Panel talks Black Lives Matter, LGBT ties
The panelists who gathered Saturday over Zoom were somber as they watched the video of Muhlaysia Booker, a black transgender woman, being brutally beaten in Dallas last year.
When the video ended, the silence didn’t. A year later, it’s still incredibly hard to see.
But Marlon A. Smith, CEO and founder of Black Greeks Speak Social Justice and Human Rights Council, felt it was important to watch again.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the world, all black lives need to matter — including LGBTQ ones, he said.
“We need to cultivate and curate a conversation around all black lives matter,” Smith said. “The LGBTQ community shows up for all black folks, but we see in some instances … when our trans siblings are being murdered, we don’t often see our straight siblings showing up for the LGBTQ community.”
The council, a nonprofit focused on social justice and human rights, hosted the virtual panel Saturday to foster a dialogue between the African American LGBTQ community and the rest of the Black community.
Though Smith said some people refused to participate when they heard the focus of the panel, about 60 individuals joined the Zoom call Saturday with more tuning in on Facebook Live.
In 2019, at least 27 transgender or gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. died because of fatal violence, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Most of those individuals were black, transgender women.
Unfortunately, that statistic is not surprising, said Assata Richards, executive director of the Sankofa Research Institute. The institute focuses on communitybased participatory research to develop strategies for social change.
In a world ruled by white supremacy, she said, how could their lives matter?
“This idea that black trans
lives matter — they cannot matter in this system of oppression,” she said Saturday. “People get killed when they present themselves as women because women don’t matter.”
That’s why Monica Roberts, founded editor of TransGriot, said it’s important that transphobia and homophobia be eradicated from within the African American community. TransGriot is a blog that focuses on issues faced by transgender women of color.
“Hello, I’m Black and I’m trans and I cannot separate nor will I separate my blackness from my transness,” Roberts said. “We are also part of the larger Black community, and we have been at the forefront and fighting alongside many of you, doing a lot of civil rights work.”
Kaleb Elijah, a Black trans activist, said the key is to remove the adjectives.
“Within our community, we focus on the adjectives and the subject,” he said. “We focus on transness, we focus on woman — so we have separated ourselves at the seams. A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Though there was disagreement among panel members about how much to focus on all black lives during the two-hour Zoom call versus how much to focus on transgender people of color, all members largely agreed that a united front was the goal.
And Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, said that needed to go beyond the protests.
“Marching is always good and we should protest at the Capitol, but we have to go to (legislators’) offices,” he said. “It’s very powerful having someone standing in my office and talking to me and saying I want you to do something.”