Oppression, uninterrupted

Attention Black/Asian/American Indian/Female Communities of America: pick up a mirror and remember what life was like for us in this country two hundred years ago, the shunning by society, the silent consent of the slave trade by the church, the fact that we were seen as nothing more than property at best and animals at worst, then try to tell me that being queer is an affront to nature.

There, I said it.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just because I’m low on sleep, it’s cold out, and I had something spicy for lunch, but could someone please explain to me how it is that a series of communities built on the back of oppression, subsequently freed of said oppression through hundreds of years of fighting, has the stones to turn around and oppress a completely different group of people based on the same criteria?

The criteria in question: how they are born.

Being queer is not a disease, it is not a abomination, and it is not a movement hell bent on destroying anything or anyone aside from the social stigma that got branded by fearful people who know nothing about what’s really going on. This is about people being allowed to live their lives as they are, not trying to fit into society’s view of what they are supposed to be. There was a time when women were seen merely as baby factories, unfit to work for the same pay, vote, even speak in public. American Indians were seen as nothing more than savages to be killed off to make way for white expansion, killed off by disease, warfare, and the willful slaughter of their food supply. Blacks were seen as nothing more than slaves, hard laborers kidnapped from their villages, born by ship stacked on top of each other like strips of animal skins, bought and sold like so much grain, then raped and beaten within an inch of their lives to keep them ‘in line.’ This is a community that was freed from one kind of slavery to be dropped ceremoniously into another: poverty. The laws may have changed, but the social stigma remained, and in the end, it took a second uprising, a second changing of the laws, and a second war to truly begin the road to equality, a war fought not with guns but with sit-ins, marches, fire hoses, tear gas, all on American Soil. I, an American Citizen born in this country, as a member of these three communities, have only one thing to say: All men are created equal as long as you look and think like land/slave owning, Christian, homophobic white men. Let Freedom fucking ring.

Yet, here we are, a melting pot of cultural diversity, spitting on one another every damn day. Yet this is a country built on one underlying concept: COMMUNITY. Families grow through neighborhoods, not just blood. Sisters and brothers are loved and cherished from states, time zones, even continents away not by the relevance of their heritage or how they live their lives, but by the common strand of humanity that links us all.

Which begs a further question: given that at some point in the history of this world, nearly every single culture that has ever existed has been persecuted, enslaved, or shunned simply for being who they are, how can any of us truly have a right to say word one about how someone else lives, let alone loves?