khalebsalah submitted:
My name is Khaleb Salah Sojourner. I’m a queer, slam poet, model, designer, world traveler, activist, painter, and have the most intense desire to save the world… let’s learn from each other.
Absolutely, I’ll clarify.
To return the comment y’all so ungraciously deleted, what I said was this:
Clarifying question: Does this mean y’all are also officially enacting a ban on fake afros too? Or is it just simply not ok to appropriate Mexican culture but ok to appropriate Black…
“If you can’t have a
dialogue about race and racism,
things you don’t experience and
just don’t know anything about
other than what your white peers
tell you, without getting angry and
defensive, perhaps you shouldn’t
be playing black music”
^
THAT FOREVER
Real talk, I support Tom and Co. in all their other non appropriative music related endeavors but I’ve never set foot at HF due to the personal problems the existence of the event itself pulls up for me…the 2 most glaring being brown people suffering from hella internalized oppression and many a privileged hipster homo dancing at a small space in what used to be an unsafe part of the mission {i still avoid it out of habit} feeling cultured because they’re dancin to soul which is only fresh and engaging to them because they grew up without it in their households (and it doesn’t require much rhythm to dance to)
BEYOND THE DATE AND LOCALE
THEESatisfaction - Do You Have the Time
(Source: youtube.com)
Although it is the last thing we want to do right now I’d like to ask everyone grieving today to do it in public— amongst the straight cis rich white male scum that told Mark she wasn’t fit for the world. I ask you to grieve today unabashedly and honestly with nothing but Fierceness and Intent.
Bois please scream and cry because we are tired of a world where we have to hide the tears we shed because they are not masculine or because “gay people kill themselves all the time” is NOT an ok or accurate justification for this loss (Mark was a fierce genderbending mf’er SHE and THEY are not that hard to grasp)
Queers let your voices be hoarse and your eyes become beyonce lip stain red from crying tears for our deceased brothers & sisters and all the living freaks, faggots, and trans folk getting fucked with on the street, in the bathrooms, in our classrooms, at our jobs.
Gurls who are tired of transmisogyny and cis white women or assimilationist gays being the mouth piece for “trans womyn of color” I beg you to scream the loudest and proudest..be visible today and every day here after
All of us together—-who are tired of being expected to educate people about our history and who our heroes are, tired of invisibility, tired of hating ourselves, tired of the fact that when you are queer and/or brown all towns are sundown towns for you, to those of us tired of binaries, marriage, hegemony, gays in the military, tired of people not knowing who our lost children are and the brilliance their suicides and murders leave the world without
if you are sick and fucking tired of needing to unlearn everything society told you to hate about yourself I ask you to celebrate, remember, and create a spectacle in the name of our fallen queen——our sweet bb calloutqueen.
r.i.p. mark
mark was one of the first people to make me realize that other radical qpoc and gender pirates existed online. for the first time since 10 years earlier when i had discovered the internet i didnt have to worry about making white friends with my “ethnic” interests because i knew i could always log on to tumblr/flickr and converge with a group of artists who were facing the same systematic forms of oppression i was. a small group of us scattered all over the u.s. not all queer not all brown but all angry and tired of being fucked with posting or blogging the things we liked and talking about the way things weren’t right for us. i was never really close to mark but we chatted a few times online (read: she called me down) and via msg once tumblr got that feature—— i guess what i’m saying is even when she was posting shit that made me literally gag on my eleganza mark made tumblr my safe space she made me realize that even when there wasn’t a place for reading a girl for having “popeye’s honey colored hair” in public that at least one person knew the exact shade you were referencing and had just dyed their own extension that color. people often accused her of being inflammatory or “reverse racist” (whatever the fuck that means *side eye* ) mark wasn’t any of the shit mark was exactly what her blog said she was A BLOGGER FOR BROWN GURLS
you shall be missed bb
is it summer yet?!
(Source: eddiesuave, via kalemason)
TRUTH
Trans people of color avoid white trans people because we are not safe.
Take a moment and think about what that means. Think about how unsafe it is to be trans. Then think about how it would feel to not even feel safe amongst other trans people.The next logical question is “How do we reach out and let PoC know our communities are safe?” right?
Wrong.
The next logical question is “how do we make our communities safe for people of color?”
The first step is hardest because it involves a lot of listening. We need to listen to people of color. I don’t mean go out and demand to be educated by the next non-white person you see. No. I mean we need to go the library and take out books by PoC, watch movies made by PoC. Follow tumblrs addressing racism that are written by people of color.
We need to learn the language of oppression as it pertains to PoC. We know the language of oppression as it pertains to trans or queer issues. We know exactly how deeply the cis-sexist and homophobic things cis/straight people say to us sear into our souls. We need to know what things we say hurt PoC and why.
Then we need to stop it. Stop it forever. We need to stop making excuses for screwing it up. As a trans person I always know when someone is misgendering me on purpose, out of ignorance, or as legitimate slip. I’m sure PoC know how we intend our words when we are racist, so don’t try to explain why. Just apologize and stop doing it.
After doing all that we will be ready to reach out to trans and queer PoC. Finally we’ll be able to reach out a hand that isn’t cupping ignorance. We will be able to reach out a hand that is the handshake of an equal, not a patronizing hand to “bring people of color up to our level”.
