This is the kind of statement that drives me nuts – in this case a statement made by a diarist last week utilizing the royal "we" to suggest there is a monolithic LGBT voice:
"We, as a community, went into the 2008 election with many serious misgivings regarding candidate Obama..."
"We" did? Who decides who "we" is? I’m queer, and this statement sure doesn’t speak for me. I’ll say more about why in a bit, but for now, I want to say this: There is no single LGBT/queer voice at Daily Kos, no one group that speaks for all queers – either on the site or in the larger society. There is no single policy/activist agenda that accurately reflects the priorities or experiences of multiple queer communities. But a lot of people not immersed in queer politics might think there is. So this is my formal defection - fierce but nonviolent - from that particular royal "we" here at DKos.
And while some white gays (at DKos and elsewhere) seem to feel comfortable comparing gay experience in this country with the long, racially specific, systemically brutal white supremacist history of Jim Crow laws and practices – and with the structurally violent white supremacist practice of apartheid in South Africa – many other queers – people of color and whites - do not feel that such historical comparison are either honest or politically helpful. I – a white lesbian - strongly believe that such comparisons, though they may be made in ignorance, are not only appalling, but terribly counterproductive. Gays need not make such a comparison in order to describe our own oppressive queer realities and stake our full claim to justice.
I was out of town and blessedly away from the Internet last Friday when the diary in question appeared. I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to promote it. But I also do not want to publish an "attack" diary of my own.
Instead, I'd rather simply lift up my own dissident queer voice to champion a different kind of progressive politic that trades "single issue/single constituency" gay campaigns/litmus tests for organizing approaches that pay close attention to the dynamic, ever-shifting intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class that are always at play in the unequal and unjust distribution of rights, recognition, and civic and economic goods.
Defecting from the Politics of Denunciation
Let me begin by explaining briefly why I exclude myself from that royal "we" which purportedly speaks for all queers in publicly denouncing President Obama and suggesting that he has embraced Jim Crow for queers.
The President has not failed me, even though I do not always agree with every decision he makes and have often been disappointed by the Democratic Party generally – including my state's governor and U.S. senators. I knew – as did so many others – that any Democratic president would be facing pure hell, and that a black president would be facing not a "post-racial society," but additional racist hell that would come from all directions. Many of us knew that a Democratic president could not rely upon a progressive Congress and Senate to support the boldest actions so many of us desire in so many different arenas. Even so, he has accomplished much and will accomplish a great deal more if we do not actively undermine his presidency and are strategically smart about how we organize to constructively influence his decisions.
And while I support the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) and the right of people of any gender/gender identity to marry, these are not my queer priorities. My queer priorities are a little more complicated, having to do with challenging law enforcement violence, mass incarceration, and the prison industrial complex, establishing a broader framework for partner and household recognition that includes but does not privilege marriage as the sole funnel for essential forms of legal recognition and access to basic economic benefits, and such. My queer priorities center race, class and gender in ways the agendas of the big, majority white gay nonprofits do not do. I seek liberation, not just assimilation into a massively unjust racial, gender, and economic status quo. But I'll write a different diary about that one of these days.
For now, I want to note that while I am active in elections – I walk precincts, sometimes serve as a convention delegate, phone bank, give money, put up yard signs, go to rallies, all that good stuff – I have never placed ultimate faith in electoral politics. They are important, but they are not everything. Not for one moment did I believe that any president could – even in two terms – work all the miracles we need worked to undo even a modest measure of the horrific damage and injustice wrought not just by the Bush administrations, but by the relentless rightward push since Goldwater’s calamitous defeat in 1964.
To do that, I think we need to emphasize movement building. Because without that, even though we may elect a few "better" Democrats, we won't be able to even envision, much less sustain, a bold, imaginative, and compelling justice vision that increasingly trumps the fearful dread of the Right.
