberation is a mechanism for control that seeks to make marginalized people complicit in their own oppression. It is a plea for people of color, women, poor folks, queer people, trans people, disabled people, and anyone who happens to find themselves at the intersection of any or all of those identities to make their emancipation efforts as convenient and comfortable for the oppressor as possible.

via Here And Now
Pictured above, nonviolent police officers kindly advocating against injustice

Assata Shakur wisely defended that “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” A murderous State cannot tell us that we must protest “peacefully.” An appropriative State can’t instruct us not to destroy communities that we’ve never been allowed to fully own. In fact, revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon believed that only absolute violence could disrupt the white supremacist system of oppression because it undoes the violence created to keep the oppressed obedient and complacent.

This thought piece is not a call to set fire to everything within a 10 mile radius of your computer; however, it is an examination of violence in our queer communities of color, as well as in our white supremacist nation states. America doesn’t have a conscience, and every acquittal of racist cops who continue the genocide America has spent the last few centuries endorsing proves it. America can’t thrive off of violence and death and still define the moral high ground for liberation. So a murderous State can’t tell us queer folks of color, poor queers, disabled queers, and everyone in between that we must protest peacefully in order for us to get justice. Many of our ancestors were violently forced to build this nation, and it is our birthright to tear it down.

Ownership of Violence

Violence features so prominently in many of our communities, and yet it exists as the unacknowledged specter in queer spaces, and particularly in spaces for queer people of color. In a self-preservative gesture, I think we speak around violence in an effort to have some reprieve from it. While it is important for us to forge spaces in our communities that are explicitly nonviolent to give us a chance for collective healing, we must speak loudly about the violences we face and as a result take ownership of them. We must recognize that the majority of us are covered in someone’s blood, if not our own. When we own the violence we face, we can begin to break the shackles of trauma that keeps our communities disenfranchised and oppressed. We can fortify our communities with love and with hope. Moreover, if we own our violence, instead of fearing it because we see how violence has wrecked our families, neighborhoods, and communities, we can use violence as a tool for liberation, when it is necessary.

We are violence (though not necessarily violent) by nature of our marginalization, but we are also so powerful and so empowered. With every “riot” or protest, I see my fellow people of color, QPOC, and even allies breaking chains of oppression. Violence may have created the state of our world, but we have the right to choose and define peace for ourselves. And the peace I speak of, the peace I dream of is not the State’s model for absolute submission, but our aspiration for liberation.

On the Front Lines: Alternative Forms of Protesting Police Violence

featime image via BC Art Life

This piece was originally published on 1/20/2015.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Here at Autostraddle we’ve done a fair amount of coverage of the recent protests swelling around the issue of police violence and systemic racism. We’ve also covered how queer and trans women of color are often both at the center of violence from the police and prison system, and at the same time on the front lines of the protests to stop it. For people who want to see change, we are full, heavy, and undone by the outpouring of support in the streets. We feel as though, perhaps, we are on the brink of revolution. But many of us haven’t been on the literal front lines. Not for lack of rage or revolutionary spirit, but because our advocacy comes in many forms.

A friend of mine, an arts activist who is a theater-maker and who works a low-paying job serving coffee to wealthy fifth avenue suits, was on her way to work when a protester stopped her and demanded to know why she — a woman of color — was not in the streets demanding justice. Her answer? “I have to pay rent.” A luxury for many protesters is having a warm home to return to at the end of the night, a home for which somebody probably pays rent. Speaking of payment, getting arrested often precludes paying a fine, or bail, or having a friend or family member to call who can come pick you up. What if you are homeless, or estranged from family? What if you have a job that would not be patient if you are late or absent because you spent the evening at Central Bookings? What if you are physically unable to attend a protest because you use a wheelchair or otherwise disabled? What if you just don’t want to chant and march through the streets in the bitter cold?

Friends and family have leadingly asked me, “so did you ever go to the protest?” as though if I hadn’t, I was doing a disservice to our race. I know of other POCs who couldn’t bring themselves to protest because the very weight of the perpetual onslaught of depressing headline after depressing headline left them feeling emotionally weak. But I have found that those same people, wracked with guilt, have contributed in their own ways, sometimes unwittingly. After the first few nights of emotionally charged spontaneous protests broke out in New York, Autostraddle’s very own Gabby Rivera organized a Google hangout session for QTPOC Speakeasy members. We expressed our outrage, our exhaustion, as well the humor that might seem inappropriate to an outsider, but which was so very necessary if we were to have enough stamina to face the day. During the hangout, we came to the realization that what Gabby had done for us was community care. She was affecting change by giving others a place to prepare themselves to affect change. That is valuable. It’s not as visible as attending a march. There were no selfies to prove we had been there. But it had tangible value.

Alternative forms of protest are necessary to make activism accessible. Sometimes, they’re even more effective at creating change than a permitted march. Here at Autostraddle, we have heard from readers far and wide who say that the content on this website has given them a sense of community they couldn’t find elsewhere. I mean, not to toot our own horn but that’s freaking incredible! Where better to convene a mass of rad queers than on the web? Where better to plot the revolution? If you are feeling bummed about not being able to, or not wanting to attend a protest or a die-in, you don’t have to be. There are a myriad of ways you can contribute, and you might already be doing it without knowing.

When petition sites like Change.org started popping up, there was a lot of skepticism surrounding the effectiveness of a petition that was just too easy to sign. Long before any of these phenomena, “Facebook activists” were taking advantage of easy access to hundreds and thousands of people to disseminate information from independent and alternative news sources, to the annoyance of some, but the benefit of many.

Now, the positive effects of cyber activism are becoming clear. Petitions on Change.org and other sites have countless success stories. I first heard about the Michael Brown case from a Change.org email. I know many others who received this tragic news the same way. This was amidst the End Stop-and-Frisk campaign taking off in NYC, and I believe the confluence of these two events have inextricably tied Ferguson to New York, even before the police murder of Eric Garner. Something as simple as signing up for an email listserve brought the Michael Brown case to the doorstep of every American, and helped galvanize a nation. Previously, the memory of Michael Brown would have been reduced to a statistic.

Entire revolutions have been facilitated via Twitter and Facebook. American movements have taken a page from their book, using Twitter to locate protests in real-time without alerting the authorities. Other hashtag movements have given a voice to those usually marginalized. For example, the twitter-facilitated movement, #YouOKSis encourages women, especially women of color to be active bystanders in instances of street harassment, and to share those experiences on twitter. Creating a community where women of color know they can rely on others to check in and prevent potentially violent interactions in the street can offer peace of mind to women whose voices are often drowned out by the patriarchy.

Speaking of creating space, #ThisTweetCalledMyBack recently came to the defense of what has been dubbed “Toxic Twitter.” Toxic Twitter refers to primarily POC women and marginalized communities that have found their voices in the Twitterverse:

We are your unwaged labor in our little corner of the internet that feeds a movement. Hours of teach-ins, hashtags, Twitter chats, video chats and phone calls to create a sustainable narrative and conversation around decolonization and antiblackness. As an online collective of Black, AfroIndigenous, and NDN women, we have created an entire framework with which to understand gender violence and racial hierarchy in a global and U.S. context. In order to do this however, we have had to shake up a few existing narratives…

The response has been sometimes loving, but in most cases we’ve faced nothing but pushback in the form of trolls, stalking. We’ve, at separate turns, been stopped and detained crossing international borders and questioned about our work, been tailed and targeted by police, had our livelihoods threatened with calls to our job, been threatened with rape on Twitter itself, faced triggering PTSD, and trudged the physical burden of all of this abuse. This has all occurred while we see our work take wings and inform an entire movement. A movement that also refuses to make space for us while frequently joining in the naming of us as “Toxic Twitter.” Why do we face barriers at every turn? If you hear many tell it, we are simply lazy women with good internet connections.

In an age where young women often have cell phones with internet access before they have access to healthcare and social services, why are so many so quick to demean the work of digital feminism in the hands of Black women?… When we ask these questions, we uncover that the only people who meet these qualifications of real activism are cis gender, able bodied people — frequently male.

