Coalition Building

When you think about gay and lesbian activism, what images come up? Who is behind the protests, events, and press releases?

This feature is covering Youth Activism and Coalition Building, and is meant to challenge what it means to be active, to work around GLBTQ issues, or to even be gay. Specifically this feature is going to address how sexuality intersects with race, class, gender, and nationality. Through these poems and essays, stemming from the personal to the political, this feature will attempt to show the ways in which our personal identities are intertwined with our political beliefs and our activism.

Want to get started on building your own activist coalition? Read more here.

This feature was comiled by former YouthResource intern Kohei

Books

Angela Davis: Identity-based or Issue-based Activism?

Nationalist notions of identity and action circumvent around the idea that only Gay and Lesbians can fight for Gay and Lesbian issues, or that only Asian Americans can fight for Asian American rights and issues. However, activists and intellectuals have articulated that one's identity can sometimes have little controlling impact on one's politics. So what do you do with a bunch of gay men in a room- when some identify as Queer, some as gay or bi-sexual, and some are out Log Cabin Republicans?

Speaking on coalition building among people of color, Lesbian, activist, philosopher, and educator, Angela Davis calls for more coalitions and networks, between people of color, to be formed on the basis of politics, rather than race and ethnicity.

"There is often as much heterogeneity within a black community, or more heterogeneity, than in cross-racial communities. An African-American woman might find it much easier to work together with a Chicana than with another black woman whose politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality would place her in an entirely different community. What is problematic is the degree to which nationalism has become a paradigm for our community-building processes. We need to move away form such arguments as "Well, she's not really black." "She comes from such-and-such a place." "Her hair isn't." "She doesn't listen to 'our' music," and so forth. What counts as black is not so important as our political commitment to engage in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work."
- Angela Davis, speaking on "Building Coalitions of People of Color" at University of California, San Diego, May 12, 1993.
From The Angela Davis Reader

Cherrie Moraga: Coming to grips with our own homophobia, racism, and oppression

"In this country, lesbianism is a poverty- as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place."
From "La Guera" in This Bridge Called My Back

Bell Hooks: Experience
People of color have a "unique mixture of experiential and analytical ways of knowing" and understanding racism. This "privileged standpoint cannot be acquired through books or even distanced observation and study of a particular reality."

"It is a way of knowing that is often expressed through the body, what it knows, what has been deeply inscribed on it through experience. This complexity of experience can rarely be voiced and named from a distance. It is a privileged location, even as it is not only or even always the most important location from which one can know."
From Teaching to Transgress, 90-1

Yoko Yoshikawa: Being the Bridge with, for, and through Coalitions

In writing about a protest against Lambda's fundraising event- Miss Saigon, Yoko Yoshikawa writes:

"Our coalition pointed the way to a possible future: where a complex identity is not only valued but becomes a foundation for unity. We who occupy the interstices- whose very lives contain disparate selves- are, of necessity, at home among groups that know little of each other. We know what others do not about reconciling differences in our own lives and the mutable nature of borders. We have a deep hunger for a place in which we can be, at one and the same time, whole and part of something larger than ourselves. Our knowledge and desire may at times bring us to action: we push the parameters of existing communities wide open and cause the struggles of different communities to overlap and meld. In the tangle that ensues, we may also be midwives of vital coalition."
From "The Heat is On Miss Saigon Coalition: Organizing Across Race and Sexuality" in Q & A: Queer in Asian America