The political climate today is toxic; it is pathological; it is virtually insane. The Right has made it so, abetted by religious fear-mongering, and the media increasingly colludes in the production of tabloid political journalism, a circus to distract us from bleak realities. Corporations have a stranglehold on so much of our political and economic lives. Liberals/leftists/progressives have not yet succeeded in stopping this train wreck, much less turning the train around. So what do we do? Start screaming at each other, as if that screaming were somehow a valiant badge of courage instead of just piss-poor, embarrassing behavior. If we are not careful, we will simply strengthen that climate, which is defined by the promulgation of fear, the marketing of polarization and hostility, a gospel of scarcity and resentment; the skyrocketing of anxiety and dread as we all wonder what our futures hold – or if we and the world in which we live have any future at all.
These are shared anxieties; they are felt within every group that has ever been – and remains – marginalized and excluded in this country. Wedge politics – the culture wars against women, queers, immigrants of color, Native sovereignty, multicultural education, school textbooks and curricula – keep us from realizing our common dreams, our shared aspirations. So hammered do we all feel that it is easy to turn on one another; to become addicted to our own dispiriting politics of resentment and denunciation. In certain Latin American circles, there is discussion of the "cannibalizing tendencies" of much of the left. I believe that today, such tendencies touch – and weaken – the U.S. left as well, leaving us particularly vulnerable to backlash.
This is not to say we don't need vigorous critical discussion and debate. We do – and where rigid ideologues prevail or the fundraising mandates of nonprofits discourage risk-taking, we have precious little of it. But we also need to figure out how to have those discussions and debates without destroying one another – and without simply reifying existing racial, gender, and class power hierarchies, which is what usually happens today. Within the LGBT mainstream, this generally means that the voices of the most marginalized queers – people of color (including immigrants), poor and homeless queers, youth (especially youth of color), transgender people, sex workers, and incarcerated LGBTQ people - are functionally erased. It means that "representational diversity"– which somehow never quite manages to shift the power dynamics – substitutes for a continuing commitment to fight for racial and economic justice.
And that, to me, is intolerable.
I am working with many others to lift up a queer politics that does not promote "color-blindness" but recognizes that unless we mount relentlessly persistent challenges to the countless ways in which white supremacy is structurally "normative" in U.S. society and not just an outspewing of racist rhetoric by obvious wingnuts, the system always defaults to white privilege. A queer movement that recognizes that from the moment they were won, the historic gains of the black Civil Rights Movement and other struggles for racial justice have never been fully realized and remain under constant assault.
A politics that recognizes that LGBTQ people are not "the last group to be denied our full civil rights" as is sometimes claimed, but stand among the many groups in this society who are treated unjustly. And all of us must work to advance together.
And that recognizes that race, class, gender, and gender identity are fault lines within LGBTQ communities every bit as much as within the larger society.
Movement Building & The Politics of Intersectionality
It's cheap and easy to heap invective and vitriol on those within our own ranks – and those we hope will join our ranks - who aren't where we want them to be on various issues. It's much harder to build a progressive movement that really walks it like it talks it.
But that's exactly what we need: less vitriol, more movement-building through grassroots community organizing. Any movement worth its salt works persistently to build strong, trustworthy bridges across issues and constituencies. It takes time to meet and talk and work with people at the community level. A movement doesn't simply demand that people support it; it reaches out, always taking the first step across the great divides. And probably the second and fifteenth steps and hundredth steps as well. It is built person by person over more kitchen tables than conference tables, and as much with compassion as candor. A movement worthy of your time and mine doesn't just tell others what they should feel or do; it listens and learns, finding new ways forward over old impasses through quiet conversations and seeing reality through someone else's eyes. And everyone involved – if they stick with it and don't spin off forever into bitter cynicism - will find themselves changed for the better as a result, even though at times, it will feel like being boiled in oil. Because it's not just "them" who needs to change. It's "us," too.
