The Violence of Dogmatic Pacifism

By Gregory Stevens

"Violence means working for 40 years, getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get to retire…

Violence means state bonds, robbed pension funds and the stock market fraud…

Violence means unemployment, temporary employment….

Violence means work "accidents"…

Violence means being driven sick because of hard work…

Violence means consuming psych-drugs and vitamin s in order to cope with exhausting working hours…

Violence means working for money to buy medicines in order to fix your labor power commodity…

Violence means dying on ready-made beds in horrible hospitals, when you can't afford bribing."

- Proletarians from occupied headquarters of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE), Athens, December 2008

I was once a hardcore Christian pacifist who would justify non-violence in the face of rape, robbery, military occupation, police violence, or systemic racist violence. I have read much of the literature, attended and taught pacifist trainings/conferences/events, and have previously been one to publicly shame more militant tactics. As my political work has transitioned from liberal policy activism to revolutionary organizing (lead by and for the oppressed, working toward collective liberation) I have learned more historically-nuanced notions of violence, non-violence, and self-defense. I have come to think dogmatic Christian pacifism can be extremely dangerous and violent to oppressed human and non-human peoples.

One of the first things done in religious debates about pacifism is proof-texting verses from the Bible, picking verses (usually out of context) to prove one/your vision over the other. If we hold a more complex and nuanced version of our faith stories we recognize the goodness and the vast diversity, often contradictory, in biblical narratives and Church traditions. Much like the diversity of gospel accounts shows us the diversity of the early Church, the diversity of revolutionary tactics within our biblical stories and faithful traditions can help us shape our contemporary movements through a diversity of tactics. Rather than assume one way of thinking is right for all times and all places, no matter the context or people involved, we are better off using a diversity of tactics in our goal of our collective salvation from sin (aka our collective liberation from oppression). We need every tool in the box, we need all sorts of tactics available, and we need a great multiplicity of strategies if we want to win in taking down the capitalist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal system destroying planetary life.

I do not think the world will ever be, or has ever been, a world without violence. Violence is a broad word with many different meanings. I am using the term violence in a very general sense when I suggest that the world will never be a place without some forms of violence. An indigenous Elder of mine teaches this in relation to rain: just the right amount of rain creates new and thriving life, too much rain and life is violently swept away. When the hungry tiger pounces on an antelope, digging their sharp teeth into the flesh to kill for nourishment, violence erupts for life to maintain living. When a glacier cracks and crumbles down into the fishing villages of the far northern regions, entire communities can be lost to the tidal waves and impact of the moving mountains of ice. When a fire takes over a forest, burning down trees and decaying plant matter to ashes, nutrients flood the soil and stronger rays of sun can then reach the forest floor providing more ingredients for new life to flourish.

Mother Earth is not a dogmatic pacifist, she uses violence to transform the world. It's not always Her favorite tool, but it sometimes is; it doesn't seem to be Her ultimate philosophy but a tactic within Her larger strategy for survival.

To claim a completely pure dogmatic pacifism goes against the patterns we see in the world around us. Pacifism becomes a fundamentalist religion or ideology rather than one of many tools within our revolutionary strategies. It is important that we begin to see non-violence or non-resistance as a tactic within a diversity of strategies; it is not the only answer but one very useful answer to very specific historical moments. Non-violence is not dogmatic pacifism, non-violence does not need to be universalized as an ideology for all times, places, and circumstances as in pacifism. The militant non-violent tactics used by some of the civil rights movement (boycotts and sit-ins) have shown that some non-violent tactics can be successful. The militant self-defense tactics used by others within the larger liberation movements (Black Panthers, Young Lords, UHURU etc.) were also proven successful. Neither would have been as successful without the other.

Capitalist Violence

To claim some sort of purist pacifism as the only way forward is also illogical for those who live, move, and have their being within the capitalist world economy. Central to Marx's critique of the capitalist system was the inherent violence of private property, centralization of wealth, worker alienation, and vast hierarchies of domination. Through the ownership of other humans, water, air, and land; the pillaging of global lands for resource extraction; the centralization of property ownership within the hands of the few; and the endless pursuit of 'infinite growth' on a finite planet, life itself is being violently destroyed. With billionaires and millionaires centralizing their wealth and power, strengthening and broadening the gap between the rich and the poor, extreme acts of violence run amuck in society: rampant impoverishment, and no or terrible access to healthcare, food, education, shelter etc. While capitalist pacifists sit rich and pretty, a majority of the world suffers immeasurably.

The capitalist system thrives on the racialization of peoples and their subjugation to colonial power through extreme violence. The capitalist economy thrives on war for oil, land, monopoly-imperialist power, and for the many markets opened up through the production and sales of millions of high-tech weapons. To claim a pacifist existence of non-violence is to assume your life is not actively executing violence on the world through the very social systems those who claim such lofty ideals benefit from.

It is white middle-class pacifists who do not experience capitalist violence in the disproportionate way black, brown, differently able, queer, trans, mothering/care-giving, migrant, female, and religiously diverse people experience daily. It is these same middle-class pacifists who greatly benefit from the violence enacted by the state and corporate business forces on Earth and peoples around the world. They experience health, wealth, and property; they experience the abundance of food, shelter, and access to the excesses of capitalism but they do so on the backs of the global south and the middle east. It is these white middle-class dogmatic "peace police" who scream and yell at people defending themselves from state violence, telling them they are immoral and violent. In this way, they stand directly in the way of someone seeking their own liberation.

Writing in his personal journal about the rise of fascism in Germany, George Orwell mused, "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.… others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.… Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force" (emphasis added).

Pacifist capitalists are extremely violent and can even be regarded as home-grown terrorists, as they are committing senseless acts of violence by perpetuating a state of extreme inequality through violent relations of domination, hierarchy, alienation, and exploitation. They project this violent privilege onto the impoverished, the working class, and other radical organizers who seek to defend themselves from the extreme violence of a capitalist society. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to this problem among political leaders, "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con." ( "Nonviolence as Compliance" in the Atlantic )

A key to understanding this problem lies within the social location of many pacifists. The free-market, private ownership of property, elected governmental officials, and the legal system itself have all been managed by and for white people (often white Christian men). When all of these systems do not work in your favor and when they do not protect you but are in fact a great source of the violence you face, then your political actions focus on ending these systems of death, if not just defending yourself from their violence. This is exactly why disenfranchised people do not always choose "civility" as their response to liberal violence. The state defines "civility" and their "civilization" - they chose to define their civil state through genocide, colonization, imperialism, slavery, inequality, etc. Civility is the problem.

Revolutionary Resistance, Diversity of Tactics, and Liberation

People of color, trans people, and folx with differing abilities know this, and have been leading struggles with diverse tactics for a very long time. In an article posted on April 26, 2015 on the Radical Faggot blog , Benji Hart writes, "Calling them uncivilized and encouraging them to mind the Constitution is racist, [sexists, ableist] and as an argument fails to ground itself not only in the violent political reality in which black, [trans, and differently abled] people find themselves but also in our centuries-long tradition of resistance - one that has taught effective strategies for militancy and direct action to virtually every other current movement for justice."

In reaping the benefits of violence and then subjecting oppressed peoples to violence so they cannot escape their oppression, you not only thrive off their perpetual suffering, but you take away the ability to claim dignity and self-determination. It is extremely violent to push pacifism on those who exist under the heaviest of boots of capitalist and colonial exploitation when you greatly benefit from the exploits of capitalist and colonial violence.

The colonizer tells the colonized not to defend themselves.

The rapist tells the raped not to defend themselves.

The attacker tells the attacked not to defend themselves.

The murderer tells the victim not to defend themselves.

The slave owner tells the slave not to defend themselves.

The civilized tells the savage not to defend themselves.

The pacifist tells the oppressed not to defend themselves.

The revolutionary joins the colonized, raped, attacked, victim, slave, savage, and oppressed in solidarity; together they seek collective liberation. It is "precisely marginalized groups utilizing these tactics - poor women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans* street workers and indigenous peoples fighting back against murder and violence; black and brown struggles against white supremacist violence - that have waged the most powerful and successful uprisings in US history." (from an April 2012 pamphlet written for Occupy Oakland, Who is Oakland? ).

It is often argued that by offering your own life in martyrdom, the violence of the state will be exposed when the state or armed forces act in violence against you for all to see, and then put an end to once and for all. This is terrible logic, especially if applied to every context in all of history. We should not expect someone to die or not defend themselves in abusive and violent situations so that the violence of their actions can be exposed, somehow convincing others not to be violent in the same way.

Jesus was nailed to a cross and Caesar didn't have a change of heart in the face of such oppressive brutality. He celebrated.

Black and Brown people were lynched, and white supremacists didn't have a change of heart in the face of such oppressive brutality. The community celebrated.

Violence is exposed all the time, and nothing is done about it. How many videos of police murdering unarmed teenagers do state officials need (or do liberals need) to watch before they realize their violence and magically chose to stop it via a change of heart? How would that even make sense coming from an institution founded just after slavery to harass, watch, and catch non-white former slaves? The very same legal system that didn't have a change of heart in the face of violent white supremacy but rather created an entire white supremacist billion-dollar business: the prison industrial complex.

White feminist theologians in the 1960's critiqued the idea of "sacrificial living" as the mission of their faith-filled lives. It was being forced upon them by liberal theologians of the day: the highest calling is kenotic, sacrifice, emptying oneself for thy neighbor. The white cis male liberal theologians making these claims on the bodies of women did not consider the thousands of ways women are already subjected to capitalist hetero patriarchy, especially the unpaid reproductive labor it takes to produce such a society. This critique was later enhanced in the 1970s by revolutionary black feminists in the Combahee River Collective who first wrote about intersectionality: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face."

This narrative of sacrificing one's life to the powers and principalities also assumes that the upper class, the capitalist class, and the exploiting classes will suddenly choose to sacrifice their wealth, power, and privilege in order to liberate the masses who have (at their own expense and for their own survival) produced all of their wealth, power, and privilege. Not only does this idea take autonomy away from the oppressed, continuing the elitist narrative that the oppressed are uneducated filthy savages, but it also supports oppressive violence through demanding non-resistance in hopes of revealing the brutality of oppression to the oppressor.

Here's another example: A man breaks into a woman's house with a knife and has intention to rape, rob, and kill her. As a pacifist she chooses not to use a gun to defend herself. Rather, she creatively tells him that his ways are unjust, that there is another way of living, and that compassion is the way of truth; she hopes that her rape and murder will be a shining example of compassion and courage - she offers her own life as a sacrifice to show him that his ways are unjust, that he should change his ways, that he should rape, rob, and murder people no more. She hopes to convert his heart along the way, through her sacrifice she hopes he will repent.

It's also absolutely absurd to think a woman who fights or kills a rapist, becomes like the rapist. Colonized Indigenous and African peoples forced into slavery did not become like their slave owning colonizers when they violently rebelled, resisted, revolted, and rioted. The Jewish people who killed or fought the Nazis trying to exterminate their people, did not become like the Nazis. Using violence against those who exploit, oppress, and abuse you does not make you like them. Reality is more complex than dogmatic pacifism allows.

Don't Speak Truth to Power; Destroy Power

If someone is suffering and experiencing oppression, we should act to stop the violence and not hope that timely bureaucratic answers of policy reform will actually do anything to alleviate suffering and fight injustice. Wasn't it the elite classes and their bureaucrats who created the very legal system that attempts to make extremely complex realities into black-and-white situations for "educated" judges to dictate someone's future?

Most people in the world are already experiencing violence and are not defending themselves; most people are not acting violently in direct confrontation with their abusers, and these hoped-for non-responses have not motivated liberals or conservatives into action. Slavery did not end because all the salves were full of hope or because they were pacifists. Slavery was abolished because of slave revolts, organized rebellions, and armed underground rail roads like the one Harriet Tubman led thousands to freedom through. Slave abolitionist, Frederick Douglas , speaks so eloquently to these ideas in his 1857 speech delivered on the 23rd anniversary of the West India Emancipation:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

Liberal dogmatic pacifism is one of the most effective tools of violence used by the State to keep marginal and oppressed communities from rising up, restoring their dignity, and protecting themselves from further abuse through liberatory communal armed self-defense.

What then does it mean to love your enemy? Does it mean you continue to allow you enemy to attack you? Is it loving to allow someone to attack you, to bomb you, to exploit you, to oppress you - is that really what Jesus and the early church were getting at?

"Love your enemy" does not mean: stay in an abusive relationship, take the abuse because it's good and holy. If such an abusive relationship is complexified and organized on a mass scale why would the logic of resistance be any different? Why is the abuse of the state or of right wing fascists any different than the abuse of a spouse? It absolutely seems more intense, it seems more organized, it seems more brutal - and if anything, it doesn't seem to be worthy of our acceptance. We should always defend ourselves and others from oppression. Why would we accept the abuse as if pacifism is more righteous? Ending the abuse and setting each other free is far more righteous.

When experiencing oppressive violence, it is important to remember that our struggle is a struggle for life itself. We are not struggling for voter recognition or policy reforms, we are not assuming life is good and just needs a few adjustments; we are struggling because our very existence depends upon it. The 13th trans woman to be murdered in 2018 was killed on July 10th; the police have killed 446 people so far this year (1,147 people in 2017); the military has dropped thousands of more bombs than ever before, murdering record breaking numbers of people and places; over 1,200 children have literally been lost by the federal government; white supremacists were directly responsible for 18 out of 24 US extremist-related deaths in 2017; and over 200 species go extinct every single day amidst apocalyptic ecological conditions that are ultimately leading to our very own species' extinction.

There is no time to wait for oppressors to stop oppressing us, as if one day they will wake up to their extremely violent ways. This is exactly what the plantation owner would hope their slaves believed. We must choose life, and we must choose to defend ourselves, our communities, and our ecosystems from colonization, industrialization, state formations, and coercive social control. To live for life is to live in opposition to capitalism and the violence it perpetuates on the world around. We do not advocate revolution because we hope to see our tendencies win the day, but because we seek the flourishing of planetary life.

Liberatory self-defense is a far greater framing than dogmatic pacifism as it encourages dignity, self-determination, and participation in the shaping of a new world beyond appealing to "representative" authorities to pass less abusive policies. When these politicians do make decisions for the masses they create more bureaucracy and make it possible to define and categorize more bodies, and thus further discriminate, oppress, and define our bodies through legal definitions. Under the rules of pacifism, the oppressors win, they always hold the bargaining power, and they always decide who gets the goods and who gets nailed to a cross.

Liberatory, Community, Armed Self-Defense

Scott Crow's recent anthology, Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense , explores liberatory, armed, community self-defense as a tactic within a larger revolutionary strategy through theoretical reflections and historical studies. He and the various other author-activists make it very clear that the armed component of any self-defense strategy should never become the center (or we risk becoming standing militaries). Rather power is sought to be shared and equalized as best as possible, thus distinguishing armed self-defense from armed terrorist, armed insurrection, armed military organizations, armed guerilla armies, or armed law enforcement. Crow writes, "The liberatory framework is built on anarchist principles of mutual aid (cooperation), direct action (taking action without waiting on the approval of the authorities), solidarity (recognizing that the well-being of disparate groups is tied together) and collective autonomy (community self-determination)."

Crow goes on to say that this form of liberatory self-defense is not to be used to seize permanent power, or that arms are to be used as the first resource for self-defense but should be taken up only "after other forms of conflict resolution have been exhausted." This isn't about revolutionary vanguardism or storming the white house with guns. This is about self-defense from literal Nazis who have been murdering, mass shooting, and assaulting people at record-breaking numbers in the past few years (Rest in Power Heather Heyer ).

It should be noted that Crow's brand of liberatory, community, armed self-defense differs from other forms of armed action in two main ways: the first is that it is organized but temporary, "people can train in firearms tactics and safety individually or together but would be called on more like a volunteer fire department - only when need and in response to specific circumstances" (9). The second, and probably most distinct and important element of liberatory, community, armed self-defense (as used historically by groups like the Zapatistas, those fighting in the Rojava revolution, and the Black Panther Party from the 1960's), is power-sharing and egalitarian principles incorporated into the ethics of the group and its culture well before conflict is engaged (9). Unlike, for instance, right-wing militias (anti-immigration patrols of the Minutemen Militia, or the racist Algiers Point Militia that patrolled New Orleans after Katrina), who have nothing to do with collective liberation. "These militias are built on racist beliefs, conspiracy theories, and a macho culture where the strongest or loudest is the leader. They are typically organized in military type hierarchies with no real accountability to the people in civil society and the communities they operate within" (9).

