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Unwavering Hope: The Strength of Our Black LGBTQIA+ Community in Transformative Times
It's okay for us to grieve in this moment. Let’s lend a shoulder, a hand, a smile, a tissue. And then let’s organize like never before.
Nov 29, 2024
I’m going to be honest with you all about my feelings. What voting has shown us is that no matter how hard we fight, we are in a losing battle. It has shown us that our bodies and lives aren’t important. It has shown us that freedom seems to be a mirage in a hot street that upon further inspection, is not water that can fuel our fight.
This grief feels different. This anxiety-inducing, depression-producing feeling has me terrified of the future. Walking through the airport in Orlando recently, I felt like I was being encapsulated by a crowd of people who abhor my existence. It reminds me of the anxiety I felt on a layover there after the shooting at Pulse. Even as I write this, I tremble as I remember being in Room 107 in Texas while the community identified the body of Tracy Single. It feels like isolation and despair and embarrassment. It feels like fear.
I am here to acknowledge though, that even in the face of fear, we can change things. Even in the face of fear, we can accomplish the impossible. As I say that, I think, “How, Ian? How can I do that in the face of the next four years of more hateful policies, bans, and rights being taken and potentially decades of lasting effects after?”
In the words of MLK, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And that’s not this “kumbayah” type of love that doesn’t see people willingly placing oppression on us; it is more love for those who look, love, and identify with us. It is creating more unity and more resources. They were never coming to save us! We have always needed to be the ones to save ourselves.
As we move along through these next couple of months before the inauguration, know that our community is here to every Black, queer individual, as thought partners, resource sharers, and possibility strategists. Because despite the hopelessness we collectively feel right now, I’m reminded of the ACTUP activists, and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Bayard Rustins, the words of Langston Hughes, the thoughts of Kimberle Crenshaw, the strategy of Dr. Charles Law, the advocacy of Monica Roberts, the campaign of Kamala Harris and you continuing to show up despite moments of grief.
I invite you to hear the words of Langston Hughes’ poem Harlem, “What happens to a dream deferred?"
"Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?”
I urge us in our grief not to allow our dream to be deferred, to sit by the wayside, to deny us the hope to see it fulfilled.
If not for us, for Trans teens not able to seek care. If not for us, for people who can have children who cannot make a choice on their own bodies. If not for us, for same-sex families in fear they will lose their rights. If not for us, for our future.
We are and have always been who we’ve been waiting for. Your presence on this Earth is hope personified.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates Freed Himself From Zionist Propaganda—Will the Country Follow?
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
Oct 20, 2024
The United States is the single most powerful supporter of the Israeli settler colony.
The U.S. government heavily arms and gives political cover to Israel, and considers the people at the mercy of its aggression as America's enemies. And president after president, Republican and Democrat, has enabled Israel to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide with total impunity.
The current genocide Israel is committing in Palestine is legally and morally placed at the doorstep of the U.S.
Therefore, what happens in the U.S.—especially when the political mainstream begins to wake up and see Zionism for the apocalyptic genocidal fanaticism that it is—matters for world peace.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Zionists—whether Israeli or American, Christian or Jewish—do not like the prospects of that awakening.
As the racist and colonial nature of Israel's regime became more widely recognized, the experiences between Palestinians and the African American community also became more prominently linked, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the last year, several outlets—from The New York Times to Politico, Vox, and others—published articles examining the history of Black and Palestinian solidarity.
Indeed, these discussions emerged in full force after 7 October 2023 as several leading African American public figures and intellectuals made clear their stance on Israel—even making headlines on "how Gaza has shaken Black politics."
When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield raises her hand and vetoes one Security Council resolution after another to stop the Israeli murderous machinery; when we see U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III in the news pledging his mighty military will protect Israel against attempts to stop its rampage; when the irredeemably corrupt New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivers nauseating "stand with Israel" speeches, something deep in the history of African American experience cries foul.
