Week 5: Go the Way Your Blood Beats

Artwork by Rommy Torrico

From Trans Day of Resilience Poster Set

Queer-affirming, Trans-affirming, and Collective Value, a Black Lives Matter lesson plan, offers a powerful lineup of articles and resources to center queer and trans voices in conversations about the movement for racial justice. The questions that the lesson plan authors pose are useful and certainly offer opportunities for rich dialogue, but, as an elementary school teacher, I am thinking about the best ways to make these resources and concepts accessible for younger students and/or students with limited literacy and comprehension skills.

The strongest element of the lesson plan, for me, is the menu of extensions/action items for students to engage in following the discussion. The options are varied and meaningful, and allow for students to engage with the material in an authentic way, allowing for reflection through action. The options allow students to explore and deepen their understanding of the intersectional analysis presented in the lesson plan, which allows for a powerful extension of the lesson. I especially love the “Lifting the Stories” option where students can research a queer or trans person of color from the movement and “lift” up their stories by educating others about their contributions. The imagery of lifting up the stories of others is so beautiful.

The resources linked in the lesson plan provide some complex insights into the ways in which POC in the queer and trans community have been erased from or shrouded within history. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera’s roles in the Stonewall riots and the subsequent movement were ignored and almost forgotten. White gay men have been portrayed as the leaders of Stonewall and the movement that followed in most historical accounts.

The interview with James Baldwin also offered some fascinating reflections on the intersection of his racial identity and sexuality. I was so moved by the beauty of his words, and would like to highlight a few quotations:

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility...The discovery of one’s sexual preferences doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”

• Trauma is manufactured, created, and recreated based on a set of criteria that society determines. 

“I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. And homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

• America’s infantilism is certainly recognized abroad. When consuming Italian media, this is a common thread in their news stories on the U.S., especially now in the age of President #45.

“It’s a way of controlling people. Nobody really cares who goes to bed with whom, finally. I mean the State doesn’t really care, the Church doesn’t really care. They care that you should be frightened of what you do. As long as you feel guilty about it, the State can rule you.”

• Fear is one of the many tools of white supremacy and is utilized by the State in full force to exert control over people. Baldwin’s argument makes me think about women’s reproductive rights and the ways that the government uses shame and guilt to try to control women’s bodies.

“I loved a few people and they loved me. It had nothing to do with these labels. Of course the world has all kinds of words for us. But that’s the world’s problem.”

• Our obsession with binaries and labels is so problematic and perpetuates systems of inequality on a daily basis. I recently got into a terribly serious (and long) argument with my brother about this with regard to flexibility in gender pronouns. He was mortified at the idea of gender neutral pronouns. How would we know how to move in the world without she and he, his and her?

“I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe.”

• There is so much to unpack here. This sentiment feels connected to some of the themes and discourse present in the interviews from The Whiteness Project. There is a sense from many white people that because they have other marginalized identities they somehow don’t experience the full benefits of white privilege.