Stuck Between A Rock and BLM

[bobot]

Coincidentally, I joined in 2009.
(And I accept fully my admonishment, BTW)

[Rysto]

@Kimstu

You think a BLM group marching in a gay pride parade is likely to be more homophobic than the general populace? How you figure? Have you missed the point that this BLM group was invited and agreed to march as the “Honored Group” in the Toronto Pride parade?

At this point it’s quite clear that BLM agreed to take part in the Pride parade in order to get a national stage for their protest, so I find this assertion extremely dubious.

A BLM group holding up a parade by a non-violent sit-in for half an hour

To be clear, it was only a half-hour because the Pride organizers caved to their demands as quickly as they could.

[Kimstu]

@Rysto

@Kimstu

You think a BLM group marching in a gay pride parade is likely to be more homophobic than the general populace? How you figure? Have you missed the point that this BLM group was invited and agreed to march as the “Honored Group” in the Toronto Pride parade?

At this point it’s quite clear that BLM agreed to take part in the Pride parade in order to get a national stage for their protest, so I find this assertion extremely dubious.

What “assertion” do you find “extremely dubious”? The claim that BLM was invited and agreed to march as the “Honored Group” in the Toronto Pride parade? That appears to be documented fact.

And why would that be surprising? After all, BLM in Toronto and elsewhere has significant leadership representation among self-identified queer and trans people of color, as this 2015 article notes:

Moreover, the movement does not merely give token representation to queer and trans people. Two of the founders of the Black Lives Matter network, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, are queer black women. And queer and trans black people are not called in merely to discuss queer and trans issues. They are at the table, on the stage, in the protests. These moves have not been without their challenges, and the movement has had to deal with queer and trans antagonism both from the broader public and within movement spaces. But there is a fundamental belief that when we say Black Lives Matter, we mean all black lives matter.

Such leaders include Janaya Khan, co-founder of BLM Toronto and one of the organizers of this year’s Toronto Pride parade BLM sit-in:

@Janaya Khan

I remember my first Pride.

I was newly out as queer, and eager to experience entire city blocks full of people like me. […]

I looked around, saw the tents with big bank and corporate logos, the groups of largely white people, and shrugged. I was with my friends, who were Black like me, and we had come to have a good time.

But then, about 20 minutes later, we were accosted by police on the fringe of the celebration. One of them wanted to know who we were and where we were going. He became increasingly aggressive but eventually left us alone. […]

We attempted to ignore the incident, to continue to celebrate, but it hung like a shadow over us, so we left.

Ten years later, on Sunday, July 3, I found myself standing in the sun with the rest of my Black Lives Matter – Toronto team as part of the “honoured group” at Pride 2016.

We brought the Pride parade to a full stop with a list of demands (see below) reflecting the needs of some of Toronto’s most marginalized LGBTQ2SIAA community members. These demands challenged the erasure of Black infrastructure and called for the removal of police floats from the Pride parade and community fair, among other things.

And we were successful.

A co-chair and the executive director of Pride Toronto signed our document, and although it seems as if they are attempting to backtrack in recent interviews, we intend to hold them accountable. They have committed to a more inclusive Pride – an inclusivity connected to the very first Pride, known as Stonewall, the riot led by transwomen and queer people of colour against police brutality in 1969 New York.

You seem to be assuming a clear disjunction between LGBTQ people who rightfully “own” Pride events and BLM participants who merely “agree to take part” in Pride events “in order to get a national stage for their protest” (as though BLM doesn’t have plenty of “national stages” for its protests already).

The actual intersectionality, to coin a phrase, of Pride and BLM appears to be much more complex than you’re assuming.

[silenus]

@Ukulele_Ike

Alton Sterling, followed closely by Philando Castile…spectacularly bad timing for an anti-BLM thread, stringbeanarino.

But Stringbean is an idiot, so it makes a sort of sense.

[levdrakon]

BLM hijacking a gay pride parade and spreading their anti-cop bigotry and making it all about them right after the mass anti-gay terror attack in Florida is spectacularly bad timing.

[Rysto]

@Kimstu

What “assertion” do you find “extremely dubious”? The claim that BLM was invited and agreed to march as the “Honored Group” in the Toronto Pride parade?