Another key component to the tactics of self-defense is dual power which is about both resisting and creating. The resistance is toward exploitation and oppression, the creation is toward "developing other initiatives toward autonomy and liberation as part of other efforts in self-sufficiency and self-determination." This model is about creating a better world, much like the Black Panther breakfast program did when they stopped waiting around for white governing officials and started to feed their own communities' kids, so they might succeed in school and life generally. Self-defense isn't merely about being armed, but about building networks and infrastructure of people powered mutual aid. The Church institution has muddled this but in many ways has a strong people powered infrastructure: when you get sick, the care team will drop off some dinner; when you have a baby, just about everyone in the church is willing to hold, play with, or baby sit your child as needed; and if you total your car in an accident, someone in the church offers to drive you places or gives you their grandma's old car. How might we use this infrastructure in more radical ways with more revolutionary purposes? How might we use this infrastructure to establish the Queerdom of God in the US Empire?

Conclusion

What I hope to have accomplished with this article is to expose some of the more basic and less nuanced notions that are often used by dogmatic pacifists who refuse to engage radical critiques of their ideas. These dogmatic pacifists keep themselves in their privileged existence, waving the finger of judgment at both lumpen and proletariat communities that choose dignity through emancipatory self-defense. In relation to violence within our movements, our tactics, and our overall philosophies, it is important we continue to ask tough questions. Here are some really great questions to ask in thinking about violence in our direct actions:

• Are we harming state and private property, or are we harming people, communities, and natural resources? Is the result of our action disrupting state and corporate violence, or creating collateral damage that more oppressed people will have to deal with (i.e., Black families and business owners, cleaning staff, etc.)? Are we mimicking state violence by harming people and the environment, or are we harming state property in ways that can stop or slow violence? Are we demonizing systems or people?

• Who is in the vicinity? Are we doing harm to people around us as we act? Is there a possibility of violence for those who are not the intended targets of our action? Are we forcing people to be involved in an action who many not want to be, or who are not ready?

• Who is involved in the action? Are people involved in our action consensually, or simply because they are in the vicinity? Have we created ways for people of all abilities who may not want to be present to leave? Are we being strategic about location and placement of bodies? If there are violent repercussions for our actions, who will be facing them? [1]

In conclusion, some more thoughts from Scott Crow on forming organized, liberatory, community, armed self-defense:

• Many questions remain, including those concerning organization, tactical considerations, the coercive power inherent in firearms, accountability to the community being defended and to the broader social movement, and ultimately, one hopes, the process of demilitarization. For example: Do defensive engagements have to remain geographically isolated? Are small affinity groups the best formations for power-sharing and broad mobilization? How do we create cultures of support for those who engage in defensive armed conflict, especially with respect to historically oppressed people's right to defend themselves? What do those engagements of support look like? Additionally, there are many tactical considerations and questions to be discussed and debated to avoid replicating the dominant gun culture. How do we keep arms training from becoming the central focus, whether from habit, culture, or romanticization?

Further Reading and Research

Akinyele Omowale Umoja - We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

Charles E. Cobb - This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Cindy Milstein (editor) - Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

CrimthInc - The illegitimacy of Violence, The Violence of Legitimacy

Derick Jensen - Endgame (Volume 1 and 2)

Francis Dupuis-Deri - Who's Afraid of the Black Bloc?: Anarchy in Action Around the World

Franz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Kristian Williams - Fire the Cops!

Scott Crow - Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense

William Meyer - Nonviolence and Its Violent Consequences

Notes

[1] https://radfag.com/2015/04/26/in-support-of-baltimore-or-smashing-police-cars-is-logical-political-strategy/

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

By Chad Kautzer

Editor's Note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (ed. scott crow).

In his 1964 speech "Communication and Reality," Malcolm X said: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence." Earlier that year, he made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity: "It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent."

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X's speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule. When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), he explicitly stated: "We don't do anything illegal." This was also, of course, how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members' Second Amendment right to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function, enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. It is necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms, training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives precisely from Fanon's understanding of the transformative effects of resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. "At the individual level," Fanon writes, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude."

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self-a "sovereign subject"-that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory of community self-defense seeks to contribute.

Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency." I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often with localized objectives, as in Shays' Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad case, for example, white officials initially described it as a rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of the self and our assessments of resistance. "Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me," writes Fanon, "there was only one answer: to make myself known." On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to recognition.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political, social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the U.S. Civil War.

Brown's rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence. Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau defends Brown's armed resistance and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown's insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to those it oppresses. "The existence of violence is at the very heart of a racist system," writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns (1962). "The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself."

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive practices of the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and thus insurrectionary, if not revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country than with the security of government institutions. "When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence,'" writes Williams, "what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists." These structures of domination and monopolies of violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane, "makes known" the selves of the subjugated.

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as "the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." While this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote that he "was a changed being after that fight," for "repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant" had an emancipatory effect "on my spirit." This act of self-defense, he asserts, "was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me." Our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformativepower of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.

Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible, vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced, and gendered, not only "externally" by how others view us or how institutions order us-as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer, disabled, white, and black-but also "internally" by how we self-identify and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, "forms of social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible ways-in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion-that often seem essential to our very sense of being in the world."

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our social identities, the self that develops is social and political from the start. This does not mean that we are "stuck" or doomed to a certain social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them. To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources. These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are integral to the development of our own, including our self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing one's self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social division that produced what he called "double-consciousness," or "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of oppression is to live this otheringform of categorization in everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social hierarchy insinuates itself into one's self-understanding. In the most intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together; to live as a subjectwhen others view and treat you as little more than an object, and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups, which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life-a fact that is neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories: they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more virtuous or rational-indeed, the depth of its viciousness is limitless-but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is more virtuous, rational, or civilized. "The colonial 'civilizing mission,'" writes María Lugones, "was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror."

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845-46). The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is, we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital's self-creation of value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially, politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence, exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense, writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), "makes possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them."

The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically organized in groups-by race, gender, and class, for example-which makes some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily habits. As McCaughey writes: "The feminine demeanor that comes so 'naturally' to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters. Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist culture." Organized examples of resistance to this structured vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh, India; Edith Garrud's Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices "feminism in the flesh," because they are simultaneously resisting the violence of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one's body and self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations. The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one's self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this does not make it any less political or any less important to the struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having "no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name." This nameless, yet masculine, figure "has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order." But who provides for the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of being mythical-George Jackson said it was "too cold, very much like the fascist psychology"-it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender nonconforming, and trans people of color from "violence directed against communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic exploitation, etc.)" as well as from "violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence)."

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject-whose freedom can only be actualized through domination-the absolute identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev's revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to acknowledge. The sovereign subject's disavowal of the social conditions of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self, whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign) social relations being afforded to all.

This excerpt was originally published at Boston Review .

Being Queer: Personal Reflections on Identity, Gender, and Relationships

By Marina Rose Martinez

The first time I had sex with my now husband, I told him roughly three things:

1. I am not really a girl, so don't expect me to act like one and don't treat me like one.

2. Don't ever touch my throat.

3. If we're going to fuck, I have to be in charge.

Actually, what I really said was something along the lines of "I don't want to be a man, but I really don't act like a woman, and that bothers most people eventually. It will probably bother you eventually. I'm never going to change." Genderqueer was barely even a Live Journal tag.

He told me he didn't think there were really women in the world like me, and that he'd wished for me. I told him that the qualities that attracted me to him were his gentleness, his shyness, and his artistic nature. I liked that he sewed and cooked, that he liked cute things, and that he could be silly. He liked that I was tough and loud, and that I could tell people to fuck off as easily as I could tell them how amazing they were. I didn't say this at the time, but I had wished for him, too.

I've written about this a dozen times, but in my house growing up there were two genders: abuser and victim. Men did what they wanted to your body so that you could do what you wanted with their money. Or drugs. Or property in general. It's a raw deal when you get older and realize that women can get jobs and have money of our own. It's an especially raw deal when you look back on a childhood of trading punches for shelter and realize that you were the only one getting hit while older women told you this was woman's lot.

Although I do remember the time my mom came home covered in blood. Head to toe. She was matted with it. She took a shower and then she left, pinkish white drops lazily drying on the plastic shower walls the only evidence she was even there.

But what does this have to do with me being queer? I know, right? That's what I thought. Of course I didn't identify with femaleness. Of course I'd rather act like a dude; I got the shit kicked out of me for being a little girl. Or that's what they said. But I know a ton of people who got their asses kicked for being girls. That didn't stop them at all.

I've never felt like a girl. What does a girl feel like when her mom's boyfriend is trying to choke her to death? What does a girl feel like when a random junky is running his finger up and down the back of her sun dress telling her he thinks her "peach fuzz" is sexy? What does a girl feel like when she wakes up with her grandpa licking her mouth in the middle of the night?

I've always had other priorities, survival being chief among them. Recovery following quick on the heels of survival. One of the smartest decisions I ever made was to keep going to 12 step meetings even after my mom dropped out. As a young atheist, I was told that "a God of my understanding" could be anything. I met people with AA chips as their gods. Trees, stuffed toys, philosophical concepts, sentences in books, laws of mechanics and everything in between. My own personal god is currently gravity coupled with a vague sense of not-knowing things. I think it's my longest lasting god and I really like this one.

When you tell a child, desperate and alone in the world, without perspective, without prospects; who is conditioned toward abuse, who has been used and gas-lit her entire life that God can be anything, you also tell her that she can be anything. I could be a me of my own understanding. When you live with abusers who are also mentally ill or addicted to something the only way to know the truth is to get quiet and go deep inside yourself for it. Addicts will tell you that this is your fault. They will tell you that you actually like what they do (to you, with you, without you, whatever.)

One time my mom grabbed me by the neck, shoved me against the wall and screamed "STOP HURTING ME!" Which is a great tactic, because instead of fighting back, I stopped to think about the last 30 minutes of our screaming match in order to make sure that I hadn't actually touched her at all (I hadn't). There's no such thing as the truth in a drug addict's home.

Nobody in the meeting tried to tell me what my problem was. First of all, we all knew. Second of all, that was mine to search, and work through and own. I think if I had gone to a therapist at that time, I would have been told a lot about what I looked like. A narcissistic hypomanic gender dysphoric codependent with attention deficit disorder and anorexia who practices self-harm and suffers from PTSD.

I did assume that as I got older, worked through some shit and matured in general, I would grow more comfortable or more natural in my femaleness. I didn't really want to. I didn't want to develop a sense of compassion for my abusers either, but when I did, it opened the world to me.

My resentment was so much a part of who I was that it felt like the only thing holding me up most days. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw my parents as children themselves, with abusive parents of their own. Whose resentments against their parents lead to a life so unexamined that they turned into abusers despite their best efforts not to. It was the resentment that had grown in them like an abscess, festering under the surface until it exploded in violence and selfishness and led them to become the one thing they said they would never be.

Resentment was more a part of me than my gender has ever been. Gender to me is just a vague sense of not speaking the same language as everyone else, but it's one of the few aspects of my personality I have loved and enjoyed for most of my life, even when I wasn't really sure how.

My grandmother used to say "You always have to be different." I think she was trying to admonish me, but it also felt like a tacit acknowledgement. Maybe I am different enough. Maybe if I have to be different, I won't be capable of getting the same results as everybody else.

My trans friends from high school and college didn't seem to have my experience. Gender was a truth they told and were imprisoned for. Gender was a trauma event that they survived. A girl tortured with boyhood, a boy forced into girlhood. I never felt like that. I still don't.

My wedding was a revelation in this regard. When we were still in college, I told my boyfriend (now husband), "you know we're queer, right?" He disagreed. It was a conversation that went on between us for a while. Liking to sew doesn't make a man queer. Obviously.

But doesn't it seem queer that I have no relationship to being a woman?

Why would you? The patriarchy makes womanhood a horrible fate.

Besides, we were graduating into the largest financial shitstorm in eighty years. Telling people your pronouns are zie and zier at that time was mostly a great way to never be able to pay your rent or your student loans. Singular 'they' was still reserved for sentences like 'someone left their umbrella in the lobby.' So we are not queer. We are feminists.

But the wedding was different. I've always had a love-hate relationship with weddings. Despite my best attempts to hide it, I'm a total sap. I love love. After I realized that not every marriage was an abusive farce, not every wedding a sales transaction, I felt free to enjoy the sentiment. And I do. But I never wanted to get married myself. It felt awkward to me. I could never see myself as a bride much less a wife. I still don't really get the whole wife thing. And don't act like there isn't a thing.

I am not the female half of this binary gender unit. Before we got married we were just us. Ben and Marina. One and the other.

After we announced our engagement, my inbox flooded with unsolicited advice, suggestions, and offers of help. I was dumbfounded. What about me and our long years of association would make my friends think I wanted to talk about wedding planning? Once again, it was like they were speaking a different language. All of a sudden my experience of myself and my partnership was being held into the light of gendered expectations and we were failing to deliver.

I was content in my decision to get married, it was a good time and a good plan based on our financial situation and our upcoming house purchase. It fit well in our 5-year plan to start the adoption process. I did not and still do not understand why that obligates me to get excited about flowers, a thing I have never done.

Usually when I'm not getting a gendered thing, it's just one thing. The day moves on and so do I. People who have gendered expectations of me get frustrated over time, but there's not that many of them around now that I'm an adult and can choose my own company.

Getting married was about six months of things I absolutely did not understand. People got frustrated with me not understanding, and I then misunderstood their frustration. One person finally asked me, exasperated, "why are you getting married if you don't want to?" Why does me not caring about flowers and dresses have anything to do with whether or not I want to move forward in my life plans with my partner?

But that stuff does matter to many smart women who are equally as feminist as I am. Does not going crazy for flowers or caring about wedding dresses make a person queer? No. But I think it is a symptom of what makes me queer. It's not that I have no relationship to dresses or flowers, I like them both. It's that there is some "female language" I do not speak and cannot learn.

Gender is a construct, but these arbitrary gender roles appeal to people because they communicate with a true part of the human experience as a man or a women. That doesn't happen for me. Up until recently, I didn't think it happened for anyone. I really believed that gender was completely performative; that, man or woman, you were trained for your role and how well you performed it had to do with how thorough your training was. Even as I had transgender friends and loved ones for whom that was obviously not true. I trusted their experience to be real and valid; I just considered it to be one of life's paradoxes.

Even after that, I didn't see much of a reason to be explicit in the way my experience of gender feels different from what I'm taught I should be feeling. Compared to my feelings as a trauma survivor, as a woman in poverty, as a Latinx person, a fat person, it didn't feel relevant. It was the least interesting thing about me.

This is easier now because times have changed. But it's also more necessary now because the people in power have not. President Trump initiated his plan to ban transgender people from the armed services. In Nazi controlled Europe, one of the first laws the Nazis passed was to ban Jews and the other groups they would go on to murder from civil service, like the military.

Up to this point it wasn't a hardship to let people see my clothes and my partner and make assumptions that I was at least part of their tribe in that way. It made more sense to be a straight woman who advocated for gay and trans rights and who tried to open the door for my brothers and sisters whenever possible. There was no tortured part of me, I never felt closeted. I did feel like I wasn't telling the whole truth when I identified as straight, as a woman, but I had larger points to make and getting into the weeds about gender felt unnecessary at the time.

Most people really and truly don't give a shit what your gender feelings are. They want to know if you can do the job they hire you to do, if you can pick up the phone when they need to talk to you, if you'll keep the noise down after 10pm.

They consider it to be none of their business, and they will continue to think of it as none of their business when you are discriminated against and attacked, and when you are dead they will think it was none of their business who killed you. Because they have nothing to do with that sort of thing. Certainly the thing that killed you has nothing to do with "regular people" like them.

So people don't ask. They assume you are like them, just like I assumed everyone else was like me, and they go on with their day. That's all well and good when things are peaceful, when progress is steady and predictable, and when there is such a thing as a good queer. Because a good queer can open the door for everyone else. But this is different. The president's campaign of hate is against all of us humans. Some of us just don't realize it yet.

It's time to be explicit. Not only is there language when there wasn't before, there's knowledge when there wasn't before and I have leverage I didn't have before. I am not straight, I am not a woman. I am not a man. If there is a word for me, it would be agender or genderqueer. Some people use the term non-binary, which I find to be weird since all of gender, being on a spectrum, is inherently non-binary.

Anyone who knows me will probably think this is not news. You won't be seeing any changes in my behavior. I'll continue to act the way I've always acted. I will continue to be completely unfazed by whichever pronoun you refer to me with (they're all equally meaningless as far as I'm concerned) and I will continue to be completely annoyed by the unnecessary gendering of agender things like #girlboss and guy-liner.

This was originally published at the author's blog .