Online activism is controversial, no doubt. “Hacktivism” is often synonymous with the vigilante hacker organization Anonymous, which has achieved many things by threatening to reveal the personal information of their targets. Often these targets are the subjects of high profile controversies, like the Westboro Baptist Church, or members of the KKK. More recently, Iggy Azalea has been the subject of Anonymous’s ire, after she got into a rather sticky (read: racist) twitter argument with Azealia Banks surrounding the issues of cultural appropriation and solidarity with Black people. The group threatened to release leaked sex tape photos and called her a “trashy bitch.” This kind of misogynist and childish behavior begs the question: who deserves privacy? While we all cower in fear of the elusive NSA, we often applaud Anonymous’ threats because they have progressive ends. But is it really progressive to lord over misguided individuals by threatening to distribute pornographic images of them? Vigilantes not associated with Anonymous, but with the same skill-sets have released nude images of famous women, not-so-famous women, and women who have dared to speak out against misogyny or rape culture. Hacking is a powerful weapon, often misused in the wrong hands. But then, what revolutionary tool doesn’t have the capacity to be misused?

Sometimes art can be more engaging and transformative than a rally or march. Sometimes art has the power to affect more minds than a riot. Theatre of the Oppressed (ToO) is a revolutionary form of theater that teaches visual literacy, and gives oppressed people a platform to not only express their grievances, but address them as well. The creator of ToO is Augusto Boal, a Brazilian man who considered this technique a sort of rehearsal for real life. One of the many forms of ToO is a performance called Forum Theatre, in which members of a community act out a play that describes their predicament, with a protagonist, antagonist and supporting characters. The audience is then invited to “intervene” in the action of the play, performing the piece over and over until a solution is developed that can then be acted out in real life. ToO groups in New York City do a version called Legislative Theatre in which actual legislators participate alongside citizens and social justice organizations to develop policies. In May of 2014, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC put together a legislative theatre festival addressing racism and profiling within the criminal justice system, called Can’t Get Right. Spect-actors (as Boal called participatory audience members), were invited to “watch, act and vote” alongside city policy-makers on reforms that would improve quality of life for Black and brown citizens of New York. In no uncertain terms, this is revolutionary: giving people the tools to be the change they wish to see.

I have heard some compare the recent protests to what it felt like to live through the Civil Rights movement. While I can’t personally attest to that, nostalgia for the revolutionary spirit of the Civil Rights era does seem to be in the air. And with it, have come reworked, or brand new protest songs. Remember when Lauryn Hill came out with Black Rage? The AP recently reported on the resurgence of protest songs from the rank and file protesters, poets and songwriters. And then D’Angelo released his album Black Messiah, with a tribute to brothers and sisters in the struggle:

Black Messiah is a hell of a name for an album. It can be easily misunderstood. Many will think it’s about religion. Some will jump to the conclusion that I’m calling myself a Black Messiah. For me, the title is about all of us… It’s about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them.

Hip Hop and Black music have always had a sociopolitical undercurrent, but it does seem that we’re developing a soundtrack for our revolution — and it’s sounding pretty funky.

Beyond the web and the stage, there are unlimited ways to contribute our time, energy and money towards a world we would want to raise our kids in. Economic boycotts have been a major part of the anti-police violence movement. Temporarily hindering the economy sends a big message to companies that tend to ignore the plight of the very people they probably employ.

While the alternatives to protest discussed here are by no means all-inclusive, hopefully they’ve inspired you to employ the skills I know you’ve got tucked away in that gorgeous, complicated, infinite brain of yours to do something particular to your interests. If you really don’t know where to begin, Tikkun.org has released a flyer detailing exactly 26 Ways To Be In the Struggle Beyond the Streets. Some of my favorites off the list include providing childcare to protesters, and cooking a pre or post-march meal. Whichever way we choose to participate in this movement, it is important to recognize those who came before us and amplify the voices most often silenced. If we follow those two rules, no form of protest is necessarily more or less valuable than another.

Black Trans People Have Been Modeling Mutual Aid Before It Became a Buzzword

In the absence of infrastructure afforded to the support of white and straight communities, Black trans communities have been supporting one another historically. One example, “For the Gworls” has been raising money through rent parties since before “mutual aid” became a buzzword.

When Black trans organizer and founder, Asanni Armon, moved to New York three years ago, friends plugged them into the Black queer scene through organizing collectives like the Black Youth Project. It was through organizing and accessing Black party spaces that Armon, also an up and coming rapper, built community and launched For the Gworls. “Many venues in New York have said no to hosting us for fear there will be a low turnout” Armon says, but parties are busy and thriving with Black joy. Through the doors to For the Gworls, attendees are vogueing to hip hop, R&B, techno, house and afrobeats centered and geared toward Black people and Black trans people in particular. “For anyone who’s experienced New York City’s Black queer party culture, this is no exception.”

Money raised by For the Gworls goes towards paying for someone’s rent, another person’s gender-affirming surgery and any leftover funds are donated to similar mutual aids for Black communities. Their first party in August 2019, raised $1575 for two Black trans femmes. A month later, their rent party aimed to fundraise for three Black trans folks raised $2500 of the $3300 goal; $1500 of that at the door alone.

Whilst the closure of non-essential businesses and a lockdown in response to COVID-19 has meant an end to rent parties and in person fundraising, a new online medical fund has been created in response to the effects of the government lockdown on Black trans people. For the Gworls Medical Fund provides assistance to Black trans folks who need to travel via rideshare to and from medical facilities or are in need of co-pay assistance for prescriptions and (virtual) office visits.

Acts of community care as far back as the late 20th century have existed for Black trans people. For example, the Black house mothers who housed their children and built chosen families from scratch in response to a lack of role models and support systems for queer and trans people of colour. One of the most notable examples of mutual aid amongst Black communities came from the Black Panthers, who provided free breakfast and health programs for organizers.

Before COVID-19, trans people were already four times as likely to be out of work and right now 21.5 million people who are documented to work remain unemployed in the U.S. Job insecurity amongst Black trans people is likely to continue at high rates — funds and initiatives like For the Gworls demonstrate the resilience that Black and trans communities have now and have had historically in the face of a sheer lack of resources and access to resources. This denial of resources happens not only through transphobia, but through racism and colorism.

Job insecurity amongst Black trans people is likely to continue at high rates — funds and initiatives like For the Gworls demonstrate the resilience that Black and trans communities have.

Being an organizer who now has to fundraise online, doing so through social media can be a double-edged sword for Armon; “I try not to look at social media; I try not to see videos of protestors beat up; unplugging when I can helps me take care of myself.” Armon believes self-care is key; “I used to work out and go for walks, then the virus hit. I’m in touch with my spirituality and talking with my friends and my ancestors. I try to engage with them as much as possible because the community can be lifesaving.”

Anti-Blackness and transphobia have shown up in instances of police brutality, often ending in the loss of Black trans lives, amidst the nation’s outrage and “an epidemic of violence against trans women of color” – before and after the murder of George Floyd:

• Nina Pop, a 28-year-old Black trans woman found stabbed to death in her apartment in Missouri early last month.
• Tony McDade, a 38-year-old Black trans man fatally shot by police in Tallahassee, Florida.
• Iyanna Dior, a 21-year-old Black trans woman beaten by 20 men whilst all but one onlooker stood by and watched; Dior managed to escape further violence.
• Riah Milton, a 25-year-old Black trans woman shot and killed during a robbery attempt in Liberty Township, Ohio.
• Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, a 27-year-old Black trans woman whose dismembered body was found in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

McDade is the 12th documented case of trans people killed in the U.S. this year and since then, the number has risen to 15 documented cases. Last year, 26 trans people were killed in the U.S. and of those 26, 91% were Black women.

Black people, femmes especially, do a lot of the work behind the scenes within activism and organizing. It’s no secret that The Black Lives Matter movement was started by three Black women (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi) in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman but there is still work to be done that accounts for all Black lives. Breonna Taylor’s murderers still remain free and names like Mya Hall, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Walter Scott and Sandra Bland are fundamentally important in our need for justice.

