I have been thinking a lot about how queers of color are constantly navigating spaces with their multiple identities and how I have oriented to this multiple identities. These identities can’t be ahistoricized from the advent of capitalism and how white supremacy, homophobia and sexism are utilized to maintain the white hegemony and force us into forced social relations.
I speak mostly from the vantage point of a black queer working class male. I was raised in a single parent home in New Orleans where my mom worked two jobs most of my life and my dad was pretty much absent. Jesus was forced down my throat at least 2-3 times a week. Simultaneously, I began to understand my queerness a little more. Since then I have I progressively read more to conceptualize my understanding of how our society works.
I look back at my experiences that have radicalized my understanding of how capitalism reinforces racism, sexism and homophobia. I have realized that I and other queers of color have always been navigating these spaces of subjugation. When I look back at these experiences I think of W.E.B Du Bois and his theory of double consciousness. Du Bois states i n The Souls of Black Folks that “the Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world”. What Du Bois is saying here is that black folks are always seeing themselves through the eyes of the rulers. A historical phenomenon that capitalism has reinforced due to how racism is constructed in our society. I think where Du Bois failed to further analyze was how capitalism creates the classed dynamic and the effects that colonialism leaves on the colonized. Frantz Fanon talks about how the ruling class indoctrinates the colonized with Euro-centric values that leaves the colonized feeling alienated and with no sense of autonomy. So black folks are constantly figuring out how to orient to this foreign oppressor and those contradictions manifest in the ways in which people struggle internally with those and vocalize against their ruler.
I think queer folks of color and other groups of people are always seeing themselves through the eyes of the hegemony but we are always reclaiming those spaces. I am reminded of the Harlem Renassaince with the “niggerati”, a group of black largely queer artists and writers, who actively reclaimed those white heterosexual spaces and made them their own. They lived communally in the qpoc home in Harlem named “niggerati manor” and many were openly queer. For these folks and I think many queers seeing themselves through the eyes of patriarchal heterosexual society, we are constantly reminded of the mores that we don’t adhere too and the institutions that we don’t want to invest in.
I also realize that these identities can’t be compartmentalized. Due to the nature of our society we have to navigate between these different classed, gendered, and sexual identities. The experienced that I have are shaped by all these things. Our capitalistic society uses these identities to indoctrinate us with white supremacist, sexist, and classed division and to divide the working class. In order to overcome these division we must organize in a fashion that addresses capitalism and all these systemic issues such as racism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, and classism.
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