The Hampton Institut

Wrenching: On Building Coalitions

By David I. Backer

In the movie Independence Day, terrifying aliens show up to take over the earth, but something amazing happens: all the peoples of the planet join together--despite their differences--and successfully fend off the threat. We don't get a good look at this coalition, or how it forms, but it appears to encompass a vast swath of the spectrum of difference: race, gender, class, nation, religion, language...

It was a rainbow coalition, right out of Fred Hampton's playbook--except the enemies were colonizing aliens rather than colonizing capitalists. (The metaphor is pretty good, however.) Other examples of such coalitions include the Communist Party's organizing in the Black Belt in the 1930s, as well as the Young Lords' work in Chicago in the 1970s.

What do these coalitions show us about emerging forms of solidarity as we build the Left now? Specifically, what gets in the way of rainbow coalitions?

One answer is that folks belonging to various social categories are wrenched apart by the categories themselves. The best-known case is race and class. When it comes to race and class in the US, as Adolph Reed has long argued, the ruling class wins when race wrenches workers apart.

Racism is thus a tool the ruling class uses to make sure workers don't get together and get rid of them. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has articulated the same insight in reference to the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent Women's Marches.

But that phenomenon--wrenching--can and does happen in many struggles, both between and within many social categories. Wrenching is one of the things that can keep the Left from getting together and warding off threats to the planet.

How Wrenching Works

Wrenching works like this. There is a ruling set with certain nefarious structural interests. The ruling set could be the ruling class (capitalism), white supremacists (racism), cis-male patriarchy (gender oppression), heterosexual norms (sexual oppression), able-bodies (ableism)...and others.

Adolph Reed, building on a long tradition of thinking, has pointed out that racism divides the working classes and helps capitalists maintain power. Yet we know this same thing happens in other social categories. Racism divides women in their struggle against patriarchy. It divides queer communities in their struggle against normativity.

But racism isn't the only wrench dividing subordinated sets when making gains against the ruling sets. Class divisions wrench African Americans apart in their struggle against white supremacy. Gender divisions wrench queer folks apart in their struggle against heternormativity.

In each case, wrenching has the same form but different contents: in the struggle of a subordinated set against a ruling set within one social category, another social category--adjacent to their struggle--divides the subordinated set.

That's wrenching: when a subordinated set is struggling against a ruling set in one social category and the subordinated set is divided by another social category orthogonal to their struggle.

Workers fight capitalists, but racism divides them, and capitalists keep exploiting. Women fight patriarchy, classism divides them, and the patriarchy stays strong. In each case there's a wrench: racism is the wrench in the first and classism is the wrench in the second.

But the thing is, there's never just one wrench. There are always wrenches. In any given struggle there will be multiple wrenches with different salience, as intersectional sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins point out. You might work through the race problems in your union, but next up is the patriarchy and then the heteronormativity and then the ableism and transphobia...

Wrenching is gut-wrenchingly powerful and complex. But if you've ever quit something difficult to quit, you know that the first step to getting rid of the problem is knowing that you have one. Then hopefully you can do something about it. Same goes for wrenching (hopefully).

Taking Out the Wrenches

The concept helps. 'Wrenching' names a key barrier to coalition and accomplicing: wrenching wrenches us apart as we fight against the ruling sets. But a wrench is also a human made object, a tool, and tools can be used or not used for various purposes. They can be manipulated and moved around. So what do we do about the wrenches?

First, we have to find the wrenches, be clear that they are tools the ruling sets use to divide us. This isn't easy to do. Most organizations are only sort of aware that there are a number of wrenches dividing them from one another and other groups. If they do know about the wrenches, it probably hasn't been made crystal clear that these wrenches were put in the works by the the ruling sets in order to divide them (or at least have that effect).

After finding the wrenches, we have to pick the most salient one and take it out, which can be a painful process full of friction. It must be slow, careful, intentional. Workshops, discussions, debriefs. There will be mistakes. False starts. Hurt feelings. Time "wasted." It won't happen immediately, and if you try to take the wrench out quickly without the right plan the machine could fall apart, particularly if it's been in there for a long time.

After that we have to find the other wrenches and take them out too. After the first time, it should be easier--but each wrench is different and might require starting all over again.

Finally, we put the wrenches into our tool box and save them if we need them in our work. We probably don't want to use them against our enemies since they're the master's tools, as Audre Lorde said.

Maybe, at the very least, we should keep the wrenches to remember how they were used against us so as not to let it happen again, and also remember the process for removing them in case another one gets lodged in the works.

Wrenching need not divide us. The time for removing these tools of the ruling classes is now. Somehow the people in Independence Day did it. Like them, our world can't wait.

On Queer Anarchism: An Interview with the Pink & Black Collective

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview I had with Gywnevere, an administrator of the Facebook page Pink and Black anarchists, where we discuss her interest in anarchism, an anarchist take on the modern LGBT movement, and how people can learn more about queer anarchism.

If you can, tell us a little bit about the history of queer anarchism and how you yourself became an anarchist.

My introduction to the anarchist school of thought has come about rather recently, perhaps within the last six months I have fully come to appreciate where my beliefs lay. However, given my interest in politics, I believe it was inevitable. I grew up listening to Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh on the radio with my grandparents, often they'd discuss their feelings on it through their own lens. After 9-11 occurred, my mother joined in on politicking, and my immediate sphere of influence was cemented in as a right-wing echo chamber.

I have known that I was a transgender woman since I was old enough to create memories of the world, and as I began to critique my own beliefs and theirs it began to chip away at the prison which had been constructed around me. As I desired for other people to be free from the same cages I had to deal with, I steadily shifted towards libertarianism of the right. When Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, I viewed it as an egregious overreach of government, and quickly took to the streets in protest, gave speeches, the whole nine yards. It was during that research that I first discovered the feelings of cognitive dissonance. While pouring through the thousands of pages of the legislation, I could not verify any of the right-wing distortions about it nor any evidence that it could be anything but a blessing for thirty million people. Yet, I still swallowed the bitter pill and forged ahead - ignoring it and my own principles.

From what I have seen these last few months, the history of anarchism is a principled one. More often than the adherents do not, an ethical stance is chosen through careful consideration of the complexities of a topic until it is picked clean as though carrion beetles defleshed it themselves. Emma Goldman's explanation for why she chose to stand up for her friend Oscar Wilde when he was convicted for his sexuality in the 1900s struck the biggest chord with me, "No daring is required to protest against a great injustice." Her collection of thoughtful pieces published in 1910, "Anarchism and Other Essays," shaped the lens through which I burned away my nationalist feelings, my internalized misogyny, and my support for the prison industrial complex. It's a lens through which I must continuously burn away what society constantly heaps upon us. Beyond hearing of other names here and there, I know little of the exact history of anarchism, as often state education glosses over an individual's ties to the community, their contributions, or the individual entirely. However, I continue to add writings and facts to my knowledge daily, and I hope others will take the opportunity to do the same with me. We all must start somewhere.

In what ways do you on an individual level interact with the mainstream LGBT movement, if at all?

I believe that the biggest way in which I interact with the community is by being very vocal, proud, and unapologetically secure in who I am as a femandrogyne individual. However, many of my friends are also somewhere in the community - even prior to my own coming out. If there was one issue which would make my blood boil during a holiday with my immediate family around it was the rights for LGBTQIA+ people. I still flashback to July 4, 2012 where I yelled at my grandmother for being ignorant and stormed off to another room while being yelled after by the two reactionaries left in the room. That incident uncorked the bottle on feeling as though the ideology I was a member of was wrong and that I should begin to be extremely vocal when something was an injustice - no matter the victim. After all, at that point in time, I was simply an "ally."

These days I spend most of my time posting thoughts into the void as myself based on the identities that intersect with my own life. For the past two years or so, I've also been running a page focused on bringing positivity or select information to individuals of the LGBTQIA+ community, but with the recent election results that has been ever-so-slightly changed. Keeping up morale and sharing information, both behind the scenes and at the forefront, has been my life for the last several years as I have grown to understand myself and others.

Why would you say that'd the history of LGBT people, especially more radical instances such as Stonewall, are glossed over while simultaneously being held up as important events in US history?

I do not recall ever hearing about anyone's sexuality when studying at public school or in any community college classes I had. The first time it was ever acknowledge was in a university course on American literature where the teacher wanted to highlight the identities of the authors so that we could better understand them.

It seems likely that such information is glossed over mainly because it is viewed as trivial. As I often recall seeing in other courses, "It is an exercise better left up to the student to figure out." I do not believe that is the only reason, however, because many of our textbooks are printed with the state of Texas, my home state, in mind. The Texas State Board of Education has a longstanding history of historical revisionism, inaccuracies, and outright errors which they convince companies to publish, as they are the largest purchaser of school texts in the nation. They carry a lot of weight, thanks in part to how our society has been constructed, and as such they dictate what is emphasized, ignored, and omitted based on their own traditionalist lens. I recall having a set of books for home, a set readily available in the classroom, and a set in the back storage if either were damaged, a grand total of six textbooks, for a single English class. I never understood it, in the past.

There seems to be a lot of support for groups like HRC, which in reality is a hotbed of white gay men who aid each other (I will include the link later) to the detriment of lesbians and transgender people. Why do you suppose this is?

If I am perfectly honest, I believe it is the byproduct of a traditionalist society within which we live. The clear majority of us were indoctrinated within households that viewed the male figure as superior or dominant which arose from the major influence that Christianity has had on our country's society both past and present. Couple that view of male superiority with the white supremacy that seethes within the United States, and it gives the predominant figure which is likely to be chosen to "normalize" LGBTQIA+ people: a white gay man. It is not that other platforms which aid transgender and lesbian individuals do not exist, it is merely that the most "socially acceptable" ones as described previously bubble to the top in our social consciousness.

Are there any strategies you use to get people, especially LGBT people, to understand that it is OK for LGBT people to defend themselves from violence? As we have seen, the only acceptable LGBT person is one who sits there smiling, while the other person screams that they should die and are going to hell.

I try to engage with them both in public and in private to help them grapple with their fear of direct action or their pacifist/peaceful ways. I share the resources that I have used to help me to shape my own stances on when violence is justified or not. I believe that the only way through which we can help people overcome our natural desire to protect everyone against those who cannot fathom such altruistic behavior without incentive is directly. One-on-one. Engaging with our friends, family, or even acquaintances and getting them to a level to where they may engage with others trying to fathom the kind of brutish behavior exhibited by those with a reckless disregard for those which lay beyond their in-group.

How can people learn more about LGBT anarchism?

Reading. Seeking out information. Filling one's mind with the observations and critiques which combine ethos, pathos, and logos in powerful ways. I found that "Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire" (2013) by Deric Shannon et. al. was a deeply insightful work which helped solidify my feelings about anarchism in place. It discusses why we must protect one another within this community, and those who have yet to realize they are a part of it, with our love and our actions. "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) by Thoreau, while not particularly tied to LGBT anarchism, I believe is also a necessary read as it highlights the struggle to apply pacifism when the laws themselves are unjust and unethical. There's so much information online and elsewhere, but with this starting point I hope individuals that are just realizing that their liberty is at stake and threatened will gain as much information as they can as quickly as possible so that we may move forward together.

Gay Liberation through Socialist Revolution: A Political History of the Lavender and Red Union's Gay Communism (An Interview)

By Marquis M.

The following is an interview with Walt Senterfitt, a former member of the Lavender and Red (which was also briefly known as the Red Flag Union), in his home in Boyle Heights, LA, to see what today's revolutionaries can learn from the unique history of the Lavender and Red Union.

This interview looks at the development, history, politics, and legacy of the Lavender and Red Union, an early gay communist political organization that was based in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1977.

Regardless of the specific politics of the Lavender and Red Union (which should be seen as a product of their time and of their relationship to the rest of the mid-'70s US left), we can gain a lot from studying the experiences they made during their brief life before they decided to merge with the Spartacist League in 1977. One of the points that came up in this interview again and again was the perspective that queer people will not be able to win alone. If we want liberation, then we will need to fight together in the same struggles as all the other oppressed groups that make up the working class with us. We cannot only focus on building organizations that just address our own concerns or our own narrow community (which the Lavender and Red Union called 'sectoralism'). This lesson, and many of the other points discussed in this interview, continue to be of importance for those of us who struggle with pushing back against the liberal, reformist, and class collaborationist tendencies in our movements.

Marquis: You grew up in the south?

Walt : I grew up in the south, mostly in northern Florida in the era of de jure Jim Crow racial segregation. Being in an officially legally segregated society - schools, public facilities, neighborhoods - and my reaction against it, which was based largely on a religious impulse initially, was what initially propelled my political awakening. However, it was kind of stunted because I was a white kid in a fairly backward small Southern town without any allies or anybody much to learn from even. So I would follow things through the news, like the awakening civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s. When I began to try to reach out to young black people on the other side of town, I quickly got squelched rather vigorously by the town fathers coming down on my parents and threatening to fire them from their jobs if they didn't shut up their noisy and traitorous kid. So we worked out a compromise that I would cool it for six months in exchange for leaving home early and going to college in the north. Which I thought would be a decisive act of liberation and freedom because I would get away from a small Southern town.

And go to someplace where everything was enlightened....

Where everything was enlightened, non-racist, and kind! Well of course that also led to my political awakening at the next stage. Oh! It's not just the south! Racism is not simply a southern problem. It just has a different accent up here, and different forms. But my political activity was still within the confines largely of liberalism, but inspired by the Southern black civil rights movement and I was in fact organizing fellow university students from the north to support it, and to travel down south and participate in voter registration, and Freedom Summer, and liberation schools and things like that. And then increasingly also turning to community organizing in poor communities in northern cities. I dropped out of university without finishing. Partly over conflict over feeling impulses towards being gay but not being able to accept that yet, or not having a context, or not knowing anybody else.

You weren't in contact with any gay community?

No. Now remember this period was pre-Stonewall, we're talking early-to-middle '60s. I worked with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and a group called the Northern Student Movement in Philadelphia after I dropped out and then moved to Washington D.C., worked for the National Student Association, which was basically a confederation of student governments. Unbeknownst to me until later it turned out to have been substantially secretly funded by the CIA together with thirty or forty other cultural and educational and artistic organizations in the US as a Cold War tactic because of the US government knowing that it wanted to be able to operate in third world and left movements internationally but wouldn't be able to get any traction if it were doing that in the government's own name.

So the whole story of the Lavender and Red Union goes back to the CIA.

No, but my own history does! So I ended up accidentally coming across this information and helping to expose it, in 1966, 1967. The government was at first going to deny it, but we had enough inside information that could corroborate it. So I got a call in the middle of the night from the controller of the NSA, the person who oversaw the relationship and the funding from the CIA, and he put this guy on the phone who at least said - and this was at three o'clock in the morning - that he was Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and he told me "Young man, you've betrayed your country..."

Congratulations!

"...we have ways to do deal with people, like drafting you and sending you to the front lines of Vietnam." I did stuff like write up the story and put it in a safe deposit box and write stuff telling my parents that if something happens to me.... But fortunately it became a big enough story with national press, and then they started unraveling all these different other organizations.... So I was an embarrassment but it also gave us some protection. Anyway. Not too long after that I left the NSA and moved to - I got married - moved to San Francisco, started an alternative school, was involved in the counterculture. And other ways of, you know, the whole mid-late '60s stuff that we were going to...

So you were kind of generically political. You didn't have a particular direction.

I knew that I was committed to social justice, to building a new society, but I was not primarily political in any organized way. Then in the course of that I also began to realize that I was queer, and that ultimately my marriage was not going to be sustainable in that context, so I came out, but fairly late, in my late 20s. This was two or three years after Stonewall. Stonewall helped me come out 'cause all of a sudden - OK, here are people that I can identify with, at least the radical wing of gay liberation was something that I could identify with. So I got involved in that a little bit late. Particularly since I moved back to Washington which was a bit late, since Washington D.C. has tended to be politically behind other parts of the country. For example, when I moved back to D.C. in '72 and the next year '73, I hooked up with a group of people and we wanted to propose the first gay pride in Washington, and we got shot down violently by the nascent gay community - "Oh no! You'll turn everybody against us! It will set us back for two years!" - just to have an open gay pride, which was already happening in New York, San Francisco, LA. So Washington was a few years later.

Had you been to a gay pride march before then?

No. I left San Francisco and I came out, and had been dealing with it pretty much on a personal level. So when I got to D.C. I was involved at the gay community level in terms of institution building, like helped to start a counseling center that was peer-based and sort of liberatory-based, not psychologically-based, started an alternative to bars for people that didn't drink or didn't like the atmosphere of bars to have social dances and interaction, started a VD clinic which later grew into a health clinic for gay men and ultimately for lesbian women.

