Friday, November 08, 2013

Transpeople of Color Don't Get The Luxury of Ignoring Race And Class

Sigh.  Once again, Moni's gonna have to break it down for the wallowing in white privilege clueless. 

And this clueless youngling had the nerve to claim in the subsequent comment thread that she's 'anti-racist'.

Peep this comment posted by Jocelynn Veleta on the mixed company Facebook Transgender Alliance FB page.

It was posted on a comment from Black Transmen Resources ironically posted to promote their upcoming BTAC 2014 conference in Dallas April-May 2014.

At first I was going to be nice and not embarrass her in cyberspace until she deleted her initial comments before I had a chance to copy them, ran, called me 'stupid', said I was 'playing the victim'  and cried the usual 'white women's tears' before I got tired of her mouth and unleashed the 50 megatons of knowledge on her azz.  

im offended when ppl add race, ethnicity, or gender restrictions to anything, Trans in itself is enough of a minority i personally don't feel we need to break up anymore... hey maybe its just me; im not trying to be rude.

No, you weren't rude, you were white privileged clueless.

As I've said on multiple posts here on this blog and on countless discussion threads inside and outside the trans community for over a decade in various ways, race matters, even in the trans community..

We transpeople of color do not have the luxury of separating our race and ethnicity from our trans status. They are inextricably part of us.
   And as part of the Black community, we still get whacked by the microaggressive and macroaggressive ways whiteness and white supremacy deleteriously affects us.

Your lived experience as a solitary white trans person doesn't trump (and never will) the lived experience of someone who has taken the brunt of the white supremacist attitudes since birth, much less her people's 400 year history of living in the Americas.


Jocelynn, you may not like the fact that we have Black, Latina and Asian trans groups, organizations and conventions, but they didn't come out of a vacuum.

As Kwame Ture said, 'in order to become a part of the greater society, you must first close r
anks.'

People of color face anti POC hatred whether we are trans or not and being trans only magnifies that. And some of the worst manifestations of that anti-POC hatred are in our own TBLG ranks.

What we do have, if the trans community will seize that opportunity, is to lead by example in eradicating racism in its subset of society.


Our little subset of society is infected by the same isms and ills of the parent society, and just because you transitioned doesn't mean you nor transpeople of color are free of that baggage.  Race and ethnicity add to our trans status as bigotry multipliers in terms of the anti-trans hate directed at us inside and outside the TBLG community.   Black trans women have to deal with the same 'ugly black woman' meme and destruction of our images that our cis sisters have had to grapple with for four centuries.  Black trans men when they transition step into being just as hated by society as their cis Black masculine counterparts do and the transmasculine discussion being disproportionately centered on white trans men. 

And when the Teapublicans seek to block the vote of the Black community at the polls, I don't get a pass from that because I'm trans.    

Jocelynn, you aren't even close to being anti-racist if you can't openly acknowledge the point that racist attitudes permeates American society, still affects POC's in the second decade of the 21st century, can't see past your own unacknowledged white privilege and how it has shaped your thinking (as the playing the victim conservacomment demonstrates) and that racism= prejudice plus systemic power.

And before you even part your lips to ever try to bring up the word 'anti-racist' in a conversation, better hit Google and learn the word 'intersectionality'. 

I'm offended Jocelynn when you make such a knee jerk reactive clueless statement on the comment of a Black trans group promoting their upcoming Dallas trans conference open to all, you failing to see how problematic that statement of yours was, and then running when you get called on it.

And you getting your vanillacentric privileged back up, accusing me of 'attacking you' for schooling your barely out of zygote stage behind and you running from the truth isn't going to change one syllable of what I posted about race still mattering in the trans community.     

We do have the opportunity in the trans community to build a society better than the one we left behind but it's going to take honest communication about race relations in our community to do so. 

Honest communications that obviously you're not even close to being ready for or intelligently discuss.
 

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