⟦On the Christian homophobic & transphobic agenda in Communities of Color⟧
Per Facebook commentary
Any Person of Color who takes issue with Black + Brown LGBT or SGL (Same Gender Loving) People in this country or abroad via their myopic interpretation of the Bible is doing nothing less than transferring the hatred, violence, and systemic oppression levied against People of Color and their ancestors by White Supremacy. Period. There is no in between, nor is there a “middle ground” that should be sought. The fact that PoC who identify as something other than cisgender or heterosexual come under the double scrutiny handed to them due to their intersectional existence is a tragic byproduct of this civilization’s rampant anti-Blackness and Christianized Patriarchy. There is a difference in allowing the opinions of others to be heard as is their privilege under Constitutional Law versus using what is clearly hate speech and divisive rhetoric to garner + maintain followers of a religion that, historically speaking, was never ours to begin with.
How easily Communities of Color like to forget just how violently and vehemently Christianity - both Catholic & Protestant - was forced upon them by their European, Colonial oppressors. How easily we choose to adopt a so-called “passive” sense of just how our lives, our bodies, and our progeny were up for constant critique, torture, and elimination through this institution of religion. And how dare ANY of you who stand by your Bibles and your ignorance continue to use these historically oppressive tools to defend a Black/Brown clergy or religious who have literally named People of Color who are LGBT/SGL as complicit in some sort of “rebellion?” Meanwhile, your churches, your social circles, your choirs, your Gospel music industry, and your donation coffers are chock filled with participation and tribute via folks who identify as these things (and are probably far more “saved” than some of you will ever be), but whom you still choose to condemn based on the delusional prattle of a pagan-based set of laws written in antiquity.
It is one thing to respect the the privileges that are supposed to be granted to all US citizens through our long-standing legislation; that is something that should always be defended, particularly at a time when Black voices and Black bodies are being torn down to defend a violent Supremacist system. It is entirely another to take that kind of violence and divisive double-speak and pair it with the institution of Christianity as a reason to stand behind so-called “leaders” of the faith who willingly, WILLINGLY, use their influence to marginalize and oppress members of their own community. There is nothing “Christian” about defending moral bigotry or low-information zealots. There is nothing “sanctified” about using one man’s understanding of Scripture to continue bashing the lives of any person whose identity offends our sense of structure. And there is nothing - NOTHING - about an intellectual, comprehensive, and modern spiritual understanding of Christianity that says we are in the right when we treat other people wrong simply because of who they are.
Shame on all of us, every one of us, for allowing this bastardized, poisonous understanding of faith to undermine the unity and liberation of marginalized people.
Shame on us for letting our subjective understanding of God and the Universe block our need to show love & empathy towards one another.
If this is the best we can do as a community, this simple-minded bickering over someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity/preference, then we have already lost this struggle long before we decided to pick up the tools to fight.
⟦On White Supremacy's dominant role in chattel slavery⟧
[Not-so] Random [at all], but since it was part of a podcast I was listening to recently, let’s be VERY CLEAR that the concept of torturous chattel slavery as a fulcrum for Western European and US led capitalist imperialism was NOT something that Africa helped cultivate. This ridiculous - literally, ridiculous - argument that slavery in the Americas would never have happened if Africans hadn’t sold off “their own kind” is the stuff of Supremacist historical rewrites. If Arabs had not shown up on the Eastern borders of the African continent with the intent to exploit and sell Black bodies, there would’ve been no Eastern African slave trade. And if White European Catholic and Protestant military generals, missionaries, financiers, and prospectors hadn’t happened upon the tribes of Western Africa with weapons and a stated intent to monopolize on the already existing tensions between African tribes and kingdoms [via arms-slave exchange and forced colonization], there would have been NO reason for said tribes and kingdoms to do this kind of business with these White men.
Supremacist culture provided the opportunity for more aggressive African civilizations to maintain and expand their influence over less militarized ones - and in their folly, allowed for that Supremacist culture to overtake their own, with the end results being the full, violent exploitation of every resource and available Black and Brown body they could lay their hands on. Warring African civilizations may have levied heavy damage and mass casualties against their enemies before the years of the Diaspora, as is the nature of intra-societal military conflict, but the very fact that White Europeans & Americans viewed the entire African continent as an expendable resource, and the mass of its people as subhuman property, is a complete departure from anything many of its people had seen before, and the long-term damage wrought by this specifically White Supremacist system has proven itself to be both generational and permanent, as is evidenced by our racist institutions and broken societies in existence today.
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