That's a lot of things to start. Seems like you were very active.

Yeah, I was active. I was politically involved with what was left of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had already kind of gone rapidly up and down in DC. We fought things like the discriminatory and racist behavior of the gay bars. They would triple card black gay men in the city, or they would have a quota that when a bar got up to more than 10 or 15 percent black patrons, then they would start discouraging any more coming in on the theory that too many black people would discourage white patrons from coming. So we were fighting racism within the gay community, or within the institutions that serve the gay community. And with the people I was organizing with and with my own experience, looking back over the last few years, we became unhappy with this community building counterculture method of social change, and also with liberal pressure group politics for democratic rights.

Why were you unhappy with this? What did you see was limiting yourselves?

We weren't getting anywhere. Except short-term and limited demands. And the more you got involved and the more you opened your eyes, you saw that it was an interconnected system of exploitation and oppression, not just a question of a bad policy of the government, or incomplete or imperfect democracy, or not giving enough rights or equality to one group or another. It was a little inchoate but it was largely frustration with a lack of vision. I also personally felt frustrated with the New Left. We were basically informed by the New Left, and one of the things that was typical of the New Left is the old left is bad. They were wrong. That's associated with the Soviet Union. Nobody wants anything to do with them. At best they're stodgy, conservative, bureaucratic.... But the part that was frustrating me about this was that we didn't have anything to learn from the people who came before us. So frustration, or the New Left running its course, led to a number of people who were looking for a chance to study history and a chance to find theory that made sense, that would help explain the world, system, capitalism. At the same time there were beginning to be these generally Maoist pre-party formations, they called themselves - collectives that were aspiring to become part of the new communist movement, towards building a new party.

You mean like Revolutionary Union?

Yeah. Revolutionary Union, October League. Some of them had been around before, like the Progressive Labor Party. The Communist Workers' Party. And then some of the Trotskyist movement, which had been pretty much off to the side, but present, started coming in and intervening with the New Left in one way or another. So anyways, we found a woman who is now identified as a Maoist, who was a former Communist Party leader who had come down from New York to D.C. in the late '30s, early '40s. She agreed to teach the rest of us Marxism. So we collectively studied. We had a study group complex, as we called it, and there were 125 of us in 10 different groups of 12. So I got involved, while continuing the kind of the things that I've described before, in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought - MLM-T3. On the one hand it was very exciting and it was like the first time I had read or study Marxism, other than reading the Communist Manifesto when I was a college freshman. This was like turning on the lights in a tunnel. It was like, Wow! Oh, yeah! OK! Class struggle! Working class! Capital! Fundamental contradiction! Exploitation! Class struggle driving motor force of history! Having that framework, rather belatedly, you know, because I was thirty years old or something coming to this, was exciting. We started having this trouble though, because I brought up homosexuality in the study group complex, and this woman said "No, we can discuss it, but the line's going to be unless you can show me different, unless you can show me the material basis for homosexuality and it's theoretical contribution to revolutionary struggle or the working class, you just basically need to know what's wrong with it. That it's like bourgeois...."

Bourgeois decadence?

Yeah... a symptom of bourgeois decadence. She wasn't so overtly homophobic. It was polite and soft in the language, but that was basically the line. It basically was the Chinese Communist Party's line. That this is one of the many deviations of human behavior that will disappear with socialism. I essentially got marginalized by this MLM-T3 study group complex. They didn't kick me out because I had some friends who respected me and who would have refused to allow that. But I saw that I was an uncomfortable minority. It made me think back to when I was a twelve year old boy in segregation Florida and there was nobody else there. So I started questioning. These people may have turned on the lights in the tunnel, but they sure do put blinders on. There's something wrong with this Stalinist-Maoist version of Marxism. And also, I wanted to be queer. A queer communist. A queer Marxist.

So through that study group you became Marxist.

Yes.

But you realized, "I am Marxist, but not this Marxism."

Yeah. So I started looking around and I found this little ad in a national gay paper that was about two lines at the bottom that said "Gay Liberation through socialist revolution!" I said, "What! Did I read that right? They sound like my kind of people!" So I wrote them from DC. They had just gotten founded about this time, '74 or early '75. In between my two years of nursing school, which is what I was doing my last few years in DC, I drove out here to LA to meet them to see what they were like. So I met them and was reasonably impressed, although they were awfully small. There were three to five of them total. I had discussions, and then I went back to DC and I started a little DC gay socialist study group that was using a kind of edited version of that same curriculum of this other study group complex, a little of the Mao and adding in a little Trotsky. Basically it was an introduction to Marxism. I wanted to recruit some other queers to Marxism so that I wouldn't be the only one. I also tried horizontal recruitment, as they called it - from the straight ones. So that went OK. One person ended up later moving with me to LA to join the L&RU and a couple others remained sympathizers. But I stayed in touch by correspondence with the people out here, the L&RU, and invited them to come to DC. We did a forum for this left milieu called 'Gay liberation through socialist revolution'. Later through struggle with the Spartacist League we dropped that slogan, but at the time it was cutting edge; it was the main slogan of the L&RU and of course it drove most people in the liberal and sectoralist queer community crazy - "What are you talking about socialist revolution, we just want equal rights". But we got 125 people to come out to that in DC, including some of the Maoists who spoke up and gave their line, but.... Since I got my nursing degree I came out here to join them.

So how did those three or five people in L.A come together?

I don't know exactly because I wasn't here and I don't remember the stories. I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. Because the Maoist milieu dominated the new left decomposition products of that time, and if you were a radical revolutionary anti-capitalist, that was the main game in town, with the Trotskyists having a little left field pocket, and then the anarchists - I don't know about LA, but they weren't a factor in DC. So then in '76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to 11. So we had brought in more people, including people that were less politically experienced. But there were some core politics, like we believed in a working class orientation, including implantation of cadre in industry and work in trade unions.

Can you explain what the implantation of cadre in industry means?

It's that you want to recruit people from the working class, but you also wanted to send people who may be from a petite bourgeois or working class background, but who became won to communism, into industry or into strategic places where they could help organize other workers or recruit from working class struggles and to work in the trade union movement. So out of our 11 we had two in communications, who were telephone workers and in the communication workers union, and me in health care, joining the health care workers union. We actually talked about that within the L&RU - you notice we weren't just talking queer politics, we were also trying to do our bit to help build a revolutionary working class movement. That's a part of the problem that we began to see here pretty soon. First of all, 11 is awful small, being out queer. And so being a gay liberation communist organization was not particularly helpful in organizing a revolutionary caucus within the communication workers union, or the nurses.

Did the organization actually send people into these workplaces to organize? You said that was a strategy.

Yeah. At least one of the communication workers was sent in. The other may have been their to start with, but he was there in part with the idea of being an organizer within. And before we later moved on into the Spartacist League, we were training a couple or three other people for jobs for implantation. Apprenticeships, and skilled trades for example, and electrician, transport workers. We were aiming for somebody in the ports. Didn't get that far, though.

So the goal then in doing this workplace organizing, would not be to, say, organize a queer caucus in the health care workers union.

No. It wasn't. Not at that time. And it was also contrary to our politics.

Why was that?

Well, we were saying that the role of queers in the maintenance of American capitalism is not strategic in the same way that, particularly black people - and later other people of color - and women is. That American capitalism and the domination of the American ruling class is integrally dependent on maintaining the special oppression of blacks, in particular, and also increasingly Latinos and other immigrant forces, and women. And that gay people are probably not going to find, or likely to find, full democratic rights without the leadership of a radical or revolutionary movement. But it's conceivable that they could. And I think that in the outcome of the last few years you can kind of see that it's conceivable that the nominal granting of democratic rights can happen within the structure of capitalism. So we were saying that we wanted to organize around the things that were strategic and fundamental while also we fought for women's liberation - and we sort of saw the queer question as in some ways integrally related to that - and for full democratic rights for everybody, that we have to make a point of fighting for everybody, even unpopular or small minorities, whether strategic or not. Though we didn't organize gay caucuses in our trade union work, we did raise the demand that unions should support full democratic rights and oppose discrimination against LGBT people. That way, we established a track record of the importance of the unions and the working class fighting to defend gay people when under attack, as with all marginalized groups. So we were in a position to quickly mobilize support when pogrom-type attacks came, as later happened during the hysteria around AIDS.

Earlier you were talking about whether it was possible to realize full democratic rights under capitalism. I think you were saying that at least for the United States.

It's theoretically possible to do that.

But it's not possible to do that for, say, black people, because capitalism, in the US, is formulated on the foundation of racism. But you said that for queer people, it's more of an... open question?

Yeah. I would say, once again I personally don't see it fully, but it's possible to extend democratic rights more and more and more on things like marriage, on things like serving in the military. They could also do, although they haven't yet, on nondiscrimination in the workplace, or nondiscrimination in housing. All these are aspects of full democratic rights. They can grant that without threatening hegemony, rule, power, including power to exploit the working class as a whole.

In some of Lavender and Red's writing about their goals or demands for sexuality and for queer struggle, they talked about a vision of being able to actually move beyond gender distinctions entirely, and not have - obviously - straight, gay, bisexual; not have masculine/feminine gender roles, not being assigned male and female. Is that something beyond democratic rights, are those things that you think can be achieved under capitalism?

No, that's beyond democratic rights. I think that's part of what that ultimately needs the socialist revolution. But I think that's integrally related to, and you can contextualize it within, the "woman question", in the traditional Marxist terminology. In terms of the elimination of patriarchy. I think retrospectively we could have gone beyond this to expand the potential contribution of queerness. But it's still a terrain that was opened up. I mean we want to be able to, for example, socialize reproduction of labor to create freedom from those traditional sex roles, including forms of sexual partnering. So I would say that's tied to to the original liberatory vision of Marxism. And we were certainly into extrapolating on that, and talking about that, and envisioning and imagining, but on the other hand we're not utopians. We're saying you don't get these things just by imagining them, you get them by working to change the material bases and the structure of capitalism and class rule.

You saw that struggle for liberated gender and sexuality as being part of what you called the "women question", and also that's clearly part of the gay liberation struggle. So how did you separate out the gay question from women's liberation struggles and patriarchy, and separate it as something that was not strategic?

Well, by saying not strategic doesn't mean it's unimportant. But because you were asking me initially around caucuses and about how you would organize caucuses. And it gets back also to sectoralism. To the extent that we sort of made a hard line about this, it was because we were fighting against sectoralism, which we felt is really going to weaken and divert the movement, or building a powerful unified working class movement that can ultimately smash capitalism, and the solidarity necessary to do it. With sectoralism, the tendency is that it ends up focusing more and more on the particular gains and demands and organizing increasingly narrowly around those, and often then it leads to, as we can see time and time again, to bending away from a revolutionary purpose by making alliances and concessions with capitalist forces, particularly liberals, saying "Oh, you support us on this so we won't challenge your basic power." At it's worst sectoralism can lead to support for fascism. For a very authoritarian form of capitalist state as long as you got your crumbs, or your particular narrow interests were protected. So we were very motivated by fighting against sectoralism. We were talking in terms of how you organize the fight, and particularly when there's a justification for separate forms of organization. And that wouldn't necessarily be hard and fast for all time. For us, for a caucus in the health care workers union, or the communication workers union, it was much more important to have a revolutionary or a class struggle trade unionist perspective that we were uniting all people around, as opposed to prioritizing a gay caucus, or a series of caucuses that might be parallel, like a gay caucus, and a women's caucus, and a Latino caucus, and a this and that caucus. At another time or with a more "advanced" nature of the struggle, you might have some of these different caucuses, all of which were revolutionary and class struggle, and were united at the same time.

But going into an industry, the first thing you do would not be going to find the other queer people there.

Yeah. Right. So, since we're on the labor thing, I had gotten involved in the trade union struggle struggle activism at Kaiser here in LA as a nurse. I had been involved in the new RN union, including pushing the contract negotiations in the most militant direction I could, including some democratic rights demands, including for queer people, and for the right for Filipinos to speak their language - they had a rule that you couldn't speak non-English in the hospital even in off-duty areas. And then a strike was coming up from the "non-professional" workers - the vocational nurses, and the nurse's aides, and the housekeepers, and the dietitians. And so the question was, what are the RNs going to do?, because we were in a different union than the majority of the workers. The perspective of the union leaders was, "We will keep working. But we will work to rule. We won't do other workers' jobs. But we will cross picket lines and come into work to take care of patients because that's our highest duty and blah blah blah." I argued as a class struggle trade unionist, no, picket line means don't cross, working class solidarity is an important principle that we must - in the case of the US - reestablish as inviolate, and furthermore practically for all of you worrying about the patients, if we have a solid strike Kaiser will be much more likely to settle then if we do this piecemeal work-to-rule shit. I was putting this forward as the queer, and also the commie. I put forward a position that no, we need to commit, we need to take a vote to not cross the picket line. I won that argument, and Kaiser settled the strike the next day, without even actually having gone out on strike. That was an example - a small one - of the kind of trade union work and class struggle intervention into a workplace that we tried to do.

Is that part of the reason why you thought it was a necessity to go beyond just being a small gay socialist organization, so you could include people like your coworkers? Because you saw it as necessary to organize there, in the hospital, as working class people, and that being working class people was the primary point of unity in the workplace?

I think so. Plus we needed size and you've got to open it up and have it on a different basis if you're going to recruit size. We weren't exactly making headway recruiting out of the gay political organizations.

Why? Why do you think that was?

'Cause we were commies. I mean 'cause people were saying, "You're unpopular. I'm a pro-capitalist queer. I want to succeed. I just want the right to make it in this society free from discrimination." Or they'd say "Oh, my main problem is not as a worker, my struggle is against patriarchy and male bosses." We were increasingly seeing we were gonna be stuck in a niche that is not exactly a springboard to being part of a movement for power, as long as we were just isolated as a small queer communist organization. That's just setting aside the question whether we were effective or not in our organizing. But just by definition we were narrowing ourself to this little piece, whereas our basic idea - the more we thought about it, and the more we studied broader history and movements - was that we needed to build a party. That was our belief as people being won to Leninism. That we needed to build a vanguard or a disciplined democratic centralist party. So we needed to find somebody else to hook up with.

Did you focus on trying to win the gay community over to socialist politics?

We tried. But first of all this history is pretty short. We're talking here just a matter of three, four years maximum before we abandoned that narrow existence. We went to gay pride. We leafleted. We put out a newspaper. We intersected issues in the gay community like the Gay and Lesbian Center strike. We were active in a campaign to boycott some big bar in West Hollywood because of it's anti-black discriminatory behaviors, just like in Washington. And we would try to organize queer contingents in anti-war and Chilean solidarity demos or actions. We did those kinds of things that would be trying to attract attention. Although then increasingly we focused more on study to try to figure out where to go next. So we took a lot of time reading.

What were some of the challenges that Lavender and Red brought to the LA gay movement?

We basically criticized saying capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Capitalism cannot be reformed. We're not the only ones in a shaky boat here. That it's all of us or none. There's other oppressed groups and if we don't express and fight for solidarity with your working class fellow gays and lesbians, who are also maybe Latina, and maybe also black, then that even more bluntly poses, well, are you going to have freedom as a black sissy queer without also challenging racism? Without also challenging sex roles and patriarchy? So you put that out there continuously.

So pointing out that actually, despite who the leadership of these liberal gay organizations might be, the vast majority of the queer community was in fact the working class, was in fact not white. And so by being so narrowly focused, they were leaving most people behind.

Yeah. Without fighting the other sources of the oppression of our community.

What were some of the challenges that you brought to left organizations around Los Angeles?

Why are you all so backward? Defending the worst in bourgeois society or Stalinism?

Did you have conflicts?

Well, we had arguments. We would often be shown the door. We would go to meetings that were run by these Maoist organizations or popular front coalitions and speak up, including queer demands or just speaking as out queer communists, and sometimes we'd get thrown out, shown the door by the security squads. You know, they said "You're being provocateurs", or sometimes we'd be police-baited, or disunity-baited, or, in a couple cases, "Get out of here faggots - will the security show them the door". Twice, that I went to.

Despite the rejection that Lavender and Red got from the established Maoist left, you still remained very committed to the idea that what queer people needed was socialist revolution.

Yeah. We thought these weren't really socialists. They were corrupter socialists, this tradition. Also things were beginning to change. I mean, we were having some impact - not just us, other people. I mean these people were getting a bit embarrassed because they were trying to recruit people too, from a broader perspective, like ex-liberals or still liberals, and they were getting uncomfortable with this. We were also suspicious, though, because then people began to switch, including some of the Trotskyist groups, like not only the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], but Workers' World. We would point out the hypocrisy of these groups that a few years ago wouldn't talk about queer people, and now they didn't come out with some analysis admitting how come they were wrong and why they changed, they just suddenly started being friendly and welcoming and adding a few token gay demands to their kitchen sink demand list. We were telling other gay people, don't be fooled by this kind of pandering. Ask for their analysis. Where's their strategy. Where's their program. And, most fundamentally, do they have a program for overthrowing capitalism.

