Part one of a three-part series of issues surrounding racism and inclusivity I felt like writing about somewhere other than social media. A lot of what my friends are posting about is emotional, and I don’t feel like hijacking that as a place to thrash this out. But like the kid in Dear Mr. Henshaw, sometimes we need the exercise of even an imaginary audience, and so, this (hopefully for now) anonymous blog.
Recently I find myself thinking about the subtle art of underlining.
It started with the proposal this summer to add colors to the Pride flag in Philadelphia that stirred up a lot of feelings on the internet, and some of the defenses I read of the proposed change seemed to be fairly ham-fisted or awkwardly missing the point, at least as I understand it from friends who are people of color, and have more at stake emotionally than I do. I can’t tell anybody how to feel about it, but I did get a bit frustrated watching people make valid, reasonable points while completely talking past each other. All the unrest I heard was over the brown stripe (for people of color) and not the black one (for those we’ve lost to AIDS), so most of that I’ve been thinking about has to do with that brown stripe.
Three of the various dueling viewpoints are based on the fact that people of color often are, and definitely feel, excluded from LGBTQ society and events. So to some, the brown stripe is a way of making it clear that everyone is welcome, a sentiment they believe no progressive person could possibly disagree with, meaning detractors must be those overt or unconscious racists who still don’t value the people of color in our communities. To them, their hearts are in the right place, their message is simple, and therefore anyone who questions this new symbol of diversity and inclusion must be either a closet racist or just confused, because how else would progressives and people of color be against an anti-racism symbol? As it turns out, there appear to be several reasons, based on history.
One reason is that it felt presumptuous, as if white allies were just now inviting people of color to the party. This one is really a double-whammy, since Pride originated with trans people of color standing up for themselves, and some feel the entire event was co-opted by white gay men, so an olive branch to invite people of color to a party they started as a protest was received… awkwardly. For some the symbol itself continued re-writing of history, since it implies that the Pride flag didn’t actually stretch itself out to cover the whole community, and the traditional rainbow flag was actually the white queer flag all along. That clearly wasn’t the intention of those who created and flew the flag with additional brown and black stripes but it did land that way, with a thud, in some people’s perceptions. One of the things I’ve had to learn in the last few years is that some people in my life and my larger community feel the weight of history entirely differently than I do. This was one of those times. I listened, but in my heart I still didn’t feel this particular flag was wrong, and it took me a while to find the word that explained why: underlining.
Before I get to that, as an aside I want to mention the other reason some people took a dim view of what was supposed to be inclusive: some people of color do not consider themselves “brown”, or think that symbolizes every non-white person. A compromise may seem inevitable because there clearly is no perfect color that encapsulates and swathes together all the diverse, non-European bodies of this earth, but isn’t that kind of the problem? White-centric racism is what forcibly crammed these people together into one collective other with some common experiences, and this is just another label that makes it easier for people in a racist society to be inclusive in a very bland, non-specific way. I’m not personally being represented by the brown stripe, so this I leave to others to judge for themselves.
But underlining. This is how I saw the stripe, as an underline. When something has been there all along in a piece of text and I keep missing it, I underline it. I highlight it. When I revisit that text I know this is the part I am forgetting, this is the part on which I keep losing my focus. I don’t need to rewrite anything, the meaning has been there, I just need an underline to make sure I’m seeing it. We’ve had to explain this before, when marching to support the idea that Black Lives Matter, a counter has been that all human life is sacred. Which was actually the point of standing up and saying that black lives matter, it wasn’t exclusionary, it was underlining with a thick stroke the part we forgot. Bizzarely some people heard it with an “Only” on the front, but some of us heard it with a thick “too!” on the end, because we already knew our lives had value and we wanted that recognized for our friends and neighbors and colleagues. I didn’t ever hear, “Black Lives Matter NOW”, because they always did, and always will, nothing has changed but hopefully some of us are seeing this essential, timeless fact more clearly. This was why “All Lives Matter” sounded hurtful, despite nominally being the exact same sentiment, because it erased all the underlining. When told their broad blanket of belief in the sanctity of human life wasn’t actually falling over everyone, they preferred it the old way. When told they missed a spot, they didn’t actually want to look closer. They removed the underline and went back to skimming everything.
