By Ko Imani
[email protected]
McMovement
Their website couldn't be right, I thought, staring in disbelief at my computer screen. Surely something so obvious couldn't have escaped me for long! After all, this was a national queer organization--the staff and leadership couldn't really all be White, right?
I'd just returned from Portland, Oregon, and The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's "Creating Change" conference which, for the first time ever, had a theme: "Building an Anti-Racist Movement: Working for Social and Economic Justice." Some bright moments were meeting heroic People of Color, including Mandy Carter, Joo-Hyun Kang, Beverly Little Thunder and Wilson Cruz, among others, but much of the conference was a painful prying open of White eyes as person after person of Color shared their experience of being sidelined, ignored or tokenized. Raw revelations crowded into the workshops and ballrooms as anti-war activists clamored for a voice in NGLTF's decision-making and young people once again complained of feeling patronized.
Inside this mixed bag of emotions and judgments and opinions and history is the fertile stuff of creation. The question is: Are we ready to commit to growing a truly inclusive, diverse and progressive Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Affectionate and Transgender movement or should we be satisfied with the "McMovement" we have?
Some LGBT leaders believe we have to keep our message simple, highly mainstreamed and only address specifically LGB and sometimes T issues. This is often called "identity politics," and is backed by hard evidence about how people learn; that is, a single, digestible message must be heard many times if it's going to sink in. Unfortunately, identity politics is incredibly alienating and fragmenting and keeps our movement from becoming deep enough to create meaningful change.
Others of us hold up the Beloved Community, in all its complexity and overwhelming mass, as our goal, and perceive such interdependence between issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, economics, education, the environment, globalization, politics and peace, that identity politics are an unthinkable luxury. The issues' interdependence means that it is a disservice to our cause to attempt to tease out a single issue to the exclusion of contributing issues and factors.
Which issues are the most important to address depends on individual points of view. When defining our issues, we must answer the question, "Who is choosing the issues? Who is not represented? Who is being left out or left behind? What are the relationships between 'our' issues and other issues that maintain the status quo?"
The point is that to the best of our ability, and held to measures of effectiveness, we have to model the outcome we desire at every stage of the process of achieving it. In other words, the LGBT movement must be integral, not just inclusive. It must relentlessly adhere to the tenets of verbal, physical and spiritual nonviolence and must be as racially and culturally diverse and multi-issued as LGBT people are varied, without succumbing to the numbing and compressing tendency to pretend that because every individual has worth that every idea or opinion has equal value.
Race is the obvious place to begin broadening the movement because everyone who grows up in this culture is racist. We can't escape it, but we can choose to change it. Person of Color or White, each of us has work to do. White people have the responsibility to educate ourselves to become fierce allies to our sisters and brothers of Color, and to become aware of the myriad and pervasive ways racism plays out. People of Color must be ready to help us to understand, to forgive us when we err and to understand that we are making every effort to consciously eradicate racism from our own minds as well as from our organizations and communities. Mindfulness must be the mandate that guides our emergent anti-racist LGBT movement. Each of us, particularly those in leadership positions, must be compassionate, sensitized and willing to learn.
I know my friends who run that largely White national LGBT organization are not actively racist, frequently work with People of Color and are concerned about their leadership's racial uniformity. At the same time, they're not exactly a new group, and their lack of progress in diversifying the organization seems to exemplify the problem: it's one thing to talk about being diverse and another to put anti-racist work at the heart of queer organizing.
Only when the gates of racism are being torn down throughout LGBT culture can the real work begin. Only then will there be enough safe space for millions of queer People of Color and Whites to join together in the great work of Justice. If NGLTF's courageous "Creating Change" was any indication, the path to an integral LGBT movement will be messy and strewn with egos, but it's still a worthwhile journey. Everybody ready to go?
Queer activist and author Ko Imani lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with his partner and their puppy. LGBT community centers' and PFLAG newsletters around the country print his FIRE IN THE LAKE motivational columns. Ko's must-read book, Shirt of Flame: The Secret Gay Art of War will be available soon. "What is a Beloved Community?" Visit http://www.geocities.com/newlgbtactivism/belovedcommunity.html.
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