And when Congresswoman Cori Bush of Missouri avows: "Aipac [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], I'm coming to tear your kingdom down!" she invokes an entirely different legacy of solidarity with Palestinians in African American history, as Israel systematically unleashes its savageries against Palestinians and other Arab nations like Lebanon.
Towering figures like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West have been bold, precise, and hard-hitting when it comes to condemningthe criminal atrocities of the U.S. and Israel in cahoots together.
Reenter Ta-Nehisi Coates
It was not too long ago when the heat on Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent African-American literary and critical voice, got so bad he ran out of the kitchen.
Back in 2017, he deleted his Twitter account with millions of followers and went into occultation following a scathing critique levelled against him by the unflinching moral conscience of Cornel West, a distinguished scholar and activist who called him "the neoliberal face of the Black freedom struggle."
Coates soon left his main outlet, The Atlantic, a major Zionist operation run by former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, that was grooming him as a feather in their Israeli hat. For years, he would oblige.
Coates published his 2008 hymn for Israel, " The Negro Sings of Zionism," which he followed with "The Case for Reparations" in 2014. The essay, which sparked criticism among Palestine advocates, made him a darling of American Zionists.
Coates presented Israel as the model for reparations and thought African Americans ought to do the same as the Israeli state did with Germans.
For a decade now, that bit of Zionist newspeak he embraced under the condition he now calls " default Zionism" has haunted his conscience. Rightly so: Today, when he appears for public interviews, he repeatedly says: "I am ashamed!"
He should be.
Had he not heard of Edward Said when he was entrapped in that "default Zionism"? Any answer he might give to that simple question would be even more incriminating.
The most damning assessment of Coates, however, was not by West, who said in 2017 that Coates "reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people."
In his characteristically patient and precise prose, the eminent Indian public intellectual Pankaj Mishra published a major review of Coates' 2017 book on the Obama era, We Were Eight Years in Power, in the London Review of Books.
Mishra detailed and dissected Coates' deeply white-identified career, which banked on his Black identity to drive guilt-ridden white America to celebrate him—just as Barack and Michelle Obama had done. This was a fact that West had also intuited and laid bare to him.
Mishra picked up on Coates' own sense of wonder in himself, "Why do white people like what I write?" and analysed with surgical precision:
[Coates] also visibly struggles with the question, "Why do white people like what I write?'' This is a fraught issue for the very few writers from formerly colonized countries or historically disadvantaged minorities in the West who are embraced by "legacy" periodicals, and then tasked with representing their people—or country, religion, race, and even continent (as in The New York Times's praise for Salman Rushdie: "A continent finding its voice"). Relations between the anointed "representative" writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism.
This was published in February 2018, just a few months after West had, with the stroke of a few bold and brilliant paragraphs, forced Coates into early withdrawal from the public to lick his wounds.
It did him good and well.
His new book, The Message, is his deliverance from error, as it were, his version of al-Ghazali's classic al-Munkidh min al-Dalal/Deliverance from Darkness, published nearly 1,000 years ago.
Imagine that! A young African American writer publishes a book that reminds me, a Muslim, of the autobiographical masterpiece of a towering Muslim philosopher mystic. This should mean more to him than any Pulitzer or Booker.
But Coates' visit to Palestine for just 10 days is reminiscent of another even closer Muslim to his home and habitat when Malcolm X visited Gaza in September 1964.
On this occasion, he wrote: "The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders, and also divide the Africans against the Asians."
Bearing witness to Palestinian suffering and Zionist thuggeries, Coates has a giant pair of shoes to fill if he continues on this path.
The long essay Coates wrote on his visit to Palestine, which is included in his book, marks his deliverance from Zionist prose.
For generations, liberal Zionists have infiltrated the ranks of American liberal imperialists with terror visited upon the world. West and Mishra saw through Coates clearly; now, so has he.
Deliverance from Zionism
Immediately after the publication of Coates' latest book, the pro-Israel hasbara machinery, of course, went berserk and unleashed its furies, the racist nature of which managed to surprise even Coates himself.