Justice for McDade, who was initially misgendered in coverage of the fatal shooting by police, remains left out of many people’s advocacy. The same night as the Stonewall protest, Black Trans Protestors Emergency Fund was launched. “There was a need to make this fund because everybody was talking about George Floyd, but before we had the murder of Nina Pop and recently the beating of Iyanna Dior.”

“There was a need to make this fund because everybody was talking about George Floyd, but before we had the murder of Nina Pop and recently the beating of Iyanna Dior.”

In response to Black Lives Matter protests, For the Gworls partnered with Black Trans Travel Fund, The Okra Project and The Black Trans Femmes in the Arts collective for “The Black Trans Protesters Emergency Fund.” This fund was born through a group chat between the four groups discussing what they each did; For the Gworls covered rent and gender affirming surgery, Okra covered food insecurity and now health resources and rent in response to COVID-19 and Black Trans Travel Fund covered travel for Black trans women to appointments.

Given that so much media featuring Black trans femmes is about trauma, there’s something to be said about For the Gworls cultivating Black trans joy, community and liberation through their initial rent parties. Yet, whilst there is hope for and work towards Black liberation, for Armon, full Black liberation does not seem possible in their lifetime. “When we finally eradicate white supremacy, we still have to do the work of local education to talk about how we need to work within Black communities and how Black people can respect each other.” Armon refers here to gender, sexuality and disability — these labels, layered with Blackness, create additional struggles that Black people can face under colonialist government, culture, society and institutions.

When asked what non-Black people can do for Black communities beyond donating to these funds; “Have conversations about this with other non-Black people in your community,” Armon suggests, “We get lost in different campaigns and issues and the idea of ‘if I just share it I’ve done my work for the day,’ but nothing is more effective than in person communication. Sharing is great, but messaging people directly about these stories and systemic issues as a means to donate to a cause like this is better.”

You can donate to each of the fund mentioned through the links below:
For the Gworls
Black Trans Travel Fund
The Okra Project
The Black Trans Protesters Emergency Fund

Baopu #74: Radical Reconsiderations

On Juneteenth, Heed the Calls of Black Trans Freedom Fighters

Feature photo of Joshua Allen can be found on their Instagram. More images from the recent Brooklyn Liberation March for Black Trans Lives can be found here.

Earlier this month, on June 4th, Joshua Allen was out protesting the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade — in addition to the centuries-long destruction of Black communities at the hands of the U.S. government. Joshua is a Black trans femme and a community organizer, artist, and public speaker who’s been devoting their life to Black liberation since they were a teenager.

Now, as more and more Black people’s murders are gaining visibility though they’ve always been happening, Joshua is once again protesting and fighting for their people. Joined by their friend Mani Chirse, a Black transmasculine person, they went out knowing that the New York Police Department was out for blood. Moreover, the police were actively preventing people from being able to make it home before the curfew, which now now been lifted, in order to make more arrests. As Mani noted, “I can still picture a woman along with her son crying to go home, as she repeats ‘I live up the street, I just want to take my baby home.’ The police officers did not care, she was trapped along with the rest of us.”

Joshua and Mani were arrested that day. While they joined the protest together, they were separated by police. Joshua explained the imminent danger they were in simply for demanding justice for their people: “I feared that they would take us a roundabout way to the detention center and beat us up while our hands were tied. I was afraid I’d be pepper sprayed with my hands tied behind my back and I wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

Meanwhile, Mani had to make a split decision: maintain their gender identity as a transmasculine person or go with the women on a bus to a Queens County detention center. Many urged him to temporarily identify as a woman so as not to be split up from the group of protesters with whom he had gathered. But he maintained his truth, instead. These high-stakes decisions are not something that cisgender protesters have to endure.

While detained, Joshua was placed in a men’s cell. At each stage of the night, from protesting to being arrested and detained, their safety was at risk — but their life was especially in danger as a transfeminine person detained among mostly men. And that is something the cops would have known.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joshua Allen (@joshuaobawole)

We know that Black people are targeted for criminalization and incarceration, as an extension of chattel slavery. Even our laws, the 13th amendment of the constitution specifically, indicates that slavery is abolished except when it applies to incarcerated people. For Black trans women and transfeminine people, there is the additional violence of being regularly placed in men’s units, putting them at risk for assault from staff and other incarcerated people. “A lot of people told me they were worried about me being placed in the wrong cell, but quite frankly if I were in the men’s, women’s, or an individual cell, it would still just be a cage,” Joshua reminds us. “It’s no place for a young person trying to make the world a better place at all.”

Joshua had to strategize their safety within the detention center. They looked to others detained alongside them for help, asking them to watch over them while they napped. The police were randomly selecting detainees to brutalize them before throwing them back inside their cells.

While Joshua and Mani narrowly escaped those beatings, they were left with bruises and lacerations on their wrists. They were able to return home thirteen hours later in the morning. Victims of brutality at the New York protests have since filed a lawsuit against the NYPD.

A week later, Joshua was among the speakers at the Brooklyn Liberation March on June 14th. They were among other Black trans leaders — including Raquel Willis, Ceyenne Doroshow, and Junior Mintt — who had a central message: Black lives will not matter until Black trans lives matter. Standing at the mic, Joshua galvanized a crowd of 15,000 people, shouting: “BLACK TRANS POWER MATTERS.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joshua Allen (@joshuaobawole)

Many trans leaders have reported that this crowd is the largest that’s ever shown out for Black trans people. “It may be the largest gathering for trans rights overall in American history,” said journalist Imara Jones to Democracy Now.

Joining Joshua at the mic was Ianne Fields Stewart, the founder of the Okra Project, an initiative to feed Black trans people experiencing food insecurity. Reflecting on the unique struggles of Black trans people, Ianne explained the following: “The greatest violence that Black trans people face from every side is the violence of silence. Our people are brutalized and forgotten about or even worse, buried under names or truths we never claimed.” Like Ianne and Josh, leaders have challenged the Movement for Black Lives to heed the calls for placing Black trans people at the center of Black liberation.

The insistence that Black trans lives must matter comes after the deaths of Tony McDade at the hands of police, along with Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells and Riah Milton who were killed by civilians. Black trans people are not only in the crosshairs of violence by police but also by the general public. Earlier this week, the case of Tete Gulley was reopened; it was originally ruled a suicide a year ago, but only now is it receiving more attention as a potential lynching. Tete’s name is resurfacing in media as it’s tied to articles reporting on the deaths of Robert Fuller and Malcolm Harsch, who died under the same circumstances.

The impact of Black trans leaders has reached even Dr. Angela Y. Davis, the prolific Black feminist freedom fighter and scholar. She said during an event organized by Dream Defenders that “Black trans women constitute the target of racist violence more consistently than any other community — we’re talking about state violence, we’re talking about individual violence, stranger violence, intimate violence. So if we want to develop an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way… I don’t think we’d be where we are today encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. If it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly effectively resist prisons, jails, and police.”

“I don’t think we’d be where we are today encouraging ever larger numbers of people to think within an abolitionist frame had not the trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy.”

For many years, Black women and Black trans leaders have been pushing for a defunding of the police and abolition of police and prisons as a whole. Many have also reminded us that abolition is a demand that helps us return to the roots of Pride, as an uprising against police brutality towards trans people and sex workers.

As the movement to #DefundPolice continues to gain traction, we cannot forget those who’ve paved the way for abolition to be the central demand of this uprising, especially because abolition is a means of survival for them. We must remember that Black trans people, Black women, Black migrants, and Black sex workers experience the very kind of harm from police that people expect the police to solve — murder, trafficking, and sexual assault.

On this day in 1865, commemorated as Juneteenth, Black people in Texas were told they were free from slavery. This day honors the freedom that Black organizers have been cultivating for many years. It’s fitting then that we, especially non-Black folks who all benefit from the liberation work of Black folks, recommit to freedom for Black trans people who’ve been waiting far too long.

This day honors the freedom that Black organizers have been cultivating for many years. It’s fitting then that we, especially non-Black folks who all benefit from the liberation work of Black folks, recommit to freedom for Black trans people who’ve been waiting far too long.