The assertion that I find dubious is that BLM accepted the invitation to participate in the Pride parade out of a desire to celebrate the LGBTQ community instead of a cynical grab for attention.

[Kimstu]

@Rysto

The assertion that I find dubious is that BLM accepted the invitation to participate in the Pride parade out of a desire to celebrate the LGBTQ community instead of a cynical grab for attention.

Where in this thread was any such assertion made?

[Leaper]

Ya know, there IS such a thing as black gay people…

[John_Mace]

@Ukulele_Ike

We can’t call each other “motherfucker” in the Pit?

Is this new?

@El_Kabong

Yep, brand new in, oh, 2009 or so.

Yep. 2009.

[Kimstu]

By the way, nobody seems to have commented on the fact that two days previously, the annual Trans March took place as part of the multi-day Toronto Pride festivities.

Guess who led it?

Thousands gather for Pride Toronto Trans March

The crowd included at least 4,000 participants who were led by Black Lives Matter. […]

Thousands gathered Friday night to rally for transgender rights as the eighth annual Trans March took over downtown streets as part of Pride festivities. […]

The march was led by Pride honoured group Black Lives Matter.

At one point hundreds sat in the middle of Yonge Street to take in the words of march leader and Black Lives Matter co founder Janaya Khan.

“When the most marginalized lives have what they need, then we all have what we need,” Khan told the crowd at a rally ahead of the march.

Chants of “Black lives they matter here,” were screamed alongside calls for Trans rights throughout the evening. […]

After a month of events and celebrations, Pride culminates this weekend with the Trans March, Saturday’s Dyke March, and Sunday’s Pride Parade.

Any guesses as to what group was also involved with the Dyke March?

On a rainy June day in 1996, the first Dyke March sparked controversy — and now, two decades later, the Pride Toronto event is still drawing crowds and stirring debate. […]

It has also remained a source of controversy, with some questioning its inclusivity – and that of Pride as a whole. The marginalization of the trans community during the march has long been a hot-button issue, leading to a the implementation of a trans-inclusive policy back in 1999. (For the past eight years, there has also been a separate Trans March; thousands gathered for this year’s event on Friday.)

There is still room to improve, noted Alexandria Williams, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto. The group’s front-and-centre presence at the march called attention to the marginalization still experienced by some members of the LGBTQ community. […]

Val Colden, a Dyke March attendee and facilitator for Craft Action, a dyke-centered crafting space, said the overall event is improving as a whole, but added Pride needs to continue acknowledging the most marginalized people within the LGBTQ community.

“So much of the LGBTQ history you hear about is focusing on gay men,” she said. “People of colour, trans people, women, bisexuals, have always been here in this movement.”

The popular narrative about this event seems to be that the gay people organizing Toronto Pride, out of the goodness of their hearts and misguided liberal idealism, kindly offered to let the black people in BLM join in “their” parade as a gesture of cross-movement solidarity. And then BLM selfishly and ungratefully trampled on the “favor” shown them by demanding attention and subservience to “their” movement to “make it all about them”.

But based on additional info such as this April 2016 article, I’m not convinced that that narrative is accurate.

Why Black Lives Matter is Toronto’s most effective LGBT movement

[…] The success that BLMTO has had over the past two months has been astonishing. Since the two-week occupation of the plaza outside of Toronto Police Headquarters, dubbed #BLMTOtentcity, BLMTO’s protests and actions have kept the shooting death of Andrew Loku by an unnamed Toronto cop in the news, and they’ve produced a number of tangible results. […]

Protest movements are rarely able to get these kinds of varied results and obtain them so quickly. But despite their successes, BLMTO still must contend with a police force that isn’t willing to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism, a mayor who doesn’t believe white privilege exists, and a press corps that finds it easier to pick apart a hyperbolic tweet than a politician’s racist remarks.

Even in the face of that adversity, BLMTO may be the most effective LGBT-led protest movement in Toronto today.

At a BLMTO protest on College Street, hundreds of people had gathered to support #BLMTOtentcity. […] Near the back, someone held up a sign with the words of Audre Lorde, the black and queer poet.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives,” it read.

