Loving is not the name for it — a revision
(alert: this post might contain opinions that are unappealing to people holding certain views on identity politics. No insult or slight. to anyone is intended, however.)
I write a lot about how I become ‘brown-girled,’ routinely.
You’ve read some my earlier post on this, probably.
A lot has happened. A man with 91 felony charges against him is running for President of America again. Apparently, he might even win because Biden was not young enough, snazzy enough, crude enough, and sanctimonious enough. And because Kamala Harris is a “childless cat lady.”
And because, apparently, after George Floyd and the BLM movement, Nikki Haley still didn’t know the reasons for the American Civil War.
Yes, a lot has happened. Things happen. But one bizarre, frustrating, and may I say, deeply disturbing conundrum I’ve been noticing since the spirited and amazing momentum of the BLM movement is how brown girls still get brown-girled. Let me tell you my story about that.
See, I am straight. But I’m still brown, and still a girl(-ish). And I find that my story, therefore, is not that cool or that urgent sometimes to some people who think identity is a zero-sum game, about which Heather McGhee has already written beautifully in The Sum of Us.
But because I’m not a queer brown girl, to some people it seems a waste of time, maybe, to give a voice or an ear to my stories. My stories are often as much about sexuality and gender and their assorted woes, triumphs, and discoveries, but they are not queer experience stories, or at least not dominantly or directly.
So, I am sad to say, I get passed over sometimes as not having an ‘urgent’ or ‘critical’ enough message or content. Zero-sum game, again, you see. But that is NOT because my fellow queer writers with stories about queer experiences would have it so. NOT AT ALL. If it were up to them, they would still want to see all brown girl stories, queer and straight, period.
No, sadly, I get ‘brown-girled’ as a writer because sometimes the literary judges are falling all over themselves trying to prove how queer- and trans-friendly they are. Certain topics, surely, are more urgent at certain times than others, without doubt, but this is not that situation, sadly. And so, also sadly, the game being zero-sum, if there’s one slot for a story, guess which one might get picked by such judges, all other qualities including literary merit being on par.
Please don’t get me wrong. I want queer experience to be as profoundly, prominently represented in literature and culture as possible, and not just now, always. I want the trauma, the struggle, and the triumphs of those embodying that deeply stigmatized and marginalized identity to always be at the forefront, always speaking with the strength, momentum, and urgency of the moment, which in America is always NOW.
But I don’t want it to be forgotten that I am also still brown, still female, still decolonizing, still discriminated against, still underrepresented, and still misrepresented.
And zero-summing literary merit and effort doesn’t fix that. Kowtowing to a contest between trending atrocities doesn’t correct historical wrongs. And white liberal judges and readers of “minority” writing who feel it is their obligation to “champion” the brown queer experience at the expense of the brown straight experience are simply missing the point.
Which is, again, that it’s not a zero-sum game. All oppressions are real, and those with privilege in this society should not Divide and Conquer. That empowers no one in the long run. Let’s listen to all stories, not just the ones that allow the reader/judge to check off the sexiest “sensitivity” boxes. Because, newsflash: In doing so, you are just perpetuating classic paternalist racism and the Lady Bountiful complex.
Because, Dear Ladies Bountiful, I am still here, still brown, still female, still not queer, still writing.