Ianne Fields Stewart describes a feeling that many share: “Many of the visions that I have for our future… are large dreams that I never thought I would see in my lifetime.” It’s time to bring Black trans dreams into reality in our lifetime. We all owe it to the visionary Black trans people who, as Dr. Angela Y. Davis illuminates, have been building us up to the current moment.

Abolition requires that we not only reinvest dollars spent on police and prisons into community infrastructure like healthcare, education, housing, and more. It also requires us to invest in our shared humanity. Police and prisons by nature strip the humanity of those who are victims to their grip, but they also foster a culture where we are encouraged to make inhumane decisions — like choosing to allow police and prisons to torture and end people’s lives. Abolition requires that we demand our collective humanity by unlearning the values — like transphobia, misogyny, anti-Blackness, and the convergence of all three — that make us complicit in the deaths of Black trans women especially.

Despite the ongoing assaults on Black trans lives, Joshua Allen reminds us that “Black trans people historically have been some of the world’s greatest contributors to social, political, and economic movements around the globe and this uprising is no different. By utilizing art, direct action, media, grassroots fundraising, and leading the cultural conversation, Black trans people have been making vital contributions to our movements for justice. It is for this reason that they must be resourced, to sustain this important work!”

On Juneteenth, donate and follow Black trans-led initiatives to ensure the well-being and liberation of Black trans communities:

• Black Excellence Collective
• The Okra Project
• For the Gworls
• Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective
• Black Trans Travel Fund
• Black Trans Media
• Black Trans Circles
• Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project
• Black Visions Collective
• Black Trans Prayer Book
• GLITS, Inc.
• Trans Justice Funding Project
• TGI Justice Project
• Brave Space Alliance
• BreakOUT
• Solutions Not Punishment

How To Write A Spell Against White Supremacy

This piece was originally published on 10/9/2017.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Author’s Note (06/19/20): Since writing this story three years ago, I’ve acquired more reverence for my family’s Southern Black Baptist traditions—because at least they’re ours. We’ve retained them despite oppression and white supremacy. They’ve sustained us thus far. The Black Church is an undeniable part of my culture. So, nowadays, I’m most interested in syncretizing elements from the Black Church and my witchy spirituality. I’m not returning to Christianity, but rather borrowing aspects of my family’s religious practices that feel good and right to me. Still, my steps to writing a spell against white supremacy apply, especially in these tumultuous times. I hope you glean something from them.

Magic is rarely portrayed as a wholly positive thing. Even the lovable witches in my childhood favorite Hocus Pocus sucked the life out of kids to preserve their youthful looks. Witches, from Tituba of the Salem witch trials to the Wicked Witch of the West, are generally maligned as evil women who need to be destroyed or controlled.

Although magic’s viewed as the immoral sister of religion, both have rich histories in historically oppressed communities. We turn to them for healing and miracles, but there are some key differences between the two. Most religions require worship of a patriarchal figure who punishes you for doing wrong, while magic allows us to harness our power within. Religion, prayer specifically, has been offered as a solution to Donald Trump’s nightmare presidency and white supremacist terrorism, but what if we looked to the power of magic instead?

I define magic as creating desired change by performing rituals for those who guide and protect you, whether they be ancestors, goddesses or a natural wonder.

My altar

Magic is easier for me to digest than the Southern Black Baptist tradition that raised me. This tradition taught me to depend on cisgender heterosexual men to guide my spirituality. It taught me to be ashamed of things that I find pleasurable. When I think about the Black Church, I can’t help but think of white slave masters pacifying “savage” enslaved Black folks with the lessons of Christianity. I often feel nostalgic about the Black Church, and I honor its participation in social justice movements. However, I don’t feel welcome there anymore as a genderqueer feminist since most Black churches adhere to gender roles that disempower women and LGBTQ+ people.

Alternatively, the word “magic” fills my head with images of enslaved Black people preserving their ancestral deities in the Americas by practicing Voodoo and Santería. Magic is an ancestral practice that transcends time and oceans. To me, magic means resilience and connecting to ancestors who survived the tragedy of the Middle Passage. Magic runs through my veins and feels like my birthright. It’s stronger than white supremacy will ever be.

White supremacy forces us to draw our strength from anti-Blackness, heterosexism and patriarchy. I use magic in my everyday life to combat individual and systemic oppression. Being a writer, it’s no surprise my favorite magical practice is writing spells. I write spells to manifest positive things in my own life and the lives of my beloveds. I write spells for the healing and liberation of my communities. The first thing I do when writing a spell is find out what’s happening in the sky. Sometimes the planets are aligned just right to cast an effective spell. Major celestial events such as lunar eclipses amplify the potency of our magic.

Then, I decide who to direct my spell towards. I choose the ancestors or spirit guides who have the power to give me what I need. I’m always adding new names to this roster. Lately, I’ve been learning about Obatala, a West African orisha (saint) who is said to have created humans. I feel a kinship with this androgynous orisha who completely disregards gender and protects disabled people. I see myself in Obatala’s image, and I feel held by them as someone living with disabilities. I hope to incorporate Obatala into more of my spells in the future.

Someone else I honor during spells is Nyabingi, a Rwandese/Ugandan woman warrior who fought fiercely against European colonizers in the early 1900s. My Rwandese partner introduced me to Nyabingi, who’s now a possibility model for the both of us.

My grandmother, an OG witch.

When performing spells together, my partner and I also invoke our late grandmothers. My maternal grandmother Carolyn was a devout Christian, but how she lived her life was magic. Grandma was a compassionate lady whose many gifts were stifled by Jim Crow and patriarchy. She accepted everyone for who they were, grew thriving plants despite living in a small apartment and whipped up soul food that tasted like love feels. Wherever she is, my grandma is shaking her head at Trump. I see her face every time I stand at my personal altar, adorned with photos (including hers), trinkets from friends and family and art made by queer and trans people of color. This is where I cast my spells.

While casting spells, I channel the strength that allowed my grandma to survive during an era when Black women were disenfranchised at every turn. The words in my spells are less important than the intention behind them. My spells are straightforward, stating exactly what I want to manifest and calling on the power of spirit to make it happen. Spell-writing is my time for reflection, meditation and gratitude. I cherish my ritual of casting spells at my altar alone, with my partner and other loved ones. I’m hungry for more opportunities to do magic in community.

What would it look like for Black, Brown, trans and queer folks to include magic in our resistance against white supremacy? I’m hoping that we can begin reclaiming magic and redefining it for ourselves.

Juneteenth: A Celebration Syllabus

Juneteenth, a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, celebrates the day when two-and-a-half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved Americans in Texas finally learned of its existence, and therefore their freedom. It’s a day that celebrates delayed liberation; a reminder that none of us our free until we’re all free.

Just as the Emancipation Proclamation meant nothing to the people who its message hadn’t yet spread to, Juneteenth reminds us that it takes work and time for the joy of liberation to reach everyone. In our current conversations about abolition, our elders remind us that the key to this work is consistency. The objective of this syllabus is to help you and your families begin that work.

The work however, is also joyful! A recent tweet that lit my heart on fire said to party on Juneteenth and protest on July 4th. The enslaved people had long anticipated their emancipation, and when news of it arrived, they were joyful and celebrated together.

Party on Juneteenth
Protest on the July 4th

— Tre’bor Jones MFT (@rogerrickjones) June 9, 2020

This syllabus provides you with materials to learn about the holiday’s history, choose best how to honor it in your life, and most importantly helps you to celebrate!

History of Juneteenth

What are we celebrating? What role does the state of Texas play? Why isn’t Juneteenth a federal holiday? Use these resources to learn about Juneteenth as an historical event and celebration.