In many ways, the quote captures the way that BLMTO has been operating. The group, like many other Black Lives Matter chapters, is organized mostly by queer and trans people, and most of them are women.

Queer and trans black people have often been at the forefront of black and LGBT liberation movements. But their contributions and accomplishments are often pushed to the side in media reports and popular culture. […]

Alexandria Williams, a BLMTO co-founder, stood in front of crowd, revving them up and leading them in chants. […]

“Now when we say black lives, we mean all black lives. All black lives. Queer black lives. Trans black lives. Disabled black lives. African black lives,” she declared. […]

Later that evening, […] Janaya Khan, another BLMTO co-founder, addressed the group through a loudspeaker.

“When Sandra Bland was killed,” said Khan, “we started to talk about gender. And what it meant to be brutalized by police with an intersectional identity.

“It wasn’t just about being black. It was about being black and queer. It was about being black and trans. It was about being queer and black and trans and disabled. And we began to add more of those intersections. And suddenly the movement was including people who have been ignored from day one, even though we were the ones bolstering the movements as we know them.”

Khan, who is queer and gender non-conforming, told Daily Xtra that this approach is essential for BLMTO. […]

And BLMTO has taken this sort of solidarity seriously. In the wake of mass suicide attempts in Attawapiskat First Nation, members of Idle No More and BLMTO occupied the Toronto office of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, demanding immediate action from the federal government. […]

But while many of the organizers of BLMTO are queer or trans, there has been less visible support from the rest of Toronto’s LGBT community at BLMTO protests. […]

Pride Toronto, which selected BLMTO to be this year’s honoured group during Pride Month, signed a statement of solidarity and came by with supplies in the first week of #BLMTOtentcity.

When asked if Toronto’s large LGBT organizations had come out in solidarity, Williams told Daily Xtra the support had been equivocal.

“We did have Pride come through, check out the space, ask us what we need, but there’s no public solidarity with these groups,” she said. “And especially with us, we’re led by queer women, women and trans folk. We’re repping that community so hard. Me myself and with my identity, it’s one of those things that is so important to me, because that’s my community.” […]

Black people in Toronto are subjected to a disproportionate amount of police scrutiny and violence. […] And for black people, these kinds of interactions can be fatal. Around half of the people killed by Toronto police since the late 1980s have been black. The number of black Canadians in jails and prisons has risen drastically in the past decade.

Many of those people are also queer or trans. […]

All of this indicates a greater need amongst LGBT organizations to address the specific needs of black LGBT people, and to act in solidarity with black liberation movements more generally.

Through their support of indigenous protesters and initiatives like Take Back the Night, BLMTO has demonstrated that sort of solidarity will be reflected back.

In many ways, the rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement resembles that of the AIDS movement a generation ago; not just a fight for human rights, but a fight for life itself.

Thirty-five years after the bathhouse raids and uprising, queer and trans people are still being brutalized by the police and the broader state. They just also happen to be disproportionately black.

[andros]

Thanks **Kimstu **.

[Kimstu]

Most welcome.

[AHunter3]

@elucidator

As a progressive, I am always seeking to expand the definition of “we”. We are black, we are gay, we are Muslim. I am none of those things, but “we” are.

Well put.

But there’s not much “we” happening when marginalized outgroups start to think of oppression and liberation as zero-sum phenomena in which only the most out of outgroups is pure enough to be Not Guilty of Possessing Privilege (translation: there’s only enough liberation to go around to the most deserving marginalized people), and where oppression is considered to benefit oppressors hence, no, if anyone can be shown to be a beneficiary of any form of categorical oppression, they are BAD and part of the PROBLEM.

[BigT]

The thing you interrupt with your protest is the de facto thing you are protesting. They held up the parade, which was not the intent of those organizing it. They made demands of the parade organizers. They made themselves separate by choosing to protest.

The narrative is that they made it about them because they did make it about them. If it was about the LGBT community, it wouldn’t have been a protest against their parade. The only way for it to be otherwise is if they were secretly representing the LGBT community.

Yeah, great. They did a couple other parades without this bullshit. Which message are people going to remember?