Other liberal Zionists like Ezra Klein of The New York Times tried to undermine his arguments by asking him why he did not consult with rabid Zionists in Israel when he was there, and of course, setting the usual propaganda trap, "What about Hamas?"
As defined and determined by well-endowed and ideologically committed outlets like the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, the U.S. media is a well-oiled propaganda machinery of hasbara-informed pro-Israel newspeak.
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
Previously, when others like Coates suddenly found a conscience, the mainstream press just turned a deaf ear and pretended it did not happen. Perhaps one recent example is New York Congressman
Jamaal Bowman, whose changed position on Israel not only cost him his reelection campaign but has largely relegated him to obscurity.
Given his influence on the white liberal establishment and their understanding of race and diversity in this country, can Coates be marginalized like any other American who dares speak the truth about Israel, let alone at this particular moment in history?
The gap between the liberating truth Coates now sees and speaks and the ugly propaganda Zionists continue to keep dominant in American political culture is now widening apace.
More than half a century after the Civil Rights movement—when the world thought racism had been dealt with—Americans gave Donald Trump to the world right after Obama lent his Black identity to career opportunist liberal imperialism of the worst kind.
The stockpile of bombs the Israelis are dropping on Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenis, and others remains Obama's legacy in the Middle East.
As I write, Americans are almost evenly split on the upcoming presidential election, poised to vote for either a Mussolini wannabe rank charlatan fascist or a Genocide Joe replacement who, like a parrot or a broken record, can only repeat AIPAC talking points.
Between a genocidal administration with the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese on its hands and a fascist wannabe, the future of the U.S. and all its global warmongering, particularly its Israeli garrison state, is now being determined.
The significance of what Coates has written weighs far less for Palestinians who have equally if not more eloquent voices to speak on their behalf.
But for Americans, Coates' corrective message may both inspire and signal a broader cultural shift in which this country may be liberated from the curse of Zionism.
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Remembering Mike Brown: Recommitting to the Fight for Power
As the nation reflects on how Ferguson changed the world, I’m asking that you think about what we have to do in the next 10 years to ensure that we’re moving closer to a world where uprisings like that one aren’t necessary.
Aug 14, 2024
On August 9, 2014, I was at the United Nations, attending the Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination, or UN CERD, as part of a delegation of Black organizers and activists who were testifying to the conditions of Black people in the United States organized by the U.S. Human Rights Network. I cried for the greater part of that day, sitting with the weight of the injustices and murders of Black people.
There was a chill in the air and not a dry eye in the room at the UN CERD as Trayvon Martin’s mom, Sybrina Fulton, testified about the murder of her son. I remember the testimony of Jordan Davis’ father, Ron Davis, about the murder of his son and the silence that fell as he broke into tears. Both of their sons were murdered by state-sanctioned violence—by the state emboldening police, or even neighborhood watch volunteers, to take Black lives with impunity. I can still hear the testimonies of Black feminist organizations like Black Women’s Blueprint and activists from Chicago who spoke about police violence and murders of Black women and men. I spoke and testified about housing insecurities and violence against LGBTQI+ people. For us, all of those stories were connected and shared—they were all about Black lives not being valued and Black folks needing to build people power in order to stop it.
While at U.N. CERD, an African diplomat asked, “What is happening in Ferguson?” This was the first time I had heard of Ferguson, Missouri. I quickly researched all I could about Ferguson and what was happening. As a parent, I immediately felt another profound loss of another child, Mike. The murder of Mike Brown Jr. felt as intimate, as close, and as violating as that of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Aiyanna Jones, and the many others taken by state-sanctioned violence before August 9.
Our work continues as we navigate the rapidly growing rise and threat of fascism, a complex electoral landscape, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and the continued murder of Black people by the police, such as the killing of Sonya Massey
It was all overwhelming. It was clear that, as a people, we had lost too much. In our time of deepest need, the state responded by further declaring war against its people with tanks, tear gas, and militarized occupation. We were outraged. We knew that we had to take action; we didn’t know what to do, but we knew we needed to be there with those brave freedom fighters in Ferguson. A few comrades and I left the U.N. CERD meeting and headed straight to Ferguson.