And so I felt that like Black Lives Matter, the new flag used in Philly didn’t remove anything. Everyone was free to fly the old flag, or make up your own symbols to say what you wanted to say to the world, as many organizations represented at Pride will do. It was just a tool to underline part of the message that we kept ignoring. Some people may not have cared about the flags we fly or what might be added, but did care about a feel-good distraction. While we might look to it as a symbol that we recognize there is a problem in our society, it can also be an unproductive signal that says, “I’m not the problem.” When people of color tell me there’s a problem, I can glance down at my brown stripe and think I’m doing my part, and this is a problem for other people to fix in themselves, not me. And this touches on one of the practical issues of Pride this year in my city: how to deal with the police presence.
A new flag may do a little bit to make people of color feel more welcome, but in my city one of the things that has made people feel unwelcome has been the ever greater insertion of uniformed police into the festival. We have a large contingent of gay officers who have made Pride “their beat”, and took it upon themselves to be very active and vigilant during all events, and the police have tried to become part of the parade, marching in uniform and having the police chief march as Grand Marshall. Again from one perspective this seems like a fantastically inclusive idea, making the police part of the celebration instead of the enemy. However, we’ve also found that uniformed police in my area have tried to create a blue ring around certain communities, turning that hyper-vigilance and proactivity to find a reason to stop and challenge as many black drivers as possible, to make sure they know they’re not welcome. This means when they choose to patrol Pride in uniform, many people in the community see that same ring being drawn around Pride, letting them know an officer is watching and waiting for a reason to force them away. When people of color and allies lobbied to not have a uniformed police presence in the parade and crawling all over the festival, noting that all these officers would still be welcome out of uniform as ordinary fellow human beings, this was first accepted and later rejected under pressure from the police themselves who expressed a lot of hurt and victimization. So when we had a practical way to make some of the most marginalized people feel safer and more welcome, we failed. This puts the symbolic gestures into perspective: we love and support you until it cost us us something or risks making an enemy.
This also flag stirred up of another issue that definitely wasn’t rooted in a desire for inclusiveness: a view that activism shouldn’t be intersectional. I talked about underlining and changing focus without losing the original spirit, but maybe sometimes we do. I understand the view that Pride is about LGBTQ issues and making it into another forum for debate on police brutality and race relations or a general broad movement for the disadvantaged or downtrodden means the specific functions it may serve for queer people are lost and drowned out. By underlining the intersectionality so heavily, it’s possible it’s no longer underlining the issues and experience of queer people of color within the context of a larger LGBTQ culture, but instead shifting it to an entirely different context, where race is being under lined in the larger context of predominantly straight white culture. I don’t believe it’s racist when someone asks if this is the time and place for this particular gesture. However from my viewpoint, it’s already all over Pride, as people celebrate out loud being gay and sober, or queer and Asian.
None of the other modified, intersectional symbols have created this controversy, but then none of them were billed as replacing THE Pride flag. Nor is this one, which so far exists in one place, and maybe using it for a year to underline what is at this moment a very raw cultural problem. Nobody is taking away all the other variations (of which there are many) or outlawing rainbows. Given all that, and the way I personally saw the message, it may sound like I support this new flag. But I don’t think I’ll ever fly one, because no matter what it may read as to me, if none of the people of color in my life get that meaning I have to wonder, who would I be flying it for? Myself? Other people like me? Both of things are fine, I’m all for doing things that make yourself feel good, especially in the field of fashion, but could something I did in such an insular way, thinking, “I get it and nobody else matters” also stand for inclusivity and being an ally? Maybe it should be a symbol of inclusivity, but right now, knowing that the people I care about couldn’t see it the same way, it sure wouldn’t feel like one in these white hands of mine.
Coq au Vin 