Anti-Black racism harms us all
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, a day that means different things to different people. For some, it is a day off work. For others, it is a day to remember remember his activist leadership that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which not only ended Jim Crow laws, but also affirmed equal rights to people independent of the basis of race, color, or national origin (and amended in 1968 to include sex and religion). For others, it is a day of service, where we work to bend the United States and its institutions and laws toward justice. And for many, this year—with police killings of Black people more visible than ever, and the White supremacist sentiments behind the insurrection on the U.S. capital on January 6th—has been an urgent reminder that we need more than just a day of working at food banks and shelters, but a sustained effort to make social, structural, and institutional change that eradicates America’s continued disdain and disregard for Black people.
I’m using this day to re-center the dismantling the anti-Black racism in the United States in my research, teaching, and service. Part of this work is using my position as an ally to help educate. So this post is for people like me who do not identify as Black, but aren’t sure why they should care about anti-Black racism. This post is my attempt to show how fighting for Black racial justice in the United States often has surprising, subtle, but direct links to my own freedom, and how that might be true for you too.
I am not Black.
And I mean that in every possible sense: racially, ethnically, and culturally. In fact, my world has been decidedly White, and only a bit Chinese. My White grandparents were Lutheran and Danish, quietly and privately pious, and were happiest in cold rural plains with grains and cattle. My Asian grandparents, if anything, were secular American, spurning China and Chinese communism, embracing capitalism, and selectively practicing Confucian values of loyalty and filial piety. What both of my families shared were an assimalative embrace of American values: work hard, love your family, and survive oppression rather than resist it.
To some, then, it might be odd that I’m writing about anti-Black racism. I don’t have anything to say about Black experience. I have no lived experience of anti-Black racism, only ever experiencing the most mild forms of anti-Asian racism. Growing up in very White, and historically redlined Portland, Oregon, I didn’t even grow up with Black people in my schools or communities. Black experience, until I moved to Pittsburgh, was something I only saw on the nightly news, and only when someone Black had rioted, been accused of a crime, or died. And when I lived in Pittsburgh, Black segregation was visceral, separating my family in our middle class White neighborhood from the vibrant Black community literally on the other side of the tracks. For me, Black experience was always hypothetical and distant.
None of this distance precludes allyship, and of course I am an ally. My country was founded and architected on White supremacy, and continues to be, in law, in practice, and in belief. And at least in my own moral universe, that fundamental inequality is more than enough to demand my sustained attention on dismantling that architecture, and replacing it with something that fundamentally respects the inherent equal worth and dignity of every Black person. This is my country, and my country is broken, and so it is my duty to help fix it.
In this post, however, I want to make the case that dismantling anti-Black racism isn’t just my moral duty, but that, at least for me personally, something I must do out of self-interest. In sharing my own reasons for prioritizing anti-Black racism over other causes of justice, perhaps you’ll find your own reasons for helping with anti-racism work. Even if, like me, you don’t feel any particular affinity to Blackness or Black experience.
My argument, in essence, is that anti-Blackness is the primary wrench in the gears of American liberty and progress. This one thing, placed long ago into the heart of our nation’s laws, institutions, and ideals, prevents any vision of America in which people have the resources they need to thrive, in which all people are treated with respect and dignity, in which we can even have a basic functioning democracy. You might be thinking there are other better explanations for resistance to progress—different values, different notions of justice, different religious positions on morality. So I’ll spend the rest of this post arguing that these differences in beliefs, at least in the United States, are often differences about Blackness, even when that’s not obviously the case. And I’ll make the case using my own oppression as a trans woman.
Bathrooms and Blackness
Let’s start with something like concrete, like trans bathroom rights. At the moment, I’m fortunate to pass well enough that I don’t get yelled at in rural bathrooms anymore. But there are times when my hair is parted in such a way, or the light falls on my brow, or I’m just a bit too tall in heels, that a woman will read me as male, pause for a moment, and try to decide whether I belong in the women’s restroom. The conservative right in the U.S. has no interest in my right to choose the bathroom that respects my gender; they still want to make it illegal for me to use the restroom that matches my gender, apparently preferring to check everyone’s genitals at the door.
What does resistance to bathroom rights have to do with anti-Blackness? Certainly it has partly to do with a misinformed biological position on gender, and of course transmisogyny. But when you analyze the rhetoric behind bathroom rights, most of it has to do with women’s fears of sexual assault, not science. White women repeatedly say they are afraid of being assaulted by “men in dresses,” and men say they are afraid of this happening to their daughters and wives. But when you go deeper, and present to them specific trans people: do you really want to force Caitlin Jenner to use men’s room? Well, not her, most say. And me? Hah, no, you’re not going to assault me, you’re too tiny. Then who? You know, dangerous men in dresses. Which dangerous men? Once, before I came out as trans, I asked this question of one conservative White relative on Facebook during a heated argument about North Carolina’s HB2 bill, and she said, “You know, *dangerous* men.” Knowing her position as a rural, White conservative who’d said many anti-Black things to me before, I couldn’t help but read this as code for Black men in women’s restrooms. And she later confirmed: “I’m not going to support some law that lets big Black men assault me in a bathroom.”
