Yesterday's
post got some reactions. I was surprised by that - I have this idea that the
normal reaction to me is "There she goes again."
It
flowed into some thoughts that I have been having about Stonewall, which
makes more sense than it sounds like. First of all, let me defer to Miss Major:
If
you're thinking this isn't my specialty, it isn't, and there's a lot here. That
reference she has to assimilation is apparently a whole thing that I never knew
about. (In my defense, I was not born yet.)
That's
okay actually; we learn when we go out of our wheelhouse. Coming in as not
knowing very much, with just the Wikipedia article and the IMDB page I can see
that the names of the detectives are in there but the names of the principle
people on the other side are not.
Apparently
some accuracy is important, but not all of it.
What
does it matter if Roland Emmerich - who is after all the man who gave us 10000
BC - takes an event that was centered on drag queens and makes it about gay men
who are mostly cis and white? I mean, even if that night was mainly trans
individuals of color, white and cis gay men were part of the Pride movement
that grew out of that, right? Is it significant that a prominent gay activist
who is a white male thinks the critics are crazy?
This
was interesting, from Wikipedia:
"Not
everyone in the gay community considered the revolt a positive development. To
many older homosexuals and many members of the Mattachine Society...the display
of violence and effeminate behavior was embarrassing. Randy Wicker, who had
marched in the first gay picket lines before the White House in 1965, said the
'screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that
I wanted people to think about homosexuals...that we were a bunch of drag
queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.'"
That
might be the kind of attitude that leads to all white, all cis statues.
Here's
the thing: it makes sense that this kind of a revolt happened with the people
who were most marginalized. They took the most abuse and they had the least to
lose. It also follows a certain logic that less marginalized people ended up
becoming the face of the movement. Is the logical extension then that, despite
huge strides in acceptance of LBG people, that the T falls behind? A trans
women still has a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered by a cis person.
I
am writing about this today because there was so much anger at the two black
women who interrupted Bernie Sanders. That is beyond the comments on my blog -
it's all over the place. I might get more into that tomorrow, but I think for
now it is safe to say that people hate being interrupted. They hate being made
to feel uncomfortable. They may later accept that the cause is right, but they
hate the discomfort that forces them to think about the cause.
So
then I think about how much of the work for women's rights has been done by
black women, and how much of the work for African-American rights has been done
by black women, and yet you have white mainstream feminists plagiarizing black
women's work, and black men taking the sides of the white women, and how hard
it is to get the same recognition for black women as for black men.
Black
women have been the most marginalized; they have had lots of motivation to do
the work, and they have done a lot, but they are less likely to reap the
benefits. It's easier for that to happen when they are erased.
And
it is wrong.
Marissa
Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford accomplished something big Saturday. This
will affect not only Sanders' campaign, but all of the democratic candidates,
and it will make this campaign about more important issues. They are also
having their reputations drug, and are the targets of a lot of anger that would
be better directed against the problems they are protesting.
This
is not unusual, but it's not right. We can change that.
These
are two other posts I found interesting, and kind of related:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment