The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER
Dal professor Omisoore Dryden says:‘we must insist that Black queer and trans lives matter’
In 2013, Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in the United States in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-black racism.
Black organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi created the Black-centred political movement, amplified online by #Blacklivesmatter. These three Black women, two of whom are queer, were insistent from the beginning that their movement be inclusive of all Black people.
For some, this may feel like new information. Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and trans people have always been part of community activism. I think of Faith Nolan, a lesbian who is African Nova Scotian. Faith Nolan lived in the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children for the first four years of her life, and then moved with her family to Ontario, returning to Halifax in 1976 when she was 19. A musician and community activist, her commitment to social justice comes from her life experiences. Faith’s music is her political work. She uses her music to bring about social change for a more just world. Nolan has stated that “along with being queer, we also carry the institutionalized burdens of racism, classism, ableism, sexism and until all of us have full equality, none of us do.”
There is also Bayard Rustin, a Black gay man who was a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.
Rustin planned the 1963 March on Washington; King Jr. received a lot of pressure to distance himself from Rustin, but King refused. And in this act, King also demonstrated that all Black lives matter.
Professor Angela Davis, a writer and former member of the Black Panthers, recently participated in the online Youtube Black Queer Town Hall on June 21, in which she describes herself as “communist, abolitionist, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, Black, queer activist, pro workingclass, revolutionary, intellectual, community builder.” Davis, throughout her work as an activist and career as a scholar has dedicated herself to prison abolition and states that the struggle for gender equality, gender diversit, and LGBTQ rights has been championed by trans people who are incarcerated.
The importance of understanding that we live complicated lives is especially crucial. Audre Lorde, who described herself as a "Black lesbian feminist warrior mother,” was also a writer and activist, and wrote that, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
All Black Lives Matter. These are not simply slogans or chants; they speak to the unique and specific experiences that Black people have, including Black boys and men, Black women and girls, Black folks with disabilities and Black LGBTQ folks. To erase these specificities diminishes the depths to which anti-black racism impacts our lives and also works to limit the demands for accountability. Even more, during these times of the pandemic and global uprisings against police brutality, violence and antiblack racism.
On May 27, Tony Mcdade, a Black trans man, was killed by police just two days after the murder of George Floyd, yet we know less about Mcdade. Mcdade was further harmed after his death by being misnamed (deadnamed) and misgendered in the press. As Black people, we have historical experience of having our names taken from us to be named by others for their use and to our detriment. As a Black trans man, Mcdade deserved dignity in his death and his name and gender respected.
Pride month began five days after Mcdade’s death — June across North America, with festivities kicking off in Halifax in July. Historically, Pride grew out of the community organizing led by Black queer and trans folks, a legacy that was reanimated in 2016, when Black Lives Matter-toronto, co-founded by Black women, queer and trans people, held a protest at Toronto Pride demanding that the organization address the internal anti-black racism and ban the police from participating. BLM-TO reminded those in attendance that Pride began as a riot led by Black and Latinx queer and trans women activists: Stormé Delarverie, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, among others.
On June 8 and 9 of this year, two Black trans women — Riah Milton in Ohio and Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells in Pennsylvania — were murdered in the United States. It is important to know their names and demand better for our communities.
As jurisdictions and locations declare that anti-black racism is a public health crisis, we must be guided by the fact that all Black lives matter. And we must remember this during this continuing pandemic and uprisings. We must address the disproportionate violence that Black trans women experience. We must remember that Black women and Black queer and trans people have always been in the centre and forefront of this organizing. We must insist that Black queer and trans lives matter.
Omisoore Dryden is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University.
We must remember that Black women and Black queer and trans people have always been in the centre and forefront of this organizing. We must insist that Black queer and trans lives matter.