Seeing the class contradiction, seeing the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class as being the crucial linchpin, is that perspective what made Lavender and Red realize it was necessary to not just organize gay people, not just organize working class gay people, but also to be together with anti-racist and feminist, and anti-imperialist struggles?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You talked about how your perspective on feminism was that it needed to be working class feminism. And you came into some debates about that with feminist groups during the strike at the Gay Community Services Center, which was one of the first established gay social service organizations, and which ended up getting a lot of funding....

This was actually before I moved out from DC, so I just know this second hand. But the workers attempted to organize a union because there were wholesale and arbitrary firings. And we supported those workers, and to some extent we might have implanted the idea that you need a union, you need to organize and negotiate as workers with the management for wages, working conditions, and against arbitrary firings.

One account I was reading basically said that the Lavender and Red Union were the people who came to the workers and said, "You should go on strike", and that idea won out, but there is one quote from one of the workers who was speaking against Lavender and Red's proposal, saying "This is not a labor issue. Our fight is about lesbian feminism versus male dominated hierarchy." It seems Lavender and Red's position was that actually workers being fired for organizing against their boss is probably a labor issue.

Yes! I think so. That's not to deny, and we didn't at the time, that it's not also a feminist issue.

So how did that play out in that strike?

As I recall the workers lost, but our position got a substantial amount of respect. But there was some lingering disagreement, sort of like markers were cast down: OK, this is how they see it, this is how we see it. But it did raise the issue - for some people for the first time - that even in the nonprofit, NGO, social services sector, there are labor issues. That because we're a queer organization does not suddenly resolve capitalism or resolve the tendency of bosses and managers to exploit, and abuse, and mistreat workers. That workers have a right to organize. And I think we had some modest success in at least instilling these basic principles which we were fighting for.

How did Lavender and Red see this NGO-ization of the early gay movement affecting things and what was your position on it?

It hadn't really happened yet enough for us to take it up as that issue specifically, except in specific concrete cases like this one. We saw that strike as an example of that, that a voluntary organization becomes an institution. We didn't foresee that it was going to become a tidal wave, or the degree to which it became the dominant mode.

Lavender and Red's existence is very interesting because it was very contradictory in the sense that this group formed that saw there was no place for queer struggle in the revolutionary left, and then at same had a political understanding that there wass no place for queer struggle by itself. And so I guess Lavender and Red probably saw its own existence as something of a failure.

Well, yeah, it certainly was contradictory from the start. That contradiction was embedded in it. But I would say that's not necessarily a failure, to have then gone through and transformed ourselves, and whoever else we influenced, with a vision that was not only transformative but transitional to a different perspective. And we probably played a small role in helping to transform at least a corner of the left. I would say that we also, we and other people who came along after us or in parallel, did have struggles within the left to clarify, or rectify, or challenge leftover or former positions. And a lot of these contradictions still.... Well, I started to say still exist but....

But for the contradictions to exist in the left, the left would need to still exist.

Yeah, that's why I sort of backed off. No, the thing that I'm saying that still exists, because I saw it again in Act Up twenty years later, was the fight against - in less explicitly political terms most of the time - a sectoralist, single-issue approach versus any solidarity, integrated struggle, and anti-capitalist perspective. And that has existed in different movements in the queer community as well.

So this approach against having a focus on just this one oppressed sector, and instead organizing in the united working class struggle with other oppressed groups - that's a perspective saying that revolutionary political organizations shouldn't be based only in one oppressed group. But is it a perspective saying that social movement groups shouldn't be only based in one community as well?

I personally wouldn't say that. I would say that there are rules for mass movements that are based in one sector, but there's always going to be the danger of that bending towards class collaborationism and accommodation with capitalism unless there's some countervailing active tendency. So I think, like your Chilean comrade was saying in that meeting a couple weeks ago, about there being different sectors of the popular movement, but then needing to have a party, a political organization, a formation, a structure, by which the unity of the struggles and the cross-fertilization and the critique and challenging takes place within the popular movement sectors. So I would say that I can certainly see - first of all, it's going to happen whether I or any other revolutionary approves of it - but I can see that it's not necessarily something to always to be fought and polemicized against, but to maybe be intervened within with a unified revolutionary perspective, and to have some way to link these together. And at times then it may outlive its usefulness. You could actually see if it's objectively becoming more of an obstacle in it's sectoral boundaries than it is a benefit in its mass mobilization potential.

Tell me a little bit about the transformation of the Lavender and Red Union. You said that after this period of intense activity, there was then a period of intense political study, saying "OK we've been doing this work in the left, in the gay community, where are we going?"

Right. Part of it was since we were coming out of a Maoist milieu, even though we weren't splitting from any explicit organizational connection, we felt like we needed to decide between the original Bolshevik vision of global international revolution, or as Trtosky concretizes, permanent revolution, versus the Stalinist/Maoist conception of socialism in one country, that, among other things led to accommodations with the...

National bourgeoisie.

National and international bourgeoisie. I mean, this was also Nixon in China time, you know. That shook up a whole lot of people in the Maoist left milieu - "What the fuck is he doing? The butcher of Vietnam being welcomed to Beijing!" That was the first big study. And so we came up with a document rejecting socialism in one country. So then we decided, OK we're basically committed to the Trotskyist tradition, so, which one?

It may seem interesting to someone that a gay communist organization would spend so much time studying the question of socialism in one country instead of spending that time studying sexuality and gender.

Well we saw ourselves as a part of - or wanted to be a part of - the global communist movement for revolution. And you can't just study one piece of that. You've got to try to find the central dividing lines or questions. That's the one that we encountered.

And it had a lot of importance in the context that you were in at that time.

Yeah, right now it might seem arcane and esoteric, but I think in the context why we did that instead of sexuality is not so hard to understand, because we were gay communists. Or gay revolutionaries. So he needed to study and sort ourselves out according to the key revolutionary questions that were facing us, as well as then we would expect to dialogue and counter with any putative partners about how they related to queerness and sexuality.

Basically at that point you're just choosing between Stalinism and Maoism and Trotskyism.

Yeah. This was a two stage process. The first was to choose Trotskyism and then to move to find out what form of Trotskyism. Then that requires a study of the Russian question. Is the Soviet Union a degenerated workers' state, or is it state capitalist, or bureaucratic collectivist? Once again a question that seems far removed from queer liberation, and I tell you people that we talked to about this said "Are you guys crazy?" Then somebody wrote a little headline on a story about the fusion of the Red Flag Union - as the Lavender and Red Union was known at that time - with the Spartacist League as "The fruits merge with the nuts".

After the Lavender and Red Union began studying the Russian question, there were a number of parties that came trying to....

Trying to pitch their version to us. We talked to the SWP, we talked maybe briefly to Workers World, although by that time nobody much had much respect for them; they had already gone over to Kim Il Sung as an exemplar of the revolution. Though maybe that came a little later. And the International Socialists [IS], and the RSL [Revolutionary Socialist League], which had been kind of a left split from the IS. We did talk to the Freedom Socialist Party too. They were the ones that were articulating the vision of socialist feminism. But it pretty much came down to between the Spartacist League and the Revolutionary Socialist League. It ended up being a twelve-three split. Twelve of us joined the Sparatacist League and three joined the RSL. It was partly a question of the way you came down on the Russia question. But it was also partly a question of style, temperament, and bent thing. The RSL was a little more loose, not such hard democratic centralist in their style. Right after the merger we were all in LA, and the Spartacist League was saying "OK, we're a national and international tendency, so you can't all stay in LA because we want you to spread out, so where are you going to go?" And some of us went to Detroit. Partly because the auto industry was hiring again. So there was going to be an opportunity of implanting a bunch of people in the auto industry after a period of stagnation and shrinking. As far as I know those three people who went with the RSL stayed in LA. The SL fraction split - a couple stayed here, some went to Detroit, Boston, Chicago, New York.

So the Lavender and Red Union mostly joined the Spartacist League, and the Spartacist League allowed you to filter out across the country. So what happened next? What was the legacy that you saw the Lavender and Red Union having within further organizing and militancy?

I think that one theme of this discussion is that we felt like we were able to express our deeper or broader political commitments through our involvement in a more comprehensive national and international revolutionary organization. To that extent I think we felt like it was successful for us as individuals and for the continuity of the political work or the political vision that we had. Later the SL certainly got more involved in queer struggle, even during the time that I was still there, which I was there for ten years. Like that case in Chicago. We were explicitly defending and mobilizing and getting labor union locals to defend a gay pride march in Chicago from a Nazi attack. And most of the rest of the left eschewed or shied away from that. The most they would do was say, "Oh, let's have a rally to protest the horror of the idea of the Nazis." And we're saying "Fuck that namby-pamby liberal-ass shit, let's stop them from coming here." Lavender and Red Union people had different skills. Some people continued to work in the communication workers' union, for example, only in a different city. Some people found skills as internal organizers, apparatus people. I worked in both health care and and in these anti-fascist mobilizations, and in the legal and political defense work. People went through with apprenticeships and were implanted into industry and industrial fractions. At that level, I would say that we also were able to bring the particular knowledge and skills of the queer community where there were opportunities to intersect, like with the anti-fascist organizing, and later in the AIDS movement, including infusing in the party - before the Spartacist League got totally isolated - and the other forces it it influenced in Europe, and Mexico, South Africa, Poland, Russia, with its commitment to queer liberation, queer rights as a part of a comprehensive communist party. That we brought that, our tradition and our personal histories into the broader life of this broader political organization; I think that had an impact.

You feel that the Lavender and Red Union was able to spread a bigger change to the rest of the left.

Yeah.

And so then you left after ten years.

Largely I burned out and just needed to take a few years off. But I was also beginning to question the continued relevance of the Spartacist League's fairly narrow application of Trotskyism and democratic centralism. Because I feel like the farther you get away from having a history of active involvement in leadership in mass workers' struggles, the more distorted, precious, esoteric, and just quirky the idea of embodying this tradition becomes. My own politics now, I would say I define myself as an anti-capitalist revolutionary, and sometimes I say I'm a communist. I mean readily I'll say that, it's just not always appropriate. But I'm not affiliated with any particular political organization or sectarian tradition. I'm still influenced by the Trotskyist tradition of Marxism more than any other single tradition, but I believe in, and I'm open to, more eclectic revolutionary anti-capitalist movement building. So there's this organization COiL [Communities Organizing in Liberation] that I've been an associate member of, and I'm a member of this Ultra-red political sound art collective that's international in three countries, and largely involved in trying to build a mass movement of tenants for housing justice, connected to the other struggles against capitalism that people in LA are engaged in right now.

You were involved in the AIDS movement after you left the Spartacist League.

I was. And I went back to school, got graduate degrees, and then AIDS kind of happened. So that's where I worked. I was involved in Act Up, and more broadly in pushing things within the AIDS movement that came out of that tradition that I've been a part of. Which is that an injury to one is an injury to all, that struggles against capitalism, against all forms of oppression, are indivisible. That you've got to solve the AIDS crisis with people who are also poor, black, trans, living in under-resourced countries, and that therefore the struggle has to be reflective of, or address, or connected to, struggles against all forms of oppression. And I've similarly found myself oppositional in many cases to people who said "No, the emphasis has just got to be on getting resources and focusing the attention of the system to solve this one crisis."

Any concluding wisdom on the lessons of the Lavender and Red Union?

Talking indirectly to the Turkish comrades, one of the things that we were attracted to from the Lavender and Red Union in the Spartacist League, is that the Spartacist League was committed to internationalism in an active way. Not just solidarity. But trying to found, or bond with, or establish relationships with revolutionary groups in other non-US countries. And that the US left should subordinate itself to an international revolutionary collective process, at least in ideal, and move in practical concrete steps. I still believe that.

Orlando: Deeper Than Terrorism

By Devon Bowers

The recent mass-shooting in Orlando is, without a doubt, a terrorist attack. However, it is not the terrorism that so much of the mainstream media is playing into, with their focus being on shooter Omar Mateen's alleged pledge of allegiance to ISIS. Rather, it is terrorism against the LGBT community, especially Latinx LGBT people, and, due to the backlash from the far right and politicians who want to focus on Mateen's religion, Muslim LGBT people. We need to understand and realize that this shooting goes much deeper than just terrorism and touches on a number of aspects of American culture itself.

Despite the victory of same-sex marriage, there is still a large amount of bigotry against the LGBT community. One only need to look at the large number of states which have passed laws that protect "state officials, faith leaders, and religious organizations who act on their beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman, that sex is only acceptable between husband and wife, and that gender is established at birth." [1] This is done under the guise of 'religious liberty,' in which it is argued that someone is merely practicing their faith when discriminating against LGBT people, yet actually inverts the entire situation by promoting the idea that "Christians who object to homosexuality on biblical grounds [are] victims of religious persecution."[2] Add to this the recent and ongoing hysteria involving transgender people using the bathrooms of their gender identity.

The situation, which hadn't been a problem before, suddenly exploded into the mainstream when the North Carolina legislature passed a bill which "[struck] down all existing LGBT nondiscrimination statutes across the state, on top of banning transgender people from using some public restrooms." [3] The arguments became so controversial that the White House stepped in and made clear that, with regards to public schools, transgender children can use the bathroom of the gender they identify with.[4] In response, states have sued the Obama administration[5] and/or have voted to ignore the directive. [6] Unfortunately, these bathroom laws have had a very real and detrimental effect on transgender people, with calls to the transgender suicide hotline, Trans Lifeline, doubling after the passing of the North Carolina bill. [7] Thus, we see that there is a general atmosphere across that nation that is hostile to people in the LGBT community - people who have been in the trenches of a long-term struggle for basic human dignities.

It should be noted that Mateen attacked Pulse during its Latin Night[8] and it has been reported that "a co-worker recalled him as a virulent racist."[9] It is quite obvious that there is an atmosphere against Latina/os in the US. With everything from presidential candidate Donald Trump saying that he was going to build a wall to keep Mexicans out [10], and that Mexicans were all rapists and criminals[11], to the old and tired argument that immigrants (specifically Mexicans) were stealing jobs from people, the anti-Latino sentiment in the US is alive and intensifying, and has been for quite some time. Mateen's racism isn't random, but rather a possible byproduct of the anti-Latina/o bigotry that has been being expressed more and more openly over the years.

It has also been noted that he was abusive toward his wife.[12] This is rather important to note as there is a connection between gun violence and domestic abuse[13]; in addition to the undercurrent of misogyny that is common in many shooting incidents - from George Zimmerman, who was arrested for domestic violence[14], to Ismaaiyl Abdulah Brinsley, who shot his ex-girlfriend before going on to kill two NYPD officers [15], to the UCLA shooter, who killed his estranged wife in Minnesota before driving to UCLA to shoot a professor.[16] Violence against women and gun violence are often linked together.

On a personal level, Mateen may have lived in a homophobic household, evident by a video released by his father the day after the shooting, where he said that "God will punish those involved in homosexuality."[17] There is also the possibility that Mateen himself was gay or at least attracted to men. According to the Palm Beach Post, "One former classmate of Omar Mateen's 2006 police academy class believed Mateen was gay, saying Mateen once tried to pick him up at a bar."[18] Mateen frequented Pulse as well,[19] yet due to both the homophobia at home and in society more generally, he may have not wanted to come out and may have internalized the shame, finally acting on it in the shooting.

The point of this isn't to play armchair psychologist, but rather to acknowledge Omar Mateen's views didn't develop in a vacuum; they were caused by deeper cultural problems involving bigotry against the LGBT community, women, Latina/os, and immigrants, all of which are reflective of the larger American society.

In terms of the response to the shooting, there has been focus on terrorism and ISIS, gun control, and some arguing that the tragedy affected everyone, not just LGBT people.

Not soon after the tragedy, both presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, responded. Trump "[lambasted] the president and Clinton for not using the words 'radical Islamic terrorism,'" seemed to advocate for loosening concealed-carry laws, and repeated his call for a 'temporary' policy to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.," whereas Clinton said that she "supports the U.S. efforts to contain ISIS" and wants "tighter gun safety laws." [20]

Where both Trump and Clinton agreed was that the U.S. needed to bomb ISIS more, which The Intercept writer Zaid Jilani noted was a bit of a problem as "no operational links between ISIS and the alleged Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, have been discovered" and "neither explained how escalating bombardments in Iraq and Syria would do anything to stop self-radicalized and/or unhinged attackers in the United States." [21] Yet, the pro-military argument plays into the terrorism narrative that has been ongoing since 9/11, and possibly plays into the larger regional game the U.S. has, as it could be argued that ISIS needs to be stopped permanently and the only way to do that would be to send in ground forces, something that would let the U.S. stay directly involved in both Iraq and Syria for quite some time.