Upon arriving in Ferguson, we learned about Mike through the memories his people shared of him. He was beloved by the community, and more than that, he represented so many of us, and we all shared so many similarities with him—Mike’s life was not abstract; it was real, tangible, and familiar. Mike Brown Jr. looked like many in our families and neighborhoods. Mike Brown Jr. looked like my nephew and other young men in my own life. It is a psychological terror when faces and bodies so much like your own are hunted down and killed. We still grieve and mourn Mike, and his memory continues to fuel our fight for power and liberation.
As revolutionaries, our role is not only to grieve and mourn but to honor our people—present, past, and those who will come after us—by acting to create the society we deserve. For months, Mike Brown Jr. was honored through the sustained action and rebellion in the streets of Ferguson and actions around the globe. Uttering his name invited millions to say the names of Black people killed by police, and that reverberation ignited a new conversation about racialized violence. Each day, each hour, there was resistance against police murders and state-sanctioned violence and an assertion that Black people deserve to live without the fear and threat of police terror. The days were consumed with marches, rallies, escalations, and time in community, and the nights were long and filled with strategy meetings, event prep, and far less rest than our bodies needed. But even when those protests ended, the work did not. Mike Brown Jr. and the Ferguson Uprisings woke something up in us, inspiring a new era of the Black liberation movement that has sustained for a decade and counting. Our lives, my life, changed forever.
At the Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL), we are fighting for a fundamentally different world, one where he and all of us would be safe, protected, and given the best conditions to thrive and determine our own outcomes.
Since the Ferguson Rebellion, M4BL has remained committed to advancing abolition, anti-capitalism, and Black Queer Feminism. We organize and advance our vision in local communities and nationally. Our strategies range from advancing policy and electoral shifts to building our own institutions and alternatives to oppressive systems. We are proud of the organizing of our member organizations in Ferguson and St. Louis, who have been vital in the resistance and power building, such as Action St. Louis and the Organization for Black Struggle.
In our 10 years of building social movement power within Black communities, we are proud of our interventions to create policy and legislative change through the Vision 4 Black Lives, Breathe Act, and People’s Response Act that all emphasize divesting from the carceral state and instead investing in alternatives that support and nourish Black lives and communities. We are excited to report about the dozens of campaigns that have won and advanced local wins, ranging from removing police officers from schools to creating housing, changing educational policies, creating safety pods and alternatives to policing, advancing reproductive justice, and engaging communities in environmental and climate change preparedness.
Our work continues as we navigate the rapidly growing rise and threat of fascism, a complex electoral landscape, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and the continued murder of Black people by the police, such as the killing of Sonya Massey. We are clear about our need to build more power to position ourselves to create the world we need and deserve. Now and forever, we honor Mike Brown Jr. in our organizing work and all those who have been taken from us. Today, as the nation reflects on how Ferguson changed the world, I’m asking that you think about what we have to do in the next 10 years to ensure that we’re moving closer to a world where uprisings like the one that rattled the foundation of our nation aren’t necessary. We are still feeling the impact of what happened 10 years ago across all aspects of society: culturally, politically, socially, and economically. And we are less than 80 days away from a presidential election where the freedom to engage in our democracy is literally on the ballot.
We know that much of what is being promised in Project 2025 is a direct response to the transformational change that came out of the Ferguson Uprising. So, I’m asking that you keep that front of mind as you consider the change you want to see in the next four years. I’m asking that you don’t overlook the communities in Ferguson who never asked for their city to be thrust into the spotlight but acted quickly to demand change and accountability from their local police and from the system of policing at large. Please remember Mike’s family, loved ones, and the organizers on the ground who carry on liberatory work in ways that can only be described as revolutionary and rooted in a deep love for their people. Today, consider your personal responsibility in changing our world over the next 10 years.
We began seeding M4BL during the Uprising because we knew there were necessary things we could do together that we could not do apart. And we still believe that. Join us in building people's power to make liberation more than a freedom dream; let’s make it a reality.
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