#decolonizing lessons

“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound.”

A few months ago, I noticed a lot of black and brown community members engaging in discussions about queer athletes, specifically transgender swimmers and runners. At best, many commentators were trying to mask their [transphobic] discomfort behind ugly feminism and gendered separatism . . . at worse, some individuals doubled down on segregationist rhetoric that came right out of the Jim & Jane Crow Handbook 🤦🏾‍♀️

This "public discourse" was NOT about creating safe environments for young folks (folx) to play sports. This "national conversation" was NOT about "respecting" women atheletes. This antiqueer backlash was about reinforcing the rigid, colonized gender norms of imperialism and the ecosystem of white supremacy. While there is a MUCH larger discussion to be held about the intersectional role empire-building and race play in cultivating environmental racism, the commodification of women and wombs, rugged individualism, the spectacule of non-white existence, and ugly feminism, we will save that deep dive for another summer's day. Whether you embrace queerness as an interwoven, intergalactic landscape of identities and lived experiences that transcend the Global North's [predominantly whitecentric and capitalist] LGBTQ+ Movement or you are still working your way through chapter one of "How to be Antiracist," keep in mind that:

Queerness is an ancestral practice that saturated our pre-colonial continents and cultures.

Queerness was a tool of resistance and reclamation against European settler-colonialism and slavery.

Queerness centers our indigenous and diaspora histories, starlore, and memories, using these collected fragments of our multicolored human condition as tools to dismantle the master's house.

The past, the present, and the future is queer!💫

From Karpoozy's IG —— Pro tip we don't call children crack babies

What a poet cannot write and the historian cannot explain, the artist draws.

I remember my father sitting down with me in the fourth grade and going through The Middle Passage. As we turned the pages, he told me how some ancestors climbed nets and ropes to throw themselves overboard, believing the ocean would carry their souls back home. He pointed to the charcoal outlines of sharks and said "sharks used to follow the ships." When I asked why, he explained how so many kidnapped Africans were dying and suffocating in the belly of slave ships that enslavers tossed them overboard. "They didn't view them as human. They viewed them as animals." Chattel.

We teach about how the Nazis used cattle cars during the Jewish Holocaust, but we fail to mention how they learned their dehumanizing tactics from the ones British, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, Arabic, and American enslavers utilized against Black people during the African Holocaust (Google Maafa)

Chattel slavery is not Black history. Chattel slavery is American history. The capitalist system that politicians fight so desperately to preserve was built on chatfel slavery. The first monumental action of the long Civil Rights Movment was a war over chattel slavery. The racial violence in policing and the apartheids and inequities across communities are all part of the multigenerational legacy of chattel slavery.

Our history is your history.