There has also been much talk about gun control and how citizens shouldn't be able to access assault weapons, with President Obama saying, "Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense."[22] Even Republicans, it seems, may be open to changing the nation's gun laws. [23]

Recently, on the show, Sky News Press Preview, host Mark Longhurst debated journalist Owen Jones (who is gay) on the causes of the attack, saying that "it was an attack on the 'freedom of people trying to enjoy themselves' on a night out." Co-guest Julia Hartley-Brewer then told Jones, "I don't think you have ownership of the horror (sic), of this crime, because you're gay."[24] On the other side of the pond, former Senator Scott Brown stated that "It's so tragic that you have people, and a lot of them were gay and lesbian and transgender, and that's deeply unfortunate, but I think it's more than that. They were Americans first."[25] There was even an article in The Advocate entitled, "There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too."[26] While it is important to acknowledge that there were straight victims, shifting attention to these victims ignores the fact that Mateen targeted Pulse specifically because it had LGBT people there. His thoughts weren't about the straight people that, to him, just happened to be there; they were on harming and killing LGBT folk. Saying "there were straight people too" only serves to erase the nature of the hate-crime and relegate LGBT people to the back rows.

What both the discussion of ISIS/terrorism as well as gun control laws does is shift the narrative of the shooting, turning it away from homophobia. This should be fought as rather than focusing on the tragedy of what happened and how to combat bigotry, the situation risks becoming another game of political football for politicians to use, using the dead bodies of LGBT people as their platform.

The purposeful ignoring of the shooting as a hate crime, either explicitly or implicitly, and acting as if was a crime against all people only serves to ignore the fact that Mateen targeted Pulse specifically because it had LGBT people there. His thoughts weren't about the straight people that, to him, just happened to be there, they were on harming and killing LGBT folk. Saying "there were straight people too" or that "they were Americans first" only serves to erase the nature of the crime and relegate LGBT people to the back rows, despite their blatant and deadly victimization.

When confronting tragedy, contrived talking points designed to support ongoing narratives do nothing to address the matter. There needs to be an examination of what exactly caused the situation, not only from a criminal perspective, but also a social and cultural perspective. These mass shootings occur in a modern context where race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors intersect. To refuse to examine these intersections is a refusal to attempt to attain a fuller understanding of what occurred and why. It is a shame that people are obfuscating or ignoring the larger picture, as it is extremely important.

It may save us from the next massacre.

Notes

[1] Molly Jackson, "How Southern States Are Now Challenging Gay Marriage," Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2016 ( http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/0220/How-Southern-states-are-now-challenging-gay-marriage )

[2] Southern Poverty Law Center, 'Religious Liberty' and the Anti-LGBT Right, https://www.splcenter.org/20160211/religious-liberty-and-anti-lgbt-right (February 11, 2016)

[3] Hannah Levintova, "North Carolina's GOP Just Fast-Tracked The Broadest Anti-LGBT Bill In The Country," Mother Jones, March 23, 2016 ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/north-carolina-bill-lgbt-discrimination-law )

[4] Emanuella Grinberg, "Feds Issue Guidance On Transgender Access To School Bathrooms," CNN, May 14, 2016 ( http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/12/politics/transgender-bathrooms-obama-administration/ )

[5] Theodore Schleifer, "Officials In 12 States To Sue Obama Administration Over Transgender Bathroom Directive," CNN, May 27, 2016 ( http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/25/politics/texas-lawsuit-barack-obama-transgender/ )

[6] Emma Brown, "Kansas State Board of Education Votes to Ignore Obama's Transgender Bathroom Directive," Stars and Stripes, June 16, 2016 ( http://www.stripes.com/news/us/kansas-state-board-of-education-votes-to-ignore-obama-s-transgender-bathroom-directive-1.414884 )

[7] Samantha Allen, "After North Carolina's Law, Trans Suicide Hotline Calls Double," The Daily Beast, April 20, 2016 ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/20/after-north-carolina-s-law-trans-suicide-hotline-calls-double.html )

[8] Yara Simón, "Worst Mass Shooting In Modern US History Takes Place at Orlando Gay Club on Latin-Themed Night," Remezcla, June 12, 2016 (http://remezcla.com/culture/pulse-mass-shooting-latin-night/)

[9] Jenny Jarvie, Harriet Ryan, Del Quentin Wilber, "Orlando Nightclub Gunman Remembered as Abusive, Homophobic, and Racist," Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2016 ( http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-orlando-nightclub-shooter-20160612-snap-story.html )

[10] Anna Brand, "Donald Trump: I Would Force Mexico to Build Border Wall," MSNBC, June 28, 2015 ( http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/donald-trump-i-would-force-mexico-build-border-wall )

[11] USA Today, Donald Trump: Mexico is Bringing Drugs, Crime, and Rapists to the US, http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2015/06/25/29292957/ (June 25, 2015)

[12] Claire Z. Cardona, "Orlando Shooter was 'Mentally Unstable,' Abusive, Ex-wife Says," The Dallas Morning News, June 12, 2016 ( http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2016/06/orlando-shooter-was-mentally-unstable-abusive-ex-wife-says.html/ )

[13] Emily Crockett, "Why We Can't Ignore the Connection between Gun Violence and Domestic Violence," Vox, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11922576/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-gun-domestic-violence )

[14] Ren Stutzman, "Girlfriend to Deputies: George Zimmerman Pointed A Shotgun at Me," Orlando Sentinel, November 18, 2013 ( http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-11-18/news/os-george-zimmerman-arrested-20131118_1_george-zimmerman-murdering-17-year-old-trayvon-martin-deputies )

[15] Justin Fenton, "Police Say Killer of 2 NYPD Officers First Shot Ex-Girlfriend in Owings Mills," The Baltimore Sun, December 20, 2014 ( http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-co-owings-mills-shooting-20141220-story.html )

[16] Julia Jacobo, "UCLA Shooter Killed Estranged Wife Before Campus Incident: Police," ABC News, June 3, 2016 ( http://abcnews.go.com/US/ucla-shooter-climbed-window-kill-estranged-wife-police/story?id=39597309 )

[17] James Barrett, "5 Things You Need to Know About The Father of Orlando Jihadist Omar Mateen," Daily Wire, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.dailywire.com/news/6532/orlando-jihadists-father-god-will-punish-those-james-barrett )

[18] Lawrence Mower, "Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen was gay, Former Classmate Says," Palm Beach Post, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen-was-gay-former-classma/nrfwW/ )

[19] Paul Brinkmann, Gal Tziperman Lotan, Rene Stutzman, "Witness: Omar Mateen Had Been at Orlando nightclub Many Times," Orlando Sentinel, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/os-orlando-nightclub-omar-mateen-profile-20160613-story.html )

[20] Rebecca Shabad, "Orlando Attack Reactions from Clinton, Trump Are Starkly Different," CBS News, June 14, 2016 ( http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-offer-starkly-different-reactions-to-orlando-attack/ )

[21] Zaid Jilani, "Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Call for Bombing ISIS After Orlando Shooting That ISIS Didn't Direct," The Intercept, June 13, 2016 ( https://theintercept.com/2016/06/13/hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump-call-for-more-airstrikes-on-isis-after-orlando-massacre-that-isis-didnt-direct/ )

[22] Robin Gradison, Alexander Mallin, "President Obama Rips Gun Control Opponents After Meeting with Orlando Victims' Families," ABC News, June 16, 2016 ( http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-visiting-families-victims-orlando/story?id=39885188 )

[23] Ed O'Keefe, Karoun Demirjian, "In wake of Orlando shooting, gun control getting fresh look from GOP," Washington Post, June 15, 2016 ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-wake-of-orlando-shootings-gun-control-plans-getting-a-fresh-look-from-gop/2016/06/15/e25e3b2a-3311-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html )

[24] Danny Boyle, "Owen Jones storms off Sky News paper review after presenter refuses to describe Orlando massacre as attack on gay people," The Telegraph, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/13/orlando-shooting-owen-jones-storms-off-sky-news-paper-review-aft/ )

[25] Emily Atkin, "Scott Brown Says Orlando Shooting Did Not Primarily Target Gay People," Think Progress, June 14, 2016 ( http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/06/14/3788372/scott-brown-orlando-shooting/0

[26] Jacob Ogles, "There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too," The Advocate, June 13, 2016 ( http://www.advocate.com/crime/2016/6/13/there-were-straight-victims-orlando-too )

Art, Race, and Gender: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

Below is a transcript interview I had with the founder and operator of the Facebook page, Son of Baldwin, where we discuss comic books as a political medium and also as it relates to and in many ways reflects the current racial and gender structures we see in society.

What made you interested in comics? For me, personally, comics were an extension of my interest and enjoyment of animation.

My father bought me my very first comic books when I was four years old and I was hooked instantaneously. At that point, I had already been introduced to super heroes via the 1973 Super Friends cartoon and then the 1975 Wonder Woman television series. I was fascinated with the idea of these larger-than-life characters with incredible powers who used those powers to protect defenseless people from the evil and corrupt. That resonated with me on a primal level. Forty years later, it still does.

Comic books are the reason I'm a writer today. My earliest writings were me attempting to create my own superhero stories. Additionally, two superheroes in particular played a major role in the shaping of the very unsophisticated political consciousness of my childhood:Wonder Woman and her black sister, Nubia. Wonder Woman comics were filled with stories that touched on very basic, elementary feminist principles. And with the introduction of Nubia, a very clumsy race awareness was brought to the fore. Both impacted me in ways that I can't fully articulate, but suffice to say, they were my first child-like understandings of identity.

The fact that these were female characters was quite important. I wasn't drawn to Superman orBatman, or even Black Lightning and Black Panther in the same way. I believe that I was rejecting, on some subconscious level, the narrowness and rigidness of a particular brand of masculinity and the increasing and needless violence that came along with it. Wonder Woman and Nubia-with their bold strength, unabashed femininity, and desire to teach first and punch only if they had no other choice-seemed more balanced and free. The escapist fantasies I had with them allowed me the room to safely explore other, queerer aspects of myself, aspects that I was only beginning to become aware of and understand. At four years old, I couldn't know that this is what was happening, but looking back, it makes a great deal of sense.

Given the fact that so many movies and shows are flourishing due to diversity, why don't you think that companies don't have more diverse characters, if for no other reason than to cash in?

There are a great number of experts, theorists, and thinkers who believe racism, sexism, and other forms of institutional bigotry are tied to economics. The prevailing wisdom goes something like: to rid ourselves of these evils, we must disconnect them from their economic incentive; we must make bigotry unprofitable. But what that class analysis fails to contend with are the psychological benefits of bigotry. Bigoted ideology helps oppressive groups feel good about their actions, beliefs, practices, and thoughts. It warps their perception of reality so that any evidence contrary to their false ideas of supremacy are discarded and discounted. They'll invent flimsy excuses to uphold the status quo in the face of utter ruin. This benefit is separate from economics. It lives in that mental and emotional realm that allows poor white people, for example, to say: "I may be poor, but at least I'm not black!" or straight black people to say, "I may be black, but at least I'm not queer."

So when the research shows that inclusive media is actually more profitable than exclusive media , they regard that data as suspect and reject it. Simultaneously, when the exclusive media they promote fails financially, they behave as though they're baffled in regard to why that might be and continue to make more of the same stuff in the face of utter failures. As a last resort, they might test the research by releasing inclusive media, but that's always a game of gotcha. If the media does well, they say it's a fluke. If it does poorly, then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't matter if what they thought was inclusive was actually tokenism dressed in offensive stereotypes. It doesn't matter how many inclusive forms of media do well or how many exclusive forms of media fail. The bigot isn't operating from a logical, rational, common-sense perspective. Even the capitalist bigot will choose losing money over allowing marginalized peoples and perspectives centralized locations in the production of media-especially marginalized peoples and perspectives they can't control.

Would you say that comics can be used effectively as a means of political engagement on some level?

Absolutely. I'd be loath to give my nieces and nephews a comic book without first reading it and then reading it with them, though. Many comic books contain really toxic messages about race, gender, gender identity, sexuality, disability, etc. I think comic books politically engage children in ways that I find abhorrent. Most comics teach kids that physical violence is the way to solve most problems; that women should always be subject to the gaze and whims of men; that queer people don't exist, or if they do, it's as the strange punchline or comic relief; that being disabled is the worst thing in the world to be and must be "corrected"; that all races should be subordinate to the white race, and so on. It's very, very rare that I come across comics that I would give to the children in my family (Princeless is a pretty good one). But I do find that my adult friends and family are politically engaged with the comic books they read. Mostly though, they, like me, find themselves in opposition to the overt and covert sociopolitical messages in them. Most mainstream comic books, I'm convinced, are created for white, heterosexual, cisgender, non-disabled men-which makes sense since that demographic, by and large, is the one creating them.

What are your thoughts on the fact that Scarlett Johansson is playing Major Motoko in an upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie ? Do you think that this is being used as a ploy of sorts to get people from criticizing Marvel for not creating a standalone Black Widow movie?

Scarlett Johansson to be playing an Asian character is blatant racism; it's yellowface. There's just no other way for me to view it. It's bold and proud racism masquerading as a necessary casting choice. Racists will always try to justify their racism and, in the justification, attempt to remove the racism label: "It was an economic decision! And Johansson is popular, so…!" They say that as though either of those plea cops shield them from the racist label. They don't. Racism is racism irrespective of the "justification."

There's just no way in the world I will see Ghost in the Shell without an Asian actor in the lead role. Period. The end. That goes for Doctor Strange, too. Ain't no way I'm supporting that film either. My response to Hollywood racism is to do everything in my power to ensure that their racist products fail. Not that they'd ever learn their lesson: How many Exodus' or Gods of Egypts have to flop before they get it? I learned that they don't want to get it. They dismiss my views by calling me a SJW (social justice warrior)-a term that they seem to think is a slur, which reveals much more about them than it does about me-and whining about how hard it is not to be a bigot.

So instead of trying to persuade bigots why it's wrong to be bigots, I give my money to those who already know why. That's why I make it my business to support ARRAY.

As far as a Black Widow stand-alone film , I don't think there's any way Marvel can protect itself from that criticism. There is no sleight-of-hand they can pull that could distract anyone from something so obviously and egregiously sexist.

Regarding the role of women in the comic book industry, would you say that there is some room for women in the industry in terms of women taking the lead in creating and producing comics?

I wish I could say yes. The industry is so incredibly hostile to women, though. Like openly hostile; so openly that it seems almost built into the industry's design.

For example, there's this situation at DC Entertainment where one of the senior editors has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment-for years and years, by many women-and only now, after one woman spoke publicly and other survivors of this man's behavior spoke up and social media got a hold of their testimonies-is DC "investigating." And they made sure to use DC Entertainment Diane Nelson to make the public statement about the investigation in an oh-so-cynical Public Relations 101 stunt move. Like that wasn't absolutely transparent. It's almost like if the public never found out about the allegations, DC would have been content with allowing it to continue, like sexual harassment is a normal part of their professional culture.

And it's not just the publishers; it's the audience, too. Women have complained of harassment and worse at comic conventions and other comic-related spaces including comic book retail stores. And don't venture into the comment sections at every comic book news site or message board. Misogyny is a staple. If you were a woman, would you feel welcome in such a vicious environment?

And it's a shame that this is the state of the industry because there are so many talented female creators and eager female readers who could help boost the industry's lagging sales-especially DC's, whose market share continues to shrink.

I find it strange in some ways (though in some ways not), that in many cartoons such as Justice League Unlimited that have strong, well-liked female characters such as Vixen and Hawkgirl and yet people seem to think that movies or shows based on those characters wouldn't succeed. Why would you say that is?

The answer is bigotry. Bigots cannot understanding centering anything outside of their identity sphere. It doesn't matter how many times Batman, Spider-Man, or Superman fail, they will be given multiple chances to succeed. Because they are perceived as having inherent value due to merchandising, etc. But if Vixen was given as many chances to find her stride as Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman have over these many decades, maybe she would eventually find her popularity as well. Though I must say, Vixen comes out of a kind of stereotype about black women's sexuality and womanhood; a white, patriarchal gaze which regards it as animalistic, base, degenerate, evil, and wayward. Vixen needs a black woman writer to redeem and revitalize her, and remove her from the clutches of the white supremacist sensibility that imagined her. There's a dope character in there somewhere, but a black woman's vision is needed to realize it.