• “Juneteenth, Our Other Independence Day”, by Kenneth C. Davis for Smithsonian Magazine
• “Why celebrating Juneteenth is more important now than ever” by P. R. Lockhart for Vox
• “What is Juneteenth” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for PBS
• “So You Want to Learn about Junetenth?” by Derrick Bryson Taylor for The New York Times
• “Juneteenth Fact Sheet” by the Congressional Research Service
• “Celebrating Juneteenth” by Erin Allen for the Library of Congress Blog
• “Juneteenth” by Teresa Palomo Acosta for Texas State Historical Association
• “The Story of Juneteenth” by Lynn Brown for JSTOR Daily

Juneteenth is Queer as Hell

The message of freedom that is centered in Juneteenth has inspired various queer activists, artists, and thinkers to create their own work around the theme. Engage in a few of these for some queer Juneteenth learning.

• Combahee Throughline Immersion 
• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2003)
• “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” by Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade from Captive Genders (2011).
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton (2017). (Read the Autostraddle review here!)

For Families

Juneteenth is a family celebration. I encourage caregivers to engage in the material to find something that’ll work for your unit, and I encourage teens to read up on Juneteenth on their own and initiate your own celebrations within your families!

For caregivers and kiddos

• First Name Podcast, “What is Juneteenth?“
• “Juneteenth” from PBS Kids
• “Kids Books to Celebrate Juneteenth” from NYPL
• Juneteenth for Mazie by Floyd Cooper read aloud on YouTube
• “Happy Juneteenth” from Teaching Tolerance
• “Teaching Kids About Juneteenth” from Wherever Family

For youth and teens (13-20)

• “What Is Juneteenth, How Is It Celebrated, and Why Does It Matter” by Jameelah Nasheed for Teen Vogue
• Come Juneteenth by Ann Rinaldi
• Yo, This is Racist, “Juneteenth Special”
• “The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth” by the National Museum for African American History

Listen and Learn

These podcasts are all short introductions to Juneteenth from a variety of viewpoints, all accessible via your favorite podcast app.

• Today, Explained, “Happy Juneteenth!” 
• The People Class Podcast, “The Quad: Juneteenth”
• The Peas in the Podcast, “Merry Juneteenth!”

Watch and Learn

Documentary and scripted films have all tackled the implications of Juneteenth.

• History of Juneteenth Documentary from Allen Library.
• Miss Juneteenth (2020), directed by Channing Godfrey Peoples
• 13th (2016), by Ava Duvernay

Read about Liberation

If you’re craving even more reading, these books will aid you in your Juneteenth journey of learning, action, and celebration.

• Women, Race, and Class by Dr. Angela Y. Davis.
• Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
• Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

Celebrate Juneteenth!

Part of the work of Juneteenth is celebrating the joy that freedom offers us. Whether through music, dance, film, engaging in these celebrations will offer you a chance to partake in the joyous project of liberation.

• Participate in a virtual weekend of action put on by the Movement for Black Lives.
• Enjoy the new film Miss Juneteenth, available on Apple TV.
• Attend the virtual Juneteenth Music Festival.
• Take action with M4BL and their SixNineteen weekend of action.

24 Actions You NEED to Take to Help Trans Women of Color Survive

feature photo by Serichai Traipoom from 15,000 Stand Up For Black Trans Lives in Brooklyn, Show Us What Pride Month Should Always Look Like

This piece was originally published on 8/6/2015.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Author’s Note (06/18/20): Revisiting this 2016 piece feels timely, which is both maddening and depressing. We have made incredible progress in the respect, love, and support to work towards ending violence against trans women of color and support the survival of trans women of color under an oppressive government and interpersonal hate and violence that continues to this day. Black trans women are leading us at this moment and I hope you all can do everything you can to support them. Raquel Willis, Aria Sa’id, Hope Giselle, Indya Moore, LaLa Zannell, LaSia Wade, Ashley Lourdes Hunter, Janet Mock, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Janetta Johnson, and countless others are doing the important work of ensuring our survival and empowerment every day. Please consider putting your wallet, bodies, and resources on the line to support Black trans women and Black Lives Matter, because without Black liberation there will be no trans liberation. Additionally, remember the legacy of disabled activists, fat activists, undocumented activists, and more who have brought us to this moment where the divestment and defunding of police for the safety and wellness of everyone is a true possibility. This moment is incredibly important, so please stretch, expand, and challenge those horizons you might have like never before.

When I wrote this piece I was 24 years old. I’m a trans Latina and a bay area native. I graduated from San Francisco State University in 2013 and have worked in the nonprofit sector since I was 16. I have done research with/on trans women of color sex workers, trans women of color living with HIV, and transgender history. I previously worked in direct service with trans women of color living with HIV. I have been privileged growing up in a middle class white household, which has also given me my own unique struggles (as a transracial adoptee) of learning to love my brown skin and claim my femininity, which almost left me homeless. I have had access to doctors and therapists, since I started my transition and have been blessed to have my father’s rock solid support unconditionally these past few years. I also have been raped, threatened, harassed, almost jumped, tokenized, and abused. My privileges have not protected me and my young body has survived a lot. The subjects in this article are not to be generalized into each trans woman of color’s life, but it is my experience that many of us have experienced these issues and will continue to struggle without drastic transformative change.

K.C. Haggard. India Clarke. Mercedes Williamson. London Chanel. Kristina Gomez Reinwald. Penny Proud. Taja DeJesus. Yazmin Vash Payne. Ty Underwood. Lamia Beard. Papi Edwards. As of July 25^th, this is the list of trans women murdered in 2015. However, this is merely the tip of the iceberg. The trans community knows that we lose our sisters to more than just murder. Suicide. Overdose. Domestic Violence. HIV/AIDS. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This isn’t just exhausting. This is intergenerational trauma, oppression, and maybe even genocide. This violence is specifically targeted against black and brown women, gender non-conforming folks, and especially trans women of color. Living at the intersection of blackness and browness and transcendence of gender normativity leaves us particularly visible and vulnerable to a lot of violence. We lose our jobs. Housing. Family. Support systems. We have to rely on sex work to get by. We have to rely on social services by nonprofits that fall short of meeting all of our needs. We welcome dangerous lovers into our lives because we don’t have intimacy or human touch. We think not using a condom will keep him with us and swallowing his cum will make him want to cuddle us a bit longer. (Not that all of us are straight or even attracted to men.) We are left starving for love, touch, intimacy, appreciations, and human contact. We might turn to drugs to escape the monstrous reality that awaits us when we wake up. This is the lived reality of trans women of color’s daily lives.

With all of this in mind in one of the most visibly bloody years we’ve witnessed of violence against trans women of color, I wanted to make a list of things you can do to begin to change the culture of violence against trans women of color into one of love, appreciation, and transformative change.

1. Listen. Trans women of color are brilliant, strong, powerful, and know our own experiences. When we tell you something has hurt us, you need to listen and work to understand what we’re saying instead of glossing over it. Also, listen to our stories, our histories, our tales of resilience and survival as well as our tales of violence and loss.

Essential Things to Think About for the Best Possible First Date with a Trans Woman

GLAAD adds transgender equality to its mission

LGBT activists call for new focus on violence against transgender community

Jewlyes Gutierrez Enters Conflict Resolution Program, But Systemic Violence Against Trans Women of Color Remains

Graduation to Womanhood: Navigating Trans Identity at a Southern College

2. Read. Read the books that have been written and published by trans women of color. There are a number of them that talk about the author’s history and life journey. Other books also capture the brilliance and raw emotion of academics and artists. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock is strongly recommended. Decolonizing trans/gender 101 by b. binaohan. Trauma Queen by Lovemme Corazon. Seasonal Velocities by Ryka Aoki. I Rise by Toni Newman. Cooking in Heels by Ceyenne Doroshow. Other writers include Morgan Collado, Micha Cardenas, Dane Figueroa Edidi, TS Madison, and soon Laverne Cox!

3. Volunteer. There are numerous organizations across the country that serve trans women of color and are under resourced. Volunteering your time, energy, skills, ears, and money are all welcome to many of these organizations. You can also find one closer to home but these are some of my favorites:

Transgender, Gender-Variant, Intersex Justice Project

Trans Women of Color Collective

Sylvia Rivera Law Project

Audre Lorde Project

Gender Justice LA

Casa Ruby

Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement

4. Donate! Many organizations don’t receive grants, sustained funding, or major donors and have to rely on community wallets to sustain their programming. We can change this!