I was shocked, but not surprised, because she’d said many racist things to me before. But it was the first time I realized that support for anti-trans bathroom bills, for many on the right, may fundamentally be more about fear of Black men than fear of trans people in general. And thus, racism and transphobia bind together, with racial fears indirectly limiting my gender rights.
Healthcare and Blackness
Another trans rights issue I struggle with is health care rights. For example, I’m lucky at the current moment to have gender affirming health care providers through Kaiser Permanente. They respect my gender, they’re knowledgeable about gender-affirming care, and they’re even advocate for trans rights in my broader community. But that’s luck and privilege. I happen to live in a trans-affirming city. My providers could move away (and some have, due to rising cost of living). Kaiser could go out of business. Or I could move someday and end up in a place that is more transphobic. The conservative right is working hard to ensure provider’s can refuse me care on the basis of my gender identity, and insurers to refuse me life-saving medication and services.
How could this possibly be a race issue, especially an anti-Black issue? When I have talked to conservatives about this, most point to freedom first, arguing that health care providers should be free to choose who they do and do not care for. More religious fundamentalists argue that they will not abide a consecration of holy scripture’s supposed gospel on the gender binary. And transphobia is certainly at play in both of these positions. But when I press them, and say that all I want is the right to sue if someone refuses to provide me care on the basis of my gender, they admit: it’s not that I don’t want *you* to have health care, its other people. I once asked an evangelical cousin: who exactly doesn’t deserve health care rights? “You know, homeless people, drug addicts, lazy people. You know how I’m talking about. My tax dollars aren’t going to support welfare queens. You let people sue when they don’t get health care, you get fraud, waste, abuse.”
Listening to this cousin, who was prone to racist outbursts on social media like many in my evangelical White family, I thought of the homeless people in my city: Black veterans who couldn’t find work, Black schizophrenics without families to care for them, Black trans women kicked out of their homes as teens and forced into survival sex. I wondered if resistance to gender-affirming health care rights was really about gender, or rather racial stereotypes about who “deserves” to be healthy.
Housing and Blackness
A third fear I face as a trans person is about housing. The mortgaged townhouse my wife and I are in now, and all of the places we’ve rented prior, were hard to get: in Seattle, there are always multiple offers and multiple renters, and landlords and owners have to make choices about who to sell to, who to rent to. I remember writing our “love” letter to the previous owner of our townhouse, presenting ourselves to a wealthy White widow and her estate as an upstanding heterosexual professional couple, ready to care for her home and not cause trouble in her neighborhood. But now, as an out trans woman married to a woman, will we ever be able buy again? Sure, there are housing discrimination laws, but that doesn’t mean that anti-trans discrimination doesn’t happen. And being able to sue doesn’t mean we get a place to live.
Surely this is just a trans rights issue, and not a racial one? Not exactly. First, the only reason I have housing rights is because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This landmark law was fought for and won by decades of Black activism and organizing, and it not only affirmed Black rights, but eventually the rights of all marginalized groups. What limited protections I have now on the basis of my gender is thanks to Black Americans fighting for equal protection, because Black people have gender too.
Of course, even with this law in place, there is still housing discrimination. In fact, the most common documented form is that property owners tell Black people that units aren’t available when they are, reserving units for White people. And so just as in 1964, Black people now are the ones organizing the most to fight this discrimination because they are the most oppressed by Black bias. If I want any hope of stronger anti-discrimination laws for myself, my best bet is to support Black organizers, who are far more experienced and motivated than me, given the much greater levels of oppression Black people face when finding housing. And just as with the Civil Right act, whatever protections Black people win will inevitably benefit me as well. After all, there are Black women and I’m a woman; there are Black trans people and I’m trans. We are united in so many ways other than the color of our skin.
Lurking behind these subtle links between my liberation and Black peoples’ is the reality of democracy. Trans people are less than 1% of Americans. There is no way that trans people alone are going to win equal rights without a much broader coalition of allies. And this is true for Black people too, who are only 13% of Americans; Hispanic and Latinx people, who are only 17% of Americans; Native people, who are only 1% of Americans; or even disabled people, who are 20% of Americans, depending on which disabilities one counts. None of these groups alone will have a majority in any election or vote without building a larger coalition around a shared concern.
What I hope some of my anecdotes above show is that anti-Black racism is our shared concern. This is because conservative cis White men and women, who make up more than half of our country, ultimately vote out of fear. And I believe that they aren’t particularly afraid of White trans women like me, or two-spirit Native people, or blind brown people, or gay and lesbian Asian people. They are particularly afraid of Black people, of all kinds, and it’s this fear drives their votes, at the expense of everyone else’s civil rights.
So if you aren’t Black, find a way to empower Black activist leaders and ally with them, because they are your path to liberation. And if you are Black, I hope you’ll see an increasing number of informed non-Black allies to help you build a broader coalitions. Together, we will correct the anti-Black original sins that wrench the gears of American progress, and together we will be free.
#BlackLivesMatter