How are cartoons used to enforce gender roles? I say this as the show Young Justice was canceled by DC as they thought that women wouldn't purchase toys of the largely male cast. ( http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317 )

It's funny you should ask this. I just wrote an essay about a superhero cartoon called DC Super Hero Girls for The Middle Spaces that explores, in some ways, the function of cartoons.

What I've come to understand is that most American media aimed at children is propaganda designed to enforce very conservative and harmful ideas about class, disability, gender, gender identity, nationality, race, sexuality, and Otherness in general. There are some exceptions ( Steven Universe may be one, though I have some minor issues with that show as well that I hope someone can correct; but that's the topic of another conversation). But for the most part, this media is attempting to indoctrinate children into becoming a very specific kind of citizen, a very specific kind of laborer, a very specific kind of taxpayer, a very specific kind of soldier, to practice a very specific kind of religion, to form a very specific kind of family-and all of those things lean noticeably to the right.

That's why we have toy commercials where only boys play with racing cars and only girls play with dolls. Shit, we even call boys' dolls "action figures" to ensure that the line between genders is solidly drawn. Cartoons, which are little more than 15- and 30-minute commercials for toys and games, are design to reinforce these outdated and limiting notions. And, unfortunately, adults have been indoctrinated far longer than children. So most adults act as the police force ensuring their children absorb these restrictive, reductive ideas.

Why do you think that so many people who are into comics want to keep the entire medium to a small few, denigrating people who are just learning about the comics or who became interests in them via the movies as not being 'true fans?' Doesn't that hurt them in a sense as a major reason comic book movies were/are being made is because of those people who haven't yet/don't read the comics?

People, I've come to understand, are afraid of change. We become anxious when we perceive that something might change because we allowed some other group to be included. The comic book fanatic that denigrates new readers because they think the new readers might cause the industry to alter its priorities and storytelling to accommodate the new reader has much in common with the xenophobe who wants to build a wall at the southern border to keep Mexicans out of the United States because they think the Mexicans will "steal their jobs." Those fears are family. They live together. And they will, thankfully, die together. It's inevitable. They're scared of that, too.

What comics/graphic novels would you say had an impact on you on a personal level and why did they have such a major impact? [For me, I would say Solanin, Blankets, and Not Simple.]

I love this question. There are a few. I tend to like comic books/graphic novels that make me think, that make me question things, that encourage me to envision a better world and a better way of life, and invite me to be a better human being:

Erika Alexander and Tony Puryear's Concrete Park is the very first comic book/graphic novel that I've ever read about people of color that wasn't plagued by the white gaze. It's the very first comic book I've encountered in which people of color are centralized, are the default, belong in the landscape, are the norm. It's the very first comic book that I felt didn't ask permission to exist in this state. It avoids stereotypes. It allows its characters the full realm of humanity and is unapologetic in allowing its Blackness to begin with a capital B. And it's a Blackness that wasn't imagined by white folks who listen to rap music and had a black roommate in college so now they think they're experts on black people even though all they can manage to conjure is black pathology. With beautiful writing and beautiful art, this comic, more than any other, provides a way for me to envision fully realized black characters in my own stories.

Phil Jimenez 's Otherworld was such a smart examination of sociopolitical hierarchy. The backdrop was Celtic myth and science fiction, but the heart of the story was about the lovelessness that defines contemporary conservative ideology and how it can only lead to human extinction. Art wise, every page is a masterpiece. Every detail is rendered meticulously. And the colors were outrageous. The series only lasted seven issues when it was scheduled to go for 12. So I never got to read the conclusion, but what I did read impacted my personal politics in a very profound way.

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers broke all of the rules in terms of narrative and visual storytelling, and did so with elegance, grace, and aplomb. They literally broke the boundaries of the panels in their stories-the art often allowed the characters to actually use the white space between panels as weapons! And then they broke one of the biggest boundaries of all: In their final issue, they revealed that every member of the team was queer. Basically, all the things the industry would have said couldn't be done because it would affect sales, they did. Their fearlessness bolstered my own.

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in The New York Times , Gawker , The Grio , and the Feminist Wire . He is the creator of the social justice social media community, Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook , Google Plus , Instagram , Medium , Tumblr , and Twitter . His first novel is in the revision stage and he's currently working on the second.

Disproportionate Minority Contact & Criminological Theory

By Miah Register

It has been recently discovered that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (trans*), queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the juvenile justice system (Holsinger & Hodge 2014; Hunt & Moodie-Mills 2012; Craziano & Wagner 2011). Hunt and Moodie-Mills (2014) also report that 60 percent of these youth are Black, Latino/a,. Further, despite the overrepresentation of LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system, the legal system's response has been lackluster, at best. In 1988, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) have responded with the Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) mandate, which was an amendment to the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act (U.S. Department of Justice OJJDP DMC Factsheet 2012). This act was intended to reduce the contact of minority youth in the juvenile justice system. Moreover, most research involving minority youth has denied the impact or intersecting identities and the oppression and lack of safe spaces for these young people to exist in society, in general, and in the juvenile justice system. Although feminist criminology has emerged and enhanced the narrow ideologies of classical criminological theory, many intersections have been left uncrossed in juvenile justice theory, research and practice. Since the inception of criminological theory, significant elements of the human identity have been overlooked as primary factors of disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system. For example, Hirschi's (1969) model of social control argues that race and ethnicity are factors that are invariant. Further, this false sense of equality and inclusion encourages exclusion and erasure of the identities of minority groups: i.e. the focus of the current research-lesbians, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming black girls.

History of DMC

The DMC mandate originally intended to reduce the confinement of minority youth in the juvenile justice corrections facilities. Moreover, it required states receiving certain federal funding for juvenile justice programming to follow this mandate and its several components. In 1992, the JJDP Act "elevated the efforts" of the DMC mandate, and allocated 25 percent of the funding to state compliance. Further, the OJJDP proclaim that through the DMC mandate, they learned that minorities were overrepresented in all components of the juvenile justice system, as opposed to earlier beliefs that minorities were only disproportionately institutionalized. As a result, the mandate was amended in 2002 and renamed to Disproportionate Minority Contact for state municipalities to understand the necessity to address overrepresentation of minorities at every point of the justice system.

Further, at the inception of DMC, the OJJDP developed a model for states to emulate in their efforts to reduce minority contact. Their reduction model calls for state agencies to identify, assess, intervene, evaluate, and monitor DMC. The OJJDP claims that their efforts, while not complete, have catalyzed some institutional change. While they quote some positive changes in arrest statistics and in detention facilities, criminological scholars must approach this perceived change from a critical, intersectional lens to understand and asses the positive changes, if any, after the DMC mandate. While each state has implemented the DMC model to some extent, most states have monitored their programming, but they have failed to methodically evaluate the program's effectiveness. Thus, in this paper, I will critically examine the effectiveness of the DMC mandate in serving all minorities-not just Black boys. This evaluation will be conducted through a comprehensive literature review, as well as a theoretical analysis of the potential origins of this deeply rooted issue.

Theoretical Approach

This paper will utilize Blalock's (1967) racial threat theory as a basis to expand upon. In essence, primary ideology of racial threat theory will be expanded to encompass and explain the matrix of oppression for all minorities. This theory asserts that competition (for jobs, economic superiority, etc.) between Black and White people in the US causes an intensified level of social control exerted on Black people. An example of racial threat theory applied to the current plight of the juvenile justice system is the disproportionate involvement of Black youth at every contact point of the system. On the other hand, Black people, in general, represent a minority of less than 15 percent of the country. Thus, the representation of Black youth in the justice system is unjustifiable through realistic, critical approaches to criminological theory.

Moreover, in this paper, some literature is reviewed that deals with Hirschi's contrasting model of social control, which completely denies that racism, prejudice, bias, and corruption are real. These two theories of social control are purposely compared in this paper to illustrate the historic failure of the justice system to understand the "matrix of power" (Potter 2013). The next section of this paper discusses the literature and research studies conducted to understand the complexities of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, social control, and the juvenile justice system.

Literature Review

Although little research has been conducted regarding DMC, the mandate was analyzed in Leiber et al.'s (2011) study. The purpose of their research was to evaluate the effectiveness of the DMC mandate in decreasing racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. The researchers approached this topic through Durkheim's (1964) consensus theory and conflict (symbolic threat) view in relation to racial stereotyping. The consensus model argues that tradition, law, punishment, and treatment derive from a broad consensus of societal norms (Durkheim 1964). According to this criminological theory, racial disparities in crime are attributed to differential involvement in crime, gender, age, dysfunctional family structures and school misbehavior. (Tracy 2005). The conflict model alleges that minority youth possess feelings of fear and jealousy, which makes them pose a greater threat to society and public safety. Moreover, this studies draws from these theories to understand racial bias and stereotyping by practitioners in the juvenile justice system, particularly at intake (court referrals) and at judicial disposition. The researchers hypothesized that the race of the offender would have no influence on intake or judicial disposition before and after the DMC mandate, and that DMC would reduce decision-making outcomes.

The researchers utilized data from a county in Iowa, which was chosen by Congress in 1989 as one of five model states for the DMC mandate. The researchers reviewed about 5,700 cases ten years before and ten years after the DMC mandate, 60 percent being White offenders and 40 percent being Black offenders. They reviewed how both groups were treated in intake and during judicial disposition. Thus, the researchers found that their hypotheses, grounded in criminological theories that do not explain oppression and discrimination, were unsupported. They found that even after the DMC mandate, cases involving Black youth were referred to court more often than that of White youth, especially when Black youth derived from single-parent families. Moreover, the researchers also found that the effects of race become much more covert and indirect, but they were apparent under a critical lens. The researchers found decision-making was most impacted by race when the there is "no procedure for review;" i.e. when discretion is at its highest.

The researchers acknowledged that the data and sample were pulled from a single jurisdiction, which makes the ability to generalize based on their research questionable. Nonetheless, they urge for more research to be conducted on the effectiveness of the DMC mandate, as it has been in place for over 20 years.

Myers and Raymond (2010) studied the effect of heternormativity on the perspectives of elementary-aged girls. The researchers hypothesized that heteronormativity is not just the result of pubescent transformation; instead, it is intertwined within everyday life and interactions, even as young as five years old. Because there has been a gap in previous research (Renold 2006; Casper and Moore(2009), the authors prioritized the focus of heteronormativity and gender performance to a young population, as opposed to the middle and high school population. The authors examined how heteronormativity governs elementary girls' gender performance and their self-image and images of their peers. The researchers gathered a focus group of 43 girls, ages five through 11 (median age 9-years-old), grades kindergarten through fifth grade. The participants were primarily white, lower middle class girls, which represented the majority of the school's population. The girls were divided into age-appropriate groups, where discussion was moderated by a researcher, but was guided based on desirable topics of conversation. The researchers found that although the questions prepared were regarding the girls' general interests, the conversation constantly shifted to a boy-centered discussion. Most girls bashfully and secretly desired to discuss their crushes or dating climate in their elementary classes, and some were very open about the boy-centered interests and perceptions.

Through the conversations with girls, the researchers found evidence to support their hypothesis. They found that the girls defined themselves through the lens of boys, and their heteronormative ideologies were consistent with their firm beliefs that sexual orientation should match one's gender identity and expression. There were also consistent findings of heteronormativity being an agent of social control. The researchers found that heteronormativity was utilized as a mirror for girls to measure themselves and one another through a heterosexist lens, and through a very chivalrous, traditional ideology of what it means and looks like to be an "appropriate" girl. Finally, they found that this was policed through school policy and through home life standards. Moreover, most of the girls' parents followed very traditional gender roles.

The researchers acknowledged the lack of racial and economic diversity in their focus group. The participants were primarily white, lower-middle class socio-economic status, and the researchers noted that the group interviews were dominated by the white participants. This lack of representation silenced the perspectives of the young, Black and Latina girls in the focus group (which were they only people of color reported in the demographic notes). The researchers did not discuss this as an opportunity for future research.

Chesney-Lind, Morash, and Irwin (2003) conducted a literature review regarding the impact of policing girls' behavior. The researchers investigated how the policing of relational aggression between girls is utilized as a mechanism of social control. Moreover, they examined the implications of treating relational aggression as a criminal justice problem. The researchers explained that [relational] aggression can be a plethora of behaviors: eye-rolling, spreading rumors, breaking others' confidence, criticism of other girls' appearance and personality, sarcasm, and much more. Further, the researchers hypothesized that the relational aggression should not be handled in a punitive manner and it should not be governed under school zero tolerance and behavioral policies.

The researchers critically examined literature from the 1970s until the early 2000s. They found that most research has emphasized the necessity to prevent relational aggression between girls, because of the emotional and psychological damage they believed would be caused. Nonetheless, Chesney-Lind et al. (2007) also found that the research supporting this psychological damage is inconsistent. They found that intervening in relational aggression has adverse effects on girls. Moreover, the researchers gathered that this increases the formal social control over girlhood, femininity, and what it means to be a girl or woman.

Thus, while previous research suggested that relational aggression be prevented with gender-specific programming, Chesney-Lind et al. (2007) found this method inappropriate. Further, the researchers found that policing noncriminal behavior of girls increased their involvement in the criminal justice system, as opposed to preventing criminal behavior or juvenile girls. While juvenile girl crime rates may have increased, self-report studies suggest that violence amongst young, female offenders was decreasing (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice 2012). This supports the researchers' hypothesis that policing relational aggression will increase girls' involvement in the criminal justice system and have adverse effects. Further, extensive research has been conducted to understand policing of girls' noncriminal behavior. Eventually, scholars developed several theories to understand the needs of girls in the system and ways to better deal with girls in the system.

There has been much existing research on the dichotomy between the chivalry hypothesis and the evil woman hypothesis. The next section of the literature explores the many facets of these theories, as they have been tested several times. Moreover, Embry & Lyons (2012) conducted a study that looked to analyze the "evil woman hypothesis." They hypothesized that females who committed crimes diverting furthermost from traditional gender roles would receive harsher sentences. Further, the researchers believed that women would receive more severe sentences than men for sex offenses, as this type of violent, dominant, and powerful behavior is an egregious diversion from traditional gender roles.

The researchers analyzed data collected by the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) in order to examine the relationship between sentence lengths for males and females convicted and sentenced for sex offenses. The data was pulled from January 1994 through December 2004. There was little demographic information, offense type, and sentencing variable. The authors' analysis of previous research focusing on women as sex offenders was inconsistent; most research in this article focused on women as victims. Further, the researchers did not find evidence to support their hypothesis, based on the "evil woman thesis." Instead, based on their data sample of approximately 2,800 cases involving females and approximately 2,800 cases involved males, the researchers found that males were sentenced more harshly than females.

The researchers discussed some limitations to their study. When they controlled for offenders' criminal history, they found that sentencing discretion was misleading and unreliable, because females' and males' criminal histories are gendered, based on the chivalry hypothesis.

Thus, this study found evidence to support the chivalry hypothesis, which previous research has utilized to compare the discrepancies in sentencing of male and female offenders who commit the same crimes. The study did not mention the implications of race, class or sexual orientation in relation to sex offenses and sentencing discrepancies.

Spivak et al. (2014) also dissected the relevance of the chivalry hypothesis and the evil women theory in relation to female juvenile offenders. The researchers had multiple hypotheses to test the two theories: they projected that status offenders would be primarily girls, girls' cases would be more often referred to court, girls would have less guilty verdicts, and girls would more frequently be sentenced to custody as opposed to probation.

The researchers utilized the Oklahoma Office of Justice Affairs, where they examined approximately 3,000 cases of status offenders (controlling for race, age, prior history, type of status offense, and socio-economic status). Status offenses included runaway, truancy, 'school behavior problems,' 'beyond parental control,' and 'in need of supervision.' The authors found that their hypotheses were supported; however, the data was inconclusive in terms of the chivalry thesis and evil woman hypothesis. The results were inconsistent, which is parallel with most existing research testing these theories. It was apparent that in this focus group, status offenders were primarily females (approximately 57 percent).

Thus, the researchers discussed that the limitations of their study are the sample size. Because the sample was gathered just from Oklahoma, it is difficult to utilize this as a general consensus about female status offending. Also, the study controls for race, age, prior history, type of status offense, and socio-economic status. Nonetheless, it is imperative view these intersectional identities when truly understanding the methods of the juvenile justice system. Although many researchers have studied these models, there have been inconsistent results.

