To be Black? or Queer Diabetics exist?

wow. the Cohen chapters really resonated with me this week. i keep finding more and more examples in my community work and interactions that i want to bring up in this response, so i think i will focus there.

I want to touch on something that Cohen discusses regarding when health issues become legitimate. On page 5 she writes that one church pastor describes that the church response to AIDS was either non-existent or negative because the disease was seen as a "disease of homosexuals" and goes on to say, "However, after women, children, and hemophiliacs--those who have no control over this disease--were found to be infected, church leaders began to realize that a more compassionate response was called for." This idea of fault/blame/guilt/immorality/legitimacy seems to be everywhere when dealing with disease. I run an online group for queer diabetics that came out of my identity as, ahem, a queer diabetic. The idea of the group is to make connections between multiple types of oppression in real terms (ie lesbophobia and ableism) and also to bring basic visibility to this double identity. Many people don't understand why its necessary to make space for queer diabetics or don't see the two pieces as connected. Yet, NONE of the mainstream diabetes advocacy groups have any information geared to queer folks about the healthcare disparities and dealing with a chronic illness. I believe that this does not just come from the ignorance of dominant groups to whom it "never occurs" that these are issues (a form of homophobia in itself--presumed heterosexuality and/or lack of knowledge about issues affecting queer communities). I think that these mainstream providers/advocates do not want to risk delegitimating their issue by talking about diabetes as a "queer issue." Particularly type 1 (sometimes called juvenile on-set) groups frame their subjects as innocent children that didn't do anything wrong, victims to whom this disease happened. since they are seen as wholesome and innocent, people feel bad when they get sick and they give money. Many of the events that these orgs put on have a large "family" focus, meaning cis-man + cis-women married with a couple (straight& cis) kids. They want to preserve this image. They do not want queers hanging around and threatening their funding (or poor people of color, or undocumented folks, etc. for that matter). Diabetes is seen as a worthy cause because white middle class kids get it; HIV contraction finally deserved compassion when "innocent" hemophiliacs & children were infected. Similar to what Cohen is explaining about membership in black communities and owning of issues, the dominant members within the diabetes community get to decide what the issues are for that community, where the research money goes, who will receive support and services and who is allowed in. Even though queer diabetics face greater health disparities than hetero diabetics, they are less likely to be able to access diabetes-specific services due to homophobia and to a lesser extent, LGBT-specific services due to ableism & disease-stigma.

Examples of dominant groups within marginalized communities deciding that group's agenda & focus issues abound in my life this week. Three others that I am dealing with today include: substance abuse prevention groups ignoring/avoiding LGBT inclusion in surveys, mainstream nyc LGBT groups focusing on gay men's health almost exclusively, and trans/queer mobilization of support against police brutality without community accountability for sexual assault.

I would like to finish with a comment about the discussion happening here around centering deviance. I firmly believe that the folks on the margins absolutely need to be the center of and leaders of movements. Yet we consistently witness the selling out of deviants once they become popular or in the center. I think that this often happens because the frameworks of these movements have not actually shifted in the ways they needed to. I have often thought that business women really aren't that liberated, they are just (sometimes) allowed to be a part of discussions/negotiations/decision-making if they are willing to take on the characteristics of the dominant group. If we were actually able to put deviant-created, deviant-led frameworks in place maybe it would be possible to make change. That's what I'm hoping for at least.

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other notes:
-issue of "black community really exist?" reminds me of conversations about ageism and what is "culturally appropriate" programming for seniors being prescriptive instead of wide-ranging and self-determined

"consist mostly of people with economic and educational privilege is MORE concerned with presenting a “respectable” face to the dominant culture and reaping the rewards of proximity with white folks than with being accountable for the lived experience of the majority of black folks."

To be Game or 41 questions

(in reading & thinking & feeling & responding to ida b wells' "mob rule in new orleans" and audre lorde's "need")

i can't pretend to understand what it means to be black.
i can't pretend to comprehend the depths of my white privilege.

i am not making excuses
i am searching

i.
was it for hate?
was it for lust?
was it for revenge?
was it for envy?
was it for entertainment?

did it slice off your fear?
did it burn off your accent?
did it cut out your pain?
did it secure your family's position?
did it tie down your job?
did it set fire to your inadequacies?
did it stake down your belonging?
did it beat back your vulnerability?
did it display your power?
did cooking tongues silence?

will you realize what you've done?
will you turn yourself in?
will you confess your horrors?

would you plead not-guilty?
would you do it again?

ii.
was it for love?
was it for need?
was it for survival?
was it for liberation?
was it for destruction?
was it for redemption?

did it help?
did it burn off your oppression?
did it beat back your vulnerability?
did it cut out your pain?
did it kick off your fear?
did it awaken your anger?
did it move like manhood?
did it feel like need?
did it die out?
did slitting tongues silence?

will you realize what you've done?
will you remember?
will you listen?

would you name the enemy?
would you dismantle the enemy?