But of course, it's a lot harder to engage in real movement building, which requires so much more than focus groups, media messaging, and desperately trying to create political marriages of convenience in the midst of a campaign crisis or building coalitions comprised primarily of paid representatives from nonprofit organizations that have little or no ongoing community base of support.
"The most general statement of our politics...would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives...
"We...often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously."
– from The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, written by a group of Black feminists who also identified as lesbians
We don't need just any kind of movement, though. We need movements that work within a framework that recognizes interlocking systems of oppression; a movement that works, as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw suggests, at the intersections of race, class, gender (pdf download). Because if we don't, we simply recreate all the old systems of injustice within our own ranks: racism, sexism/misogyny, heterosexism (or in queer groups, "heteronormativity"), the works.
Not surprisingly women of color - including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Crenshaw, Beth E. Richie, bell hooks, and Cathy J. Cohen – have led the way in opening up the new terrain of intersectionality.
Although most individuals have little difficulty identifying
their own victimization within some major system of oppression--whether it be by race, social class, religion, physical ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or gender--they typically fail to see how their thoughts and actions uphold someone else's subordination. Thus white feminists routinely point with confidence to their oppression as women but resist seeing how much their white skin privileges them. African-Americans who possess eloquent analyses of racism often persist in viewing poor white women as symbols of white power. The radical left fares little better. "If only people of color and women could see their true class interests," they argue, "class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism." In essence, each group identifies the oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental and classifies all others as being of lesser importance. Oppression is filled with such contradictions because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone's lives.
– Patricia Hill Collins, "Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination," from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Organizing at the intersections is powerful stuff - and it isn't easy, because it challenges us all to recognize that at times we are victims; at times we oppress others - or at least benefit from the oppression of others. That's painful because none of us likes to think of himself or herself as an oppressor. But the payoff is that our collective work, rooted in the lived realities of people who are suffering injustice and poverty by virtue of multiple identities, not merely a single identity, produces insights and strategic visions far greater than any single group or constituency could have produced on its own.
I know this is true based on my own experience. I came out as a lesbian in 1973, that immediate post-Stonewall time, when the radical promise of Gay Liberation was starting its transformation into what would become a super constellation of nonprofit organizations that – increasingly – would shed both the issues and people who did not fit the respectable, white (or white-like), homogenized image the groups increasingly sought to project. Fortunately, I'd already been steeped in organizing against the Vietnam war, in support of farmworker organizing, and for racial, gender, economic, and environmental justice. All of this would inform my LGBTQ-related work.
Over the years, in an attempt to meld my radical perspective with mainstream politics, I dutifully served as a board member and co-chair for one of the large national LGBT organizations; as head homosexual for NOW; and as head homosexual for a gay-friendly, faith-based organization. President Carter appointed me as one of a small handful of open lesbians to a Continuing Committee from the 1977 National Women's Conference held in the U.S. as part of the United Nations' International Women's Year.
And during all of this, I saw the mainstream LGBT definition of "what is a gay issue" shrink and shrink and shrink.
And that's a shame.
I'll let a cherished colleague have the last word.
...without the prevalence of the Vietnam War protests, without women's liberation, without the example of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the counterculture's mantra of "drugs, sex, and rock and roll" there would have been no Stonewall riots or Gay Liberation. Queens—aided by the street people in the Village—rioted because everybody was rioting. They protested because everyone was protesting.
The Gay Liberation Movement was not comprised of non-profit groups that did fundraising and lobbying to change laws. It was a grassroots groundswell of women and men who had had enough...
...What was incredible about the Gay Liberation Front—and what is sorely missing from our gay rights movements now—is that it saw itself as a multi-issue radical movement. It was as concerned with ending the war in Vietnam, fighting racism, and securing reproductive freedom for women as it was in fighting homophobia. The Gay Liberation Front understood that it needed to work in coalition with other movements as its vision linked freedom for queers to the freedom of all other oppressed groups.
– Michael Bronksi, Stonewall: Requiem for a Riot