I've been struggling to think of how to articulate a way I've been feeling about the way a lot of "you must respect your queer elders" conversations that I've seen lately have gone, and then today I saw a clip of Angela Davis speaking at an event recently and it made me realize it's the conflation of "respect for those who came before you and who built things you benefit from" and "giving those people the authority of dictating the culture."
she was talking about like, gender diversity and the ways in which that fits into liberation and the ways it hasn't always been included, and she was positioning herself in that space as someone who did a lot of EXTREMELY important work that made a huge impact, but she did not imply that that meant that those coming after her owed her writing and perspective deference on every level. which was such a wonderful thing to hear as someone who read some of her early statements about things like queerness many decades ago and felt disappointed and hurt by what she said about it. she said "we are all building on the work done by those who came before us. we all stand on their shoulders. many people stand on my shoulders, and often those people know more than I do about certain subjects, and it's important to me that I am able to learn from them." she was saying like, "yeah, my work often benefits people who come after me and who have more knowledge than I do about a component of what I am discussing, and their perspectives in turn enrich my own frameworks," and I found that really encouraging as a way to look at this. not "this activist's work was imperfect and that means it is bad," and also not "you young people don't understand what it was like, and your perspective that I have overlooked things or gotten things wrong is a threat to my work and my legacy," but "this is a collaborative effort between countless individuals over a long span of time, and we all enrich each other's frameworks with our knowledge and experience"
no one person can outline All Oppression in one perfectly informed way -- we are all cobbling together a big picture based on all of our personal experiences and our perspectives that are based on those experiences. many people stand on her shoulders, and some of them know more about some things than she does, and she values what they add to what she has done. she thinks it's important to learn from them like they have learned from her.
idk I think that's such a. I respect that way of framing activism/liberation work a whole lot. I think we live in a very authoritarian society that encourages us to conflate "granting someone respect" and "granting someone authority over you" and I think she illustrates really well how to navigate separating those concepts when talking about intergenerational discussions like this.






















