I went into some buildings and you heard the boos and the racial remarks but that kinda geared me up. I was called the N-word so many times that I thought it was a compliment, you know (laughs) So I just went out and played. […] They had never seen a black man on the ice. I just told myself: “Just go out and play and try to represent the hockey club at the best of your ability. And if the fans can’t see that then don’t worry about it.” I am a black man. I know when I look in the mirror that I am a black man. Nobody needs to tell me that. — Willie O’Ree, who became in 1958 the first black player in the National Hockey League
“Knowing that they were losing “valuable product” due to their slaves’ propensity to swim, slave owners began taking drastic steps to protect their property. One of these steps was to instill a fear of the water by dunking disobedient slaves in water until they nearly drowned and by creating fear through stories of creatures living in the water. Thus it didn’t take long to excise or destroy the West African swimming tradition from African- American culture. The Jim Crow laws that were enacted after The Civil War prohibited blacks from the popular seaside resorts in places like Atlantic City, N.J. and Revere Beach, Mass. And by the 20th Century, as the swimming pool began to gain in popularity in the United States, the color line prohibited blacks from enjoying this pleasant recreational skill.
In addition, self-segregation also played a role in limiting those of African ancestry from getting in the water. I remember my Aunt saying to stay away from the pool because, “black folk don’t swim.””
Next time you hear someone ask questions like, “Why don’t black people swim?” Or “Why are so many black people afraid of dogs?” And, “Why are there do so many black people live in poverty?”…..let ‘em know that those aren’t coincidences. These things didn’t just happen naturally, all on their own. There’s a reason for it, and you don’t have to be an historian to know they’re all interconnected through slavery, endemic racism and persistently racist cultural norms.
I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.
@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.
QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.
I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”
All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.
And?
Most of them were not white.
I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.
“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.
And do you know what else queer is?
Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.
Because it embraces aroace people.
Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.
TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.
Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.
Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.
We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.
I never head of TERFS rejecting queer for gatekeeping, but honestly? It sounds very likely, and Prismatic-Bell makes an important point.
I have seen aphobes do this exact thing first-hand. I’ve had an aphobe insist to me that I was homophobic for using the word queer to describe myself and my community (i.e. the community that is inclusive of aro/ace, trans, and multisexual people).
Aphobes really like to insist on LGBT or “gay” as the only acceptable umbrella terms, because that allows them to exclude aro/ace people while pretending to be more inclusive of bisexual and trans people than they actually are.
But oh, just wait five minutes, push them on their own internal logic a little bit, and they’ll show their true colors.
Hint: their true colors are TERF.
Queer is definitely still a slur in the UK, but I know that the LGBTQIA+ community is reclaiming it for themselves, so… yeah. The above still applies.
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