(via hellaheart)
If you were curious, this is me. You can follow me on instagram too. Najvasol.
<3
Hey y’all, I’m Kneena. This article was written about me protesting the Rick Santorum event in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The article is inaccurate in ways that are offensive and uncomfortable both to me, and others that were involved. I want to be sure that everyone knows I was not acting alone. I was working with twenty other people, some of them from Occupy Charleston and some of them from the Radish Collective (a group of radical queers working to destabilize Charleston). By portraying me as the “lone transgender” the media was able to diminish how scary I really am. I went into the rally with the goal to introduce the narritives of trans visibility and queers being violent into mainstream media. The press was able to erase the twenty people I went their with and portray me as a lonely, deluded freak.The first question the interviewer from buzzfeed asked me was weather I was there alone or not, and I told her I was there with twenty other people, but obviously she had already written her story.
The article stated that I was born biologically male. I wasn’t, I am female assigned at birth, and when I was 18 I learned that I am Queer Bodied ( a term that I am using to mean that I am neither male or female, but not able to get down with the term intersex). I would’ve told this to the interviewer, but she never asked. She only asked if I was trans, and I said yes.
I do not think the labeling of me as a transwoman was an accident. ( I want to take a second here to say that I respect transwomen so much, and that I am not trying to distance myself from this label. I was just not assigned male at birth) In the picture you can sort of see my beard,and I was rocking it so hard while also dressing super femme that day. The tension caused by my visible beard and my femme attire is central to my queer identity, however many people see me and label me as a “Sloppy tranny.” Images of transwomen in media are always seen as dangerous and deceptive (super hot girl who turns out to secretly be a man) or as comical ( a man in a dress!). By viewing me as a sloppy tranny I am often seen as an emasculated man (incapable of defending myself), and an unsuccessful woman. In this way the media was able to use transmisogyn to mock and invalidate my identity as a queer radical renegade which allowed readers to see me as comical figure and not as a dangerous one.
I was trying to push a narrative of queers bashing back and being violent not because I necessarily believe that violence is all around the answer. Reading about police brutality towards the occupy movement today, I was feeling indebted to those who have chosen to peacefully protest in the face of blatant violence. I felt jealous, because being non violent is not an option for me. It’s even less of an option for me now that the Huffington Post and other media outlets have outed me as a transwoman.
Living in Charleston as a visible queer trans body of color means sacrificing safety. I do not leave my house without knives, because I am physically confronted at least once a month, but sometimes twice a week. I am verbally assaulted at least once a day if not more. I have come to know violence intimately, because even if I can (and have!) escape the bigots that chase me with rocks and knives I cannot always escape the fear they surround me with. When people like Rick Santorum suggest that gays don’t have the right to exist, he is asking his followers to stamp them out.
I have become to familiar with what it means to be an object of bigotry. When people look at me I can tell that they are angry that I feel that I have the right to exist. I know that they, like me, are committing themselves to their activism. They are actively trying to drive freaks like me back into a normative existence, and if we refuse they are happy to drag us to our graves.
I yearn to take the violence doled out against me with a smile, to let myself be beaten to smithereens laughing all the way, but I know that when I do not fight back my face is not blown up across the internet. No one is paying attention. I know that when I am not ready to fight back, I will not fight back, and they will know to. And I know that if I do not fight back, that means that I will let myself be dragged into the trunk of a black van full of college bros looking to lynch a tranny, never to be seen again. If I do not fight back then I will just be another dead queer that the south chewed up and didn’t both to spit out. If I do not fight back, I will quickly become one less queer body, and my fellow renegades will be left on the front lines without me.
I told Santorum and the reporters that the longer you silence queers the harder we will bash back, and that is the truth as I see it, because we are fighting a war where we are being killed everyday,. Our identities and struggles are invisible to the world that refuses to see anything but the white, gender normative, heterosexual, upper middle class.
The world needs to know and respect that the other exists: that there are queers, people of color, poor people, differently abled folx (cognitively and physically), undocumented folx, transfolx, and so much more who are entitled to the same rights. We are here, we have knives and we are coming for our rights.
I hope this has been helpful to read, it was certainly self indulgent to write. I am so thankful to all the support I have recieved from so many people!! Y’all are incredible, I assumed for sure that you would be too normative and embarressed to get down with my fight. If you want to fight the fight with me and all the other renegades, I want you to do that.
There are so many things that you can do to help:
1) Work to make the spaces around you safe. By safe I mean evaluating the actions and words in the space and consciously phasing out violent or offensive terminology. It also means holding people in the space accountable for their words. This can be hard and no fun. However, nothing makes me feel worse than being in a space I thought I was safe in and hearing any of the following: faggot, retard, rape jokes, tranny.
2) Educate yourself. We are born into bigotry, and we are socialized to be bigots. Disengaging from bigotry and oppression is hard. You have to work for it. It is never an oppressed individuals job to educate you, or let you know about their struggle. It is your job to get down with their struggle.
ok, thank you for reading. If you need any help, or you want to work with me, I am here.
In solidarity,
Kneena
(via apples)