5. Hire us. Give trans women of color jobs! Job security, benefits, consistency in schedules can help someone turn their life around.

6. Nurture our brilliance. Give us professional development opportunities. Help us dream and manifest magic in the world. Trans women of color are some of the most brilliant, powerful, and biggest change-makers this world has ever seen. We need the opportunity to shine, grow, and create. If you work in a clinic give them a job or volunteer opportunity. Have them run your programs or intern for you. Teach us the process you go through to make things happen. Teach us the skills that you have learned.

7. Allow us to be our full crazy-beautiful selves. So often we don’t want to know the entire person and we just want to know the ‘good’ parts. Employees. Partners. Friends. Family. We need to be there for each other and learn to fully accept each other for our flaws, troubled pasts, traumas, and insecurities that we all hold. These are sacred pieces that make the complete picture of who we are. Welcome our whole selves into the light.

8. Increase stipends/gift cards for participation in studies. We offer up our lived experiences, trauma, blood, opinions, and thoughts for $50 gift cards. Non-trans women of color often make careers off of our struggles. Our lives are sacred and many of us are unemployed, living off social security,  and/or sex workers. Bring trans women of color into the fold and teach us these skills/give us an opportunity to learn and conduct the research ourselves. Figure out a way to funnel more money into our pockets.

9. Work against the erasure and white washing of our community history. Recently there has been a movie and a number of claims that white gay men played a significant role in Stonewall. The Stonewall riots were led by trans women of color, primarily Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. We have historical accounts and evidence that this is the case (shoutout to Tourmaline, who has done the important work to save this herstory!) We also have a surviving veteran in Miss Major, who was there.

The Stonewall movie that erases trans women of color

Meet Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera

10. Organize with us. There has been an increased effort from the amazing trans activists to organize die-ins and other actions bringing awareness to the epidemic of violence our community has faced. Fight for our federal and state protections in housing, employment, access to health care and more! We need YOUR help to bring this awareness to the mainstream consciousness. We need to begin to make a cultural shift towards valuing all trans women of color lives.

11. Love us. Romantically. Platonically. Appreciate us. Fall in love with us. Be our best friend. Go out in public with us. Claim that you are dating/loving/friends with/attracted to a trans woman of color. And DEMAND that we are treated with respect.

12. Refuse to give up on us. We all make mistakes. Given the pure amount of trauma, violence, and abuse we hold, we’ve often been unaware of the impact these moments have had on us, and our behaviors. Bring this behavior to light and if you’re able, help us work on creating healthier habits that are not destructive.

13. Get over our looks. In the end we will never look like a cisgender woman. And that’s totally, absolutely ok. It’s okay to still have facial hair. It’s ok that your body fat is still moving around and if you don’t have wide hips and are still struggling with having broad shoulders. Unless we ask for it specifically, don’t give us advice or tips on being feminine and passing. Not passing is okay. We are still beautiful and goddesses that are fortunate to grace this world.

14. Ask us what we want. From this life. From this world. From you. We all have dreams, wants, and needs. Trans women of color NEED to have these met. I need you to challenge yourself to make a difference in our lives.

15. Create a scholarship fund for trans women of color. So often we have to face decisions between our survival, housing, healthcare, food, or our femininity. If each community and nonprofit that works for the betterment of our lives put aside a small pot of money after each fundraising event to help cover cost of living expenses or 1-2% from your paychecks, we could make a real difference in a lot of trans women of color lives.

16. Spread your resources/assets around. Personally, I’m preparing to undergo a career change and am intentionally sharing some of my books from college with trans women of color as a gift. When cleaning out your closets, ask where you can donate clothes and other lightly used items that can go to a trans woman of color.

17. Safety plan and follow-up with your trans women of color friends to make sure they are safe and okay. This means going out of your way to pick them up, walk with them, text them after they leave you, and asking them what support they might need to get to a location.

18. Reflect on and challenge your own internalized trans misogyny. Be intentional with your friendships, actions, and thoughts about trans women.

19. Fight larger institutional systems that commit violence against us, like the prison industrial complex, deportations and ICE, the policing of sex work and drugs, laws that fail to protect gender identity and expression in employment and housing, and the medical industrial complex.

20. Remember that there are trans women of color who have survived and are thriving now. We even have a hashtag, #twocthriving (twitter and tumblr), created by the amazing Luna Merbruja.

21. Pay/Center/Include Trans women of color to talk about our own issues. There is a very deep ocean of trans women of color leadership out there that has been doing this work for decades to fight for this change. We need the visibility, resources, and space to hold these conversations about our needs and the change that needs to happen.

Brouhaha’s Trans Women of Color Storytelling is Healing, is the Revolution

22. Re-frame the ‘fight for equality’ to something more foundational, like the right to survive. That’s our struggle right now. Surviving in a world that cannot handle our black and brown gender transcendence.

23.Take the next year to implement some of these things into your life. Challenge yourself in ways that you didn’t imagine. Trans women of color are losing our lives. Our community is under attack. We are an endangered species.

24.Trans women of color: Add your own to this list. What do you NEED from the world to help you survive?

There is a myth that trans women of color can only pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty and violence. It’s a direct parallel to the American dream mythology of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” This doesn’t work in a cycle of violence. I have seen too many trans women of color think they are out of the cycle but get sucked back in because they quickly lost their housing, failed to get a job, were arrested, or fell back into drug use; the reasons are endless. We need to learn to communally take care of trans women of color and support them so we can move to dismantle the institutional cycles of oppression that we are caught up in.

This piece is dedicated to the trans women of color ancestors that fought hard and gave their lives so I could be here to write this piece today, my trans women of color elders who continue to share their brilliance and herstories with the world, my trans women of color sisters who have survived, cried, struggled, and helped change this world for the better just by being themselves. Finally, I hope that this can help build communities that are safe and uplifting for future generations of trans women of color. We cannot continue to lose our sisters at such an astronomical rate. Please remember, your actions have consequences.

Foolish Child #74: Karens Don’t Get It

..

Living While Black, Queer and Sometimes Mistaken for Male

This piece was originally published on 7/23/2013.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

Author’s Note (06/15/20): I’ve had my thoughts published on the internet since I was 21. It’s a wild experience to look back and see myself trying to process the world around me during a time period when our collective understanding of everything from race to class to gender continues at an ever increasing pace. I have stances today that I literally didn’t have a week ago. It’s for this reason, I’ve decided not to note the content of this essay. If you can find 2013 Brittani to take something up with her, be my guest. 2020 Brittani is fighting big fights and looking for people willing to join her. I no longer have a white girlfriend or breasts. Defund the police and have a great day.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (The Roots, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, large black man) recently posted on Facebook in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Strangely enough, his post on being seen as a menacing figure in his own luxurious apartment building made me examine my own experiences. Not in being a black male. But in sometimes being mistaken for one.

In the year since I’ve cut my hair, I’ve been pulled over twice for no reason AKA “randomly stopped.” This may not seem like a lot (especially for all those people in New York where stop and frisk is alive and well) but it’s been enough for me to change a few things about how I operate. I’ll ask my white girlfriend to drive if I notice a lot of cops are out. I try not to wear hats or hoodies at night for fear of looking too much like a black male and therefore, “too suspicious.” Of course I can’t say this is why I was pulled over. I can’t say that the officers in question thought I was male. But I can say this isn’t really something my queer white friends have ever complained to me about. When I talk about it, it’s not really an experience they relate to or a fear that they have every time they get into a car to leave somewhere late at night. They don’t know why it’s such a big deal for them to not do any of the stupid and obviously illegal things they tend to do if I’m the one behind the wheel.

I have nowhere near the stature of Questlove but I’m not a small woman. If I’m wearing a hoodie or some other sort of clothing that puts my gender up for discussion (more than it already usually is despite the watermelons strapped to my chest) I try to do things that won’t scare people. I walk a reasonable distance away and if I’m walking faster than they are, I make some sort of noise before reaching them so they won’t be surprised. Actual black males have some sort of safety net in their maleness because honestly, a black male of my size is most likely faster and stronger than a black woman of my size (for example: me). If my lack of maleness is revealed, my safety net disappears. I’m not afraid to say that when I’m alone late at night, I would rather they be afraid of me than angry at me. As a black male, I might threaten their safety but as a gender non-conforming black lesbian, I might threaten their ideals. Questlove:

Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people’s safety and comfort first, before your own. You’re programmed and taught that from the gate. It’s like the opposite of entitlement.

I think a lot of males lack the awareness that Questlove so poignantly speaks about. Male privilege allows them to carry on with the knowledge that they’re one of the “good ones” that won’t attack women and so whatever hangups anyone else has is their problem to deal with. Why should men have to respect other people’s possible fear? And why should black men have to respect that AND someone else’s possible racism? Rather than being upset that this happens, maybe this will give more men of color the opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of women, to come to terms with the fact that some of those women aren’t racist and crossing the street from them The Individual. They’re crossing the street to get away from Men because Men attack women, queers, and trans* people.

Hasn’t Trayvon taught us (again) that even men aren’t safe if they’re black? That they also invoke a sense of irrational anger just by their presence? Haven’t I been wrong this entire time? I mean, how silly am I that I thought by passing as a black male, I’d ruled out all threats. The sad truth is I have no identity to retreat to. Unless you’re a straight white cis male, you have a reason to be scared. I’m not saying that you should be, I’m just being honest about the fact that I constantly calculate the potential threats of situations. And if you think I don’t have good reason to, you’re wrong. Because when you’re black, it goes beyond never feeling truly safe. You don’t even have the right to protect yourself.

These fears and reactions have been ingrained in us from the moment we were born into a homophobic, racist, sexist, classist, etcist society that makes no qualms about letting us know we’re not safe and furthermore, not deserving of safety. I know it doesn’t feel great to watch the process of someone identifying you as a threat but I’m not the kind of person who’s going to get mad at someone trying to peaceably keep themselves out of harm’s way. Because if something happens, that’s exactly what everyone is going to ask. Why didn’t YOU do something? AKA why didn’t Trayvon just run home? AKA why was your skirt so short? How mad can I get when someone crosses the street or walks a little faster when they notice my presence when I know that if my girlfriend/sister/friend was walking home late at night by herself, I’d want her to do the same thing? Questlove:

Inside I cried. But if I cried at every insensitive act that goes on in the name of safety, I’d have to be committed to a psych ward. I’ve just taught myself throughout the years to just accept it and maybe even see it as funny. But it kept eating at me…It’s a bajillion thoughts, all of them self-depreciating voices slowly eating my soul away.

If feelings get hurt in the pursuit of safety, I’m ok with that. Sometimes our hurt feelings are incidentals. But Trayvon Martin should not have been collateral damage for one man’s pursuit of something he already had and something I’ll likely never feel: Safety.

One American Goes to See “30 Americans”

This piece was originally published on 12/14/15.

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

“The holidays are a tough time to release your inner child into the meadowlands of black conceptual art.”

The “30 Americans” exhibition now showing at the Detroit Institute of Art is an extraordinary opportunity to see the work of some of the most important contemporary artists working today. Everyone who can see it should. Take your nephew. Take your grandmother.

Carrie Mae Weems brings some Susan Sontag-style Regarding the Pain of Others analysis to a series of slave daguerreotypes. In a small screen in the corner of a room, William Pope.L crawls along the sidewalk in a Superman costume to inspire someone, somewhere, to think about the lived reality of homeless people. Iona Rozeal Brown helps us navigate our complicated feelings about the fact that sometimes, Japanese hip-hop artists wear blackface. Kara Walker still wants you to go ahead and try to act normal in front of one of her murals. Just try to smile politely at a stranger while you are standing in front of one of her murals. Hank Willis Thomas does not seem like the kind of guy who thinks that black athletes, by being rich, negate questions about branding and ownership. I have loved so many of these artists for so long. Kehinde Wiley? Kalup Linzy? Lorna Simpson? They deepen our conversations about race and gender and violence and value in a moment when we direly need to deepen our conversations about all of these things. Etcetera, etcetera.

Viewer feedback at the DIA

This is not what I’ve come here to talk about.

As I listened to the audio tour, narrated by Touré, I felt a few things. First, I was underwhelmed. I mean, I loved Touré’s profile of Lauryn Hill in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, but it’s not like he had a whole lot of creative control in this audio tour. The snippets were short. A lot of them involved student responses to the art, when I wanted to hear more from the artists themselves.

Let me preface this by saying: I wasn’t in a great mood that day. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I was visiting my family — going to a midwestern winter climate from a desert “winter” one. When this happens, I forget how to exercise and I don’t understand what to eat for breakfast. Upon entering the museum, my father and I got into a minor scuffle with one, then three security guards over whether or not my dad’s selfie stick was indeed a selfie stick if he thought it might be used as a “unipod.” I hissed at him, “don’t make a scene,” and then I realized from the way they were looking between me and my dad and back again that the security guards weren’t so much comforted by my presence as they were invisibly sucking their teeth at this coddled biracial kid who didn’t know how to respect her elders. Somebody looked scared—like she was shielding her son’s body from us. Also: there were about five hundred student groups that day. I kept doing that thing adults do in the face of adolescent swagger, where you act like you’re so above it and then you walk into something.

As we got our tickets, my dad nodded his head in my direction and said, “she’s five” in the hopes of paying a cheaper fee, but also in a way that, in retrospect, may have been revenge for me not siding with him in the selfie stick situation. Then, a woman told me, with very intense eyes, that I looked just like Frida. I love Frida Kahlo, but do you ever feel like when a white woman gives a young black woman a compliment with a certain expression on her face you can hear the soundtrack to The Help playing in the distance? Or, I don’t know, Out of Africa? See, I told you: I WAS IN A BAD MOOD. The holidays are a tough time to release your inner child into the meadowlands of black conceptual art. I tried to eat a rootbeer flavored taffy, but my inner child stayed put. So, maybe I was looking for a fight.

On Facebook, I was about to the make the mistake of engaging with a racially charged comment thread. I would actually have to post that Thanksgiving Adele Saturday Night Live video in a gesture of peace. More globally, though, in about twenty-four hours, a white supremacist would be shooting five Black Lives Matter protesters in a city I always thought of as exceptionally tolerant. Paris happened. Beirut had happened. Donald Trump exists. There was something in the air.

From Carrie Mae Weems’ “You Became a Scientific Profile/ An Anthropological Debate/ A Negroid Type/ & A Photographic Subject (from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried series), 1995-1996” with Kara Walker reflected

So, as I walked through the exhibition, I started to wonder: what exactly is it about this show that feels funky? There was a missing context. It felt, somehow, opportunistic. Vampiric in a way, as if the premise was, simply: black is hot right now. But that couldn’t be it — not realistically. Shows like this take a long time to plan, and this was a travelling exhibition that only just now got to Detroit. The Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t even a glimmer in Patrisse’s or Alicia’s or Opal’s eye when the show came into fruition. So why was I not convinced?

Something flickered for me around the time that, in my ear phones, one of the collectors who put on the show, Mera Rubell, asked Shinique Smith about her piece, “a bull, a rose, a tempest.” The work consists of a collection of items—a shoe, a bag, some kind of camouflaged fabric — hanging from the ceiling. When something hangs from the ceiling like that — lumpen, hogtied, reminiscent of a body — there is a visceral quality that makes you want to spend some time alone. In the interview, what Mera Rubell decides to ask is, “Do you go to specific places to get these rags?” And Smith responds, “I don’t really call them rags.”

Now, the kind of frustration I feel toward Mera Rubell’s interview style isn’t on par with, say, the frustration I feel toward Ted Cruz’s homophobic pastor affiliations. The Rubell interviews hold many moments of racially complicated dissonance similar to those Facebook arguments you might have with somebody who does not seem to have encountered any race theory or even considered the possibility that there is some literature to have read up on before diving into that Meryl Streep suffragette tee-shirt kerfuffle. Just, like, five minutes of bell hooks. The frustration I feel toward Mera Rubell’s interview style is rooted in the experience of listening to someone who holds a lot of power, whose title is “owner,” ask questions they don’t care to hear the answer to of people whose intelligence feels tripped up and cornered by the mediocrity of the asking.