To Be Poetic or White People Take Everything

deep breath.

i had to read the Sylvia Wynter article, "Ethno or Socio Poetics" more than twice to begin to understand. i had a hard time with the language and the vocabulary, but that made it all the more exhilarating when the same words began to transform from letters in a row to thoughts that made me franticly scribble barely-legible notes in the margins. reviewing my notes now, it seems that they are mostly just paraphrases of the author's ideas in more accessible words for myself. still, i'd like to spend some space reflecting on definitions as relations or "a relation between We and an Other."

part 1.
i was really able to follow the author's explanations of how identities are/have become/were forced to become relationships. but i do not fully follow her point that jazz allowed blacks to reinvent "themselves as a WE that needed no OTHER to constitute their Being." In some ways, I understand how art allows creation that is not confined to opposites. I find Wynter's point confusing though because it seems to me like there is still a white other. She states in the same paragraph that the popular oral culture created by the black was in response to white negation of black humaness. that makes me think that there is still a that helps define what black popular culture is. maybe i am not fully understanding the idea of definitions as relations. but maybe, despite the fact that there is no tangible other that serves to define jazz music, still the existence of jazz and how it is defined as a musical genre is somehow deeply related to being different than white culture. right? is that possible?

but, then again, it seems possible that something could be created in response to something else, but need not be dependent on that first thing to define its being...

i think that Wynter's use of music as the example of how this is possible is particularly poignant. trying to name and define music and music genres reminds me of an ethnomusicology class that i once took. on the first day of class, the professor played a song and then asked us to describe what it sounded like. it was nearly impossible. each person who tried, ended up saying things like "its was like a beep bop bo bop." part of the point of the exercise was to show that music was a not just another way to express oneself, it was not just a different adjective that could be simply substituted in a sentence, it was an alternate means for expressing experiences and feelings that we do not have the language to relate, to describe. so then, does using music as the example of a "concretely universal ethnos" work because music itself is so hard to describe and define? is that exactly the point? i mean, is that why Wynter suggests that art/poetics/creative processes the way to cease relying on exclusion? oh. did i just write myself into an insight?

part 2.
I want to stay in this same part of the article and continue to talk about definitions as relations and share a thought that i had while reading that isn't part of the posed questions. i first started really understanding and connecting with the piece during my first read-through when i got to the part on page 84 that talks about the "NORMATIVE MODEL OF MAN." Wynter describes European culture being "posited as a gold standard of value, its possession acting as a definition of...humanity" and then explains how written tradition, not oral tradition came to be identified with culture and humanity. She continues with, "The myth of the cultural void of the non-West--The Other--was to be central to the ideology which the West would use in its rise to world domination." When I first read this I stopped at the end of that sentence, looked up at my fellow subway riders, and began thinking about how the meaning of the word "culture" has changed and what is often implied now when folks speak about "having culture." i wondering who my co-rideers would identify as culturally void today.
(so, being white and having studied anthropology in undergrad, i spent a lot of time in the early years thinking about other people's cultures, mourning my "lack of culture," and wishing for "more culture" before even recognizing what it meant about white privilege, white supremacy, and white ethnocentricity to think in these ways).

still ruminating from this twist, i continued reading until i reached the NORMATIVE MODEL OF MAN phrase screaming at me in all caps. it clicked in my head then how european/white culture could easily transform/abstract from defining itself as the pinnacle of CULTURE to becoming the dominant, standard of culture and therefore the norm, or normal, plain, unexotic, un-noticeable culture (to the dominators). yet, becoming the normative model has created a sense of "lack of culture" for many white people. this can often lead to white people "going in search of real culture" i.e. cultures of the Others and then appropriating it for themselves. this cultural appropriation can then lead to fucked-up "white ally" behavior, increased stereotyping of the non-white cultures, and increased alienation in us/other definitions of self.

thinking through this chain of actions got me thinking more intensely about cultural appropriation and why its so bad. i immediately re-read the section about black popular culture constituting a universal ethnos and it struck me profoundly: cultural appropriation of the very art that black folks created to reinvent themselves as fully human (necessitated by white dehumanization of blacks) means white people taking everything. i immediately wrote in huge caps over the top of my print out

WE TAKE EVERYTHING

fuck. and then in this moment of revelation, i still can hear my own words in a conversation many years ago before i even knew what cultural appropriation was: "but if i want to have dreads, why shouldn't i be able to?"

and my friend's simple reply: "because they are not yours to have."

part 3.
i am going to have to leave off without finishing my last part, but i want to include my notes here so that i can return to it as i think about it more. i want to respond to prof gumbs question about whether its effective to define through exclusion. in my work at an LGBT center in Queens I have often struggled with questions of safe space and inclusion/exclusion particularly as it relates to perceived identities, infinite self-identities, and rubrical institutionalized identifiers. more on this soon...

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notes:
d) effective to define through exclusion? (think of LGBT and struggles to create safe, inclusive, but still (blank) spaces and the trouble with language/term/identity that ensues

boycott interesting

let's put a ban on the word "interesting."
i have been thinking lately how that word is such overused bland, inexpressive filler. today begins my new challenge to build a stronger, more compelling vocabulary. who's in?