You know, Hollywood, “Americans don’t know and don’t care”

This is a good post. It seems more and more that this type of intersectionality between and among oppressed groups is being ignored. The whole Seal Press/brownfemipower debacle is a great example, but one which I won’t even get into because I’ll be here all night.

I’ll definitely agree with you, though, that racism is a problem in the movement (along with classism, sexism, and a lot of other things — actually there’s a post on this over at Vegans of Color): http://vegansofcolor.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/the-cult-of-veganism-or-sit-down-shut-up-little-brown-girl/

My good friend Les just sent me an article about someone hunting pigeons with a blowgun up in Seattle- theres a $2000 reward. How often do these same people put up rewards when one of our kids goes missing?

Oh, that’s right, sky shitters are worth more than POC.

Nothing like a little lip service from your fellow transfolk.

one of the myriad of reasons I have yet to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is the fact that they yellowed up Chow Yun Fat’s skin.

… seriously? OMG. I did not know this.
I *did* think the second Pirates movie was awful with that whole stupid cannibalism thing. And I was pretty annoyed that in the third movie Calypso, supposedly all-powerful sea goddess, kinda just disappears after she’s released. I kept thinking that she should’ve gotten to do so much more.

But she’s a black woman. And it’s the white men who are the heroes.

But when I first started looking into it, I was only looking at what was on the page, not at what was *missing* from the articles. Finally it hit me that there was an implicit assumption of whiteness. That categorizing sexuality as an issue separate from race and gender did the same thing to queer people of color that mainstream feminism does to women of color. It ignores/eliminates intersections of oppression and perpetuates the structures of privilege that are in place, homogenizing heterosexism into this essentially white issue. And it seems like the LGBT movement as a whole does this. Battling heterosexism first — not recognizing that racism and sexism are intertwined with it and that you can’t compartmentalize oppression or ignore the effects of other sorts of privilege in a movement. Because then you have that “all the women are [straight] white[s], all the blacks are [straight] men,” all the gays are white (men) sort of thing going on.

… and then stuff like this happens.

But, when people have a very narrow focus (for example: say professors exploring homophobia), how do you convince them that racism/sexism/etc *are* LGBT issues? That it’s not just a side problem — that you can’t separate your race from your queerness or only look at one type of privilege at a time?

Just thinking/wondering aloud…