Film Still from Kalup Linzy’s “Conversations wit de Churen” Series

In “America,” Glen Ligon created a neon sign wherein the tubes are painted black, while the light is bright white. The effect is that the lettering is outlined, limiting the incandescence. Mera Rubell says, “This piece — you wouldn’t make this piece today.” She says, “somehow this piece is a pre-Obama moment.” When somebody says “pre-Obama,” I don’t feel far from the phrase “post-racial.” Ligon explains that the piece was inspired by Charles Dickens. When he says, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Mrs. Rubell joins in. Yup. He continues,

I started thinking about the moment when we went to Afghanistan, thinking how interesting it is when they go to Afghanistan, these reporters go and they interview people on the street who say “Your bombs dropped here and killed my brother and destroyed our house and I want you Americans to live up to your ideas of democracy. We believe in America.” And I thought how interesting is it that America can be this dark star, death star, and also at the same time this incredible shining light.

Viewer looking at “Hotter than July, 2005” by Mickalene Thomas

At a literary conference last March, Eunsong Kim gave a talk about the trials and tribulations of Carrie Mae Weems and her series, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.” Apparently, Harvard University threatened to sue the artist for using the daguerreotypes of enslaved people originally commissioned by Louis Agassiz because Harvard owned these images. Kim challenged the audience to think about the question of ownership here, given that the images themselves portray the bodies of slaves. When encouraged by Weems to have this conversation out in the open, the university declined.

My sweet father purchased for my spoiled ass, “The Conversations,” a DVD about the “30 Americans” exhibit including extended interviews with the artists, and I have been watching with my face contorted into a grimace, the way you would watch, perhaps, Khloe and Lamar. Or certain episodes of The View.

Some artists do a beautiful job of owning the awkward room in which they have been beckoned to perform this chit chat. I say “perform” and “chit chat” because these interviews feel perfunctory rather than curious, contained and at times corrective when the artists have so much more to say than the space knows what to do with. If you want to know what the subtext of this interaction looks like, check out Rashid Johnson’s “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood)” — in which a black man stands with an expression of utter imperviousness as smoke rises around his Frederick Douglass-style hair.

Rashid Johnson’s “The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Thurgood), 2008”

I give credit to Jennifer Rubell, the daughter of the collectors, for editing the video in such a way that tries to honor the manner in which these artists assert themselves. The film begins with Kerry James Marshall energetically questioning the concept of power. “There are no black collectors that I know of that can do what you just did in having an exhibition like this,” he says to the collectors’ faces. And, “How much analysis, how much criticality are you bringing to the essays in the catalog?” He goes on to say that the title of the exhibition, by avoiding mention of blackness, feels like a lie: “You’ve tricked them into coming here.”

After we leave, my father and I get some hot and sour soup. We visit Dell Pryor’s gallery on Cass Avenue, where the work of Kara Walker’s father, Larry Walker, hangs on the wall. During Thanksgiving dinner, my (white) mother will ask my (black) great aunt if she is tired. To which she will respond, “That’s why the white man don’t let the n***** eat until after he works the field.” The room will be quiet for the smallest second before exploding into laughter. It always fascinates me that in the humor of this 94-year-old woman, the ante-bellum era exists in present tense. The owner and the slave and the field as clear as day.

Stonewall Was an Uprising: A Playlist for Finding the Joy in the Struggle

George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and we stand in unequivocal support of the protests and uprisings that have swept the US since that day, and against the unconscionable violence of the police and US state. We can’t continue with business as usual. We will be celebrating Pride as an uprising. This month, Autostraddle is focusing on content related to this struggle, the fight against white supremacy and the fight for Black lives and Black futures. Instead, we’re publishing and re-highlighting work by and for Black queer and trans folks speaking to their experiences living under white supremacy and the carceral state, and work calling white people to material action.

It’s a very strange Pride month. More than ever, I’m inspired by my radical queer and trans ancestors, who knew that we have to fight for our freedom, who knew that Stonewall was an uprising against police brutality, who would want to see queer and trans people celebrate Pride as the insurrection that it should be. But I’m also inspired by the protesters in my town, who recently made sure they weren’t going to have a revolution without dancing.

Day 6 of Oakland #GeorgeFloyd protest: Oakland going dumb. 3 hours past curfew. pic.twitter.com/ygY87qCnfB

— Sarah Belle Lin (@SarahBelleLin) June 4, 2020

According to Susan Stryker, Marsha P. Johnson — who may or may not have thrown the first brick at Stonewall, but is a heroine regardless — “had this joie de vivre, a capacity to find joy in a world of suffering.” And for Black queer and trans people, insisting on cultivating joy might be the most radical move of all.

White supremacy and transphobia would prefer I experience only a life of torment and desolation. But as an act of resistance, I refuse! How I do so depends on the day. For many of us, being a part of the movement is a joyful act! Or sometimes, it’s scrolling through accounts like blackjoyproject or blackqueerjoy on Instagram. Sometimes it’s doing a Zoom call and playing silly online games with my Black queer friends. Sometimes it’s sparking up and taking an epsom salt and bubble bath. Sometimes it’s teaching, or writing, or making art. And sometimes it’s turning up the volume and dancing! That’s what this playlist is for. Chock full of new bops (all released in 2020) and exclusively featuring queer and trans artists of color, this is the Pride playlist for allowing yourself a measure of joy as we struggle together during what could very well be the birth of a new, better, more just world. Enjoy!

The Playlist

Tracklist:

1. “Guilty Conscience” by 070 Shake — A fuckboi anthem for the ages.
2. “Wait On Me” by Siena Liggins — You’re so cute, why are you being slept on?
3. “Dance Alone” by Tayla Parx — Remember what it was like to fall in lust with a cutie across the dance floor?
4. “B.I.T.C.H. by Megan Thee Stallion — Haters gonna hate.
5. “Ni Una Menos (Villa Diamante Remix)” by Chocolate Remix — I bet you didn’t know you needed a lesbian reggaeton bop in your life until now.
6. “Pipe That” by Big Freedia ft. Icona Pop & The Soul Rebels — It’s not Pride if you don’t shake your ass, at least a little bit!
7. “Go Bananas” by Don Elektron & TT The Artist  — it can be really therapeutic to get out of your own head and go wild once in a while.
8. “Dripset” by Young M.A — yet another fuckboi anthem. She literally says “fuck love” and “I ain’t got time for your feelings” on this track!
9. “Ya That’s Cool” by Ness Heads — work out your unrequited love on the dance floor with this one.
10. “Number One” by Mila Jam — a slow-burn R&B jam you can still move to.
11. “Tímida” by Pabllo Vittar and Thalía — Don’t be timid! Be your incredible, extra self!
12. “Don Dada” by Cakes da Killa — this brings me back to dancing wildly to “212” at an Occupy Oakland protest in like 2013.
13. “Only You” by Bronze Avery — Corny but cute.
14. “Infrastructure” by St. Panther — Never forget how much of a badass you are.
15. “Good Love” by Justin Ingalis — We’ll all get to fuck again soon, I promise.
16. “Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)” by Rina Sawayama — Try to channel some of that gay boy energy!
17. “On My Own” by Shamir – “I don’t mind to live on my own” is some empowering quarantine vibes.
18. “Microbios” by Mister & MANCANDY — Queer love is revolutionary!
19. “Made It” by Teyana Taylor — Sometimes you have to manifest your own joy.
20. “Shelly’s (it’s Chill)” by Blimes and Gab — This song’s amazing, but if you use Apple Music, cut out the last 5-6 seconds. Why do artists do this?
21. “Be Kind” by Marshmello & Halsey — I sometimes think we hurt the ones we love just because of proximity. Especially now.
22. “Rodeo” by Lil Nas X & Nas — This is a really cute collab.
23. “Dive” by Victoria Monet — Queer women really needed our own oral sex anthem. This one even has the mid-2000s-era bed spring sound effect percussion!