I support LGBTQQI rights and marriage equality to the core of the core of my being.

Call me controversial (please, it would make me happy), but I honestly don't understand how I, as a Black person, could think otherwise. Well, okay, I don't understand how anyone as a human could feel otherwise, but that's beside the point. 

Monday was Martin Luther King Day, and I didn't post anything mainly because it was the day before all final papers were do and I was writing my heart out about Awkward Black Girl, but also because my feelings on him and his day haven't really changed since last year's post.

So, even if it's a few days late, what I want to say is this: our people and our allies in other communities dedicated (and dedicate, present-tense) their lives to ensuring that we would not be classified as "second class citizens," as lesser than anyone else on the basis of something as artificial as race, and that we wouldn't be subjected to the oxymoronic (is that a word?) standard of "separate, but equal." We know that separate is inherently unequal. It's the basis for life as we know it today. 

So how can we have the audacity to have demanded such rights and recognitions for ourselves and to work towards or even wish for the exact same rights and recognitions to be denied to others on the basis of their sexual orientation? Anyone who cries that race is a social construction must also recognize that normative conceptualizations of sexuality are just as socially constructed. 

So if you want to live the words of King and other civil rights leaders this week, next month, and in your daily life, watch this video. Cry like I did. And do. the. right. thing. Support marriage equality. Support non-discriminatory citizenship. Support love and family and justice.



 

L.O.V.E.

That's what the fight for marriage equality is about. Everything else is just a fringe benefit. The important thing is to recognize and validate love and commitment wherever they come in this world full of false starts and not-so-happy endings.

This ad actually made me tear up a little. 

Silenced.

As in, a substantial percentage of the African-American male population is being silenced throughout our country. Variations in state laws make it so that different proportions of the population are having their voices--and their supposedly inalienable rights--stripped from them, but only two states in the entire nation have refrained from engaging in this terrible practice, and to be frank, there aren't really many Black people in those states anyway. Really though, this is disgusting. How can an ex-felon ever fully be rehabilitated into a quote-unquote normal life if he or she can't fully participate in society, if he or she has no say in what goes on in his or her own daily life? When this extends to large parts of entire communities, we are creating color-by-number portraits whilst missing a few crayons. We'll never get the whole picture, and the voids we're leaving behind are just dangerous. I can think of no stronger way to suggest that these people simply don't matter to the American state. 

Reblogged from Sociological Images

 

Shoutout to my friend E.H.

for this wonderful Facebook status:

"We are brilliant and beautiful. We have been traumatized for so long that we have begun to traumatize each other. We are still our solution."

Ruminate on that.

Watch out.

"The biggest fear in fighting a monster is becoming a monster yourself." --A young Muslim man, quoted in this post on Colorlines

Be careful. Go out and fight, yes, I beg you. Fight for what you believe in. Fight for what is right and good and just and will better this crazy world in which we live. Fight. But never let who/what you're fighting AGAINST take priority over who/what you're fighting FOR. Do not become a racist in your fight against racism. Do not belittle manhood in your quest for gender equality. Do not trample on other people's freedoms as you demand your own. Don't air anyone else's dirty laundry to make your own look cleaner. Do not become heartless as you wrestle with heartache.