Hirschi's (1969) Social Control model

While the current study utilizes Blalock's (1967) theory on racial and minority threat, it is important to critically examine other models of social control. Further, Peguero, Popp, Latimore, Shekarkhar, and Koo (2011) critically examined Hirschi's (1969) classical criminological theory of social control. The researchers looked to examine the validity of social control theory and school misbehavior (juvenile delinquency) in relation to race and ethnicity. The authors asserted that previous criminological theory and research has failed to address race and ethnicity as a focal point; instead, race and ethnicity have historically been a "peripheral" (Peguero et. al 2011) aspect of findings in previous research. Further, the authors hypothesized that the relationship between social control theory and school misbehavior vary by race and ethnicity.

The researchers dissected the data from Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), which includes a national sample of 10th grade students. Each of the four elements of Hirschi's (1969) social control theory was used: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. School misbehavior was operationalized as noncriminal behaviors violate school rules. The researchers found that for the overall sample, each element of social control theory is consistent with explaining school misbehavior for white students. On the other hand, for Black, Latin American, and Asian American students, a variation of two of the four elements of social control theory explained school misbehaviors. For example, Black students' misbehavior did not correlate with their rates of self-reported attachment and involvement. The researchers assume that this is most likely due to students of color being discriminated against, and the likelihood of these students to not be connected to social conventions and normality. Thus, the historic exclusion of people of color from social normality may make them feel disconnected from generally White traditions and norms.

The researchers discussed limitations to this study. They understand that their analysis was drawn from data that represents a small age group of participants and a small date range. Also, the researchers acknowledge that, like the criminal justice system, social control theory is naturally gendered, and it especially fails to address intersectional identities. Lastly, the researchers strongly suggest that further research place race and ethnicity as a focal point, rather than an afterthought of data and criminological research.

Wordarski andMapson's (2008) study filled some gaps of previous research that researchers have encouraged more scholars to contend (Embry & Lyons 2012). Wordarski and Mapson (2008) examined the relationship of the four elements of Hirschi's (1969) social control theory and how it varies between Black and White female offenders. They hypothesized that there is a stronger relationship between the four elements of social control theory and crime rates of White female juvenile offenders than that of Black female juvenile offenders. The researchers used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), which comprehensively drew data regarding the environment of social behaviors. The PHDCN documented Chicago's social, economic, organizational, political, and cultural structures and significant changes that occurred between 1994 and 2001. The sample of the study was Black and White female juvenile offenders, ages 12 to 15.

The researchers asked several questions that were relevant to each of the four elements of social control theory. For example, to understand the girls' 'involvement' (in relation to social control theory), a question asked was "Was the subject involved in any other after-school program other than extracurricular activity" (231). Further, the term delinquency was operationalized as the commission of any illegal act by an individual under 18.

While the researchers found their hypothesis was not supported, they noted several significant implications to their study. Many of the questionnaires had missing data, as many participants were unwilling to report their criminal histories and prior involvement in any crimes. The researchers also concluded that their sample size was not diverse nor large enough to represent girls in the general juvenile population, as the sample size was 837, and they were primarily Black. Lastly, the researchers suggested that more longitudinal research be conducted in order to obtain consistent results on this matter, specifically as it pertains to race in relation to juvenile delinquency.

As most research has taken a narrow focus on determining extralegal factors in juvenile justice outcomes, Guevara et al. (2006) explored juvenile justice decision making in relation to both race and gender. Specifically, the researchers examined the effect of race on outcomes of juvenile justice and how these outcomes vary by gender. They also reviewed this in relation to the effectiveness of DMC. The researchers hypothesized that white females would receive more lenient judicial disposition than male youth of color .

The researchers collected case file data from two Midwestern counties from 1990 through 1994. The names of the counties were undisclosed, and they were referred to as County A and County B. Of a total population of approximately 200,000 people, the majority of residents were White (69 percent White, 15 percent Black, 15 percent Latino, and 1 percent Native American and Asian American). On the other hand, County B had a smaller population, and it was much less racially diverse (92 percent White, 3 percent Black, 2 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American, and 2 percent Asian American). The researchers randomly chose approximately 1,300 case files for County A and approximately 1,047 case files for County B. Further, the sample was primarily minorities, because out of a total 15,000 cases for County A and a total 6,000 cases for County B, the cases referred to court were primarily minorities.

Thus, the researchers did not find evidence to support their hypothesis. The researchers emphasized the necessity to examine race, gender, and the juvenile justice system-particularly decision making-from an intersectional approach, rather than a narrow lens. This was noted several times throughout the study. A major implication to the study was that the categories of race were divided based on status of White and non-White. These labels devalue the existence of people of color, and it places all people of color in a single category, as opposed to by race and ethnicity.

In order to truly dissect the impact of the juvenile justice system on queer, black girls, it is important to look at all components of the justice system. Goodkind and Miller (2006) examined a corrections facility and their gender-specific treatment methods after the 1992 federal mandate for gender-specific services for girls in the juvenile justice system. The researchers wanted to understand the (positive and negative) effects of an art therapy treatment program, designed specifically for girls in a corrections facility, because the art therapy program was based on gender stereotypes about girls. The authors evaluated the program and found that while the art therapy program has positive effects, the inmates (participants) also understand that it is very gender-stereotypical, and it enforces gender norms as a method of controlling young girls. The researchers used the work of Foucault to understand how gender-specific treatment can be utilized to control the behavior and "appropriateness" of young girls.

The authors did not explicitly make any predictions regarding the art therapy program, in regards to the effects it had on the female inmates; they wanted to study both the positive and negative effects and the perceptions of the female inmates and the staff members. The researchers conducted five focus groups of three to six female inmates. Of the 21 participants, 12 were Black, 7 were White, 1 was biracial, and 1 was Asian American. Women of color accounted for about 60 percent of the participants, and this was representative to the population of the entire institution. They also interviewed 14 administrative staff members-four were people of color, and 9 were women. Most of the participants identified very positive aspects of the art therapy program; however, they felt troubled by the fact that only females participated in the therapy program. The participants sensed that the therapy program was gender-specific, because of the notion that they are more "needy" or more "traumatized" than their male counterparts. It is important to note that the male inmates had access to the art studio, but they did not have to participate in the program with the art therapist.

The conversations were primarily about how the female inmates are expected to act "appropriately," and any deviation from appropriateness resulted in indirect or direct punishment. The inmates were expected to create art pertaining to gendered subjects: relationships, self-esteem, etc. Some inmates expressed their frustrations with the expectations of feminine appropriateness, particularly when as it pertains to creating art. The women expressed their concern for the therapy program and the institution, in general, polices feminine "appropriateness" as a way to control the girls.

The researchers concluded that it is important to question the positive effects of the art therapy program. It must be understood that gender-specific services in the juvenile justice system can "widen the net of social control," as an art therapy program can attempt to make girls conform to society's "gendered expectations of them."

Girls' sexuality has been a taboo topic in the juvenile justice system. Practitioners have historically failed to address sexuality and sexual orientation, and they have contributed to damaging assumptions and policing of "inappropriate" behavior of girls. Pasko (2010) conducted a historical analysis of juvenile justice policing of girls sexual behavior. This was an analysis of over a century of the courts and corrections systems, and the author found the ideology of practitioners has not changed much; nonetheless, the policing has become more indirect and covert through policies and the policing of "inappropriate behavior." Pasko also wanted to investigate how the juvenile justice system has dealt with girls' sexual orientation, specifically lesbian, bisexual, and queer girls.

In addition to the historical analysis, the researcher conducted interviews with juvenile justice professionals: current and former probation officers, and correctional facility administrators (counselors, therapists, and directors of residential facilities). The researcher included that all but five interviewees were female, and all but 13 were White. These practitioners had been in their position from four to 20 years, and they were from seven different (short-term and long-term) facilities. The interviewer noted that a few of the interviewers felt uncomfortable talking about sexuality and sexual orientation in their places of work; therefore, they arranged to meet at locations other than their offices.

The author included dozens of quotes from the interviewees, most of which portrayed signs of policing girls' "appropriateness" and sexual behavior through institutional policies, psychiatric treatment, and their own personal ideologies on girls' sexuality. The primary concern of the interviewees were girls' promiscuity and pregnancy inside and outside of the institutions, and the notion that lesbian behavior was temporary or the result of trauma, and methods of feeling power over others. It is also important to note that most of the girls who were in the institutions had not committed serious offenses, but that had violated conditions of probations, which were often related to sexual behavior-behavior that was not in line with traditional gender roles. Thus, the researcher found that the interviewees were mostly uncomfortable and unknowledgeable about sexual orientation and gender identity issues. To illustrate the climate of the institutions, the author included the following quote from an interviewee: "They are gay on the inside and straight when they get out. I just had a girl who was, 'Oh, I am in love with [girl].' And I said, 'Yeah right, back to your boyfriend you go when you get out. I am sure of it.' This research illustrated the problematic nature of juvenile facilities for queer girls, especially those expressing non-binary genders.

Crenshaw et. al (2015) found that most existing research on youth in the juvenile justice system excludes girls from analyses, assuming that girls are not as at-risk as boys are. The researchers also found that research focusing on race excluded gender (Guevera et al. 2006). Furthermore, the authors developed a report to draw attention to the misunderstood and misrepresented issues of Black girls and other girls of color in the juvenile justice system and the public school system. The report gathers data regarding the effect of school discipline, zero-tolerance (used interchangeably with "push-out") policies, and the almost inescapable pathways to incarceration (school-to-prison pipeline), poverty, and low-wage work. The researchers conducted interviews with high school girls of color from Boston and New York City public schools. While the report includes statistical analysis, it also provides insightful, first person dialogue from the interviews. The premise of this report was to provide a basis of discussion and increase awareness of "gendered consequences" of discipline tactics in schools that increasingly marginalize girls of color-primarily Black girls.

While the current study cannot address all of the researchers' findings, it is imperative to note that all of the issues found in the juvenile justice system as it pertains to Black girls need to be addressed in future research to develop intervention and best practices. Nonetheless, the findings most relevant to the current research are as follows: the authors found that girls felt extremely uncomfortable, unsafe, and discouraged in the school environment. They understood the devaluing effects of push-out policies, as they argued that administrators and teachers prioritized discipline over education. The researchers gathered that traditional gender roles were enforced, as girls were disciplined for behavior deemed as misconduct (that boys were not disciplined for). The authors also note that the school, in general had extreme security measures, such as police presence, metal detectors, etc., which many girls expressed how uncomfortable this made them, discouraging them from attending school.

The authors attributed some limitations to their research to the sample size. Most importantly, the researchers noted that existing data and statistics are difficult to interpret, because of the misrepresentation of race in many databases. Thus, the authors encouraged uniformity in data reporting, because of the lack of availability of consistent measures.

Holsinger and Hodge (2014) explored the climate of juvenile corrections facilities for incarcerated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender girls. The authors wanted to understand the experiences LGBT girls, because of the disproportionate amount of this population incarcerated. The researchers critically examined the challenges facing the girls and the staff members, and they provide recommendations to better serve LGBT-identified girls in the correctional facilities.

To investigate the needs of LGBT girls, the authors conducted interviews with inmates and staff members. The authors were able to hear the perspectives of three LGB girls in residential facilities, and 21 staff members of these facilities. The results of these interviews show this particular facility illustrates the necessity of LGBT-affirming and protective policies, staff training, and implementation is imperative in order to create safe spaces for this overrepresented population in correctional facilities. The inmates reported that the facilities were uncomfortable for LGBT-identified girls. Moreover, the interviews with staff members portray the lack of knowledge and the dangerous marginalization and implicit discrimination and poor treatment of LGBT-girls. The facility also policed "appropriate" behavior, enforcing traditional gender norms, as well as a poor understanding and acknowledgement of LGBT identities, especially bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth.

The results of this study are telling and troubling, and illuminate the lack of space for existence of LGBT-identified girls in the justice system. Most of the staff members explained that dealing with LGBT girls in their facilities made their jobs more difficult. The researchers also noted that while there had been some attempted LGBT training done for staff members, the facility needs implementation. The results of this study are also indicative of the majority of findings throughout the literature analysis, which will be elaborated in the discussion of the major findings in the forthcoming sections of this paper.

Discussion

There has been exhaustive research conducted to understand, address, and increase awareness on minority populations in the juvenile justice system. After analyzing the literature, it was concluded that future research must focus on the marginalization of queer black girls as a group of people and how the layers of their identities interact, resulting in intensified oppression and trauma upon entering the juvenile justice system. The major findings were as follows: a) we have little knowledge on the perceptions of youth directly affected, but much knowledge on the lack of understanding of juvenile justice professionals and practitioners, b) most research has a diminishing, narrowed focus on one or two identities, and fail to convincingly address what happens when all of these identities collide in the margins of justice, c) most focus groups conducted reported a lack of diversity in their participants, as one social group was almost always overrepresented, d) the common theme of research on heterosexual and LGTQ girls discusses the enforcing of "appropriateness" and noncriminal, sexual and sexual orientation and gender identity-expressive behavior, and finally, e) the lack of a safe space for queer black girls to exist at every point of juvenile justice involvement.

Existing research has portrayed the power of first-person dialogue through one-on-one and group interviewing. This presentation of data has provided unparalleled insight into the perspectives of the participants in a research study, especially in the social science studying the human experience. While this approach has been utilized in the reviewed literature, most of the focus groups were to understand how equipped juvenile justice practitioners are to respond and address minority issues in corrections. While these interviews were very telling of the climate of current institutions, more youth perspective may appropriately address the issues the youth face. Nevertheless, because of staff testimonials, critical scholars can infer that the type of work that needs to be done to create safe spaces for minority youth.

Revisiting DMC

After reviewing existing research on the effectiveness of DMC and through the analysis of the OJJDP's data reporting techniques, it is clear that the DMC efforts were intended to address the issue of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American boys' disproportionate confinement. Moreover, these efforts failed to include other "minority" groups, such as LGBTQ, disabled, mentally ill, and poor youth, as well as a major population in the US: girls. The lack of focus on girls in the juvenile justice system has led to a misunderstanding in best practices in dealing with offending girls. As some research has tested the effectiveness of the DMC mandate, as well as the OJJDP's annual reviews of the decades-old program, implicitly excluding girls and other minority groups from the focus of these reviews illustrates the lack of understanding of disproportionate minority contact and responding to the needs of these populations upon intake into juvenile delinquency prevention programs.

More current literature, specifically as it pertains to black girls (a general representation of the focus of the current study), it is apparent that DMC has failed to include queer, black girls in its efforts, because of the reported increase in get-tough policies that have directly affected outcomes for queer, black girls.

Revisiting Minority Threat Theory

Minority threat theory is so important in discussing the findings of this literature. As Blalock (1967) identifies, racial threat theory manifests in the form of overpolicing urban communities of color and mass incarceration. In the same manner, the complete erasure and generalization of the outcomes and experiences of queer black girls exhibits minority threat theory. Much of the literature involving girls' sexuality and gender expression focuses on the "appropriateness" of girls' behavior and the policing of such. In addition, the policing of appropriateness manifests as follows: existing research has found that girls most often enter the system through status offending, conveying the policing of girls' behavior. Data on girls is often generalized to encompass the experiences of all girls; nonetheless, it would be a significant area of study to truly understand how queer, black girls are affected.

Conclusion: Call for intersectional thinking

Potter (2013) cites several intersectional, anti-essentialist, critical feminist criminologists and legal scholars in her article that fervently calls for critical criminologists to dig deeper into the statistical findings to understand the complexities of the human identities. In one section, Potter explains that plague of essentialism by feminist scholars throughout multiple disciplines. She asserts that "there is not a singular, shared experience among all women" (307). She then quotes the declaration of Wing (2003): "women of color are not merely White women plus color…or men of color plus gender. Instead, these identities must be multiplied together to create a holistic One when analyzing the nature of the discrimination against them" (307).

For decades, feminist criminologists have called for the study of intersectionality in criminological theory and practice (Potter 2013; Crenshaw 1989, 1991, 2015); nevertheless, as previously mentioned, this is not being done. Much data analysis has had a narrow focus, which Crenshaw (2015) dissects in her report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Crenshaw alleges that research on race excludes gender, and research on gender excludes race. Moreover, many data analyses have failed to focus on the multi-dimensional human identity and have, instead misrepresented and misinterpreted the needs of queer, black girls in a system that erases their interacting identities.

It is imperative that future research, policy, and practice take on an intersectional approach in order to truly reduce disproportionate minority contact. Otherwise, the oppression applied at the intersections will continue to intensify in the form of violence, brutality, mass incarceration, and erasure. The efforts to include all minority populations may not only contribute to the reduction of the overrepresentation of queer, black youth in the justice system, but it may also create safe spaces for them to decrease the double trauma enhanced by the justice system.

References

Blalock, H. Jr. (1967). Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. New York: Capricorn Books.

Chesney-Lind, M., Morash, M., Irwin, K. (2003). Policing Girlhood? Relational aggression and violence prevention. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice (5)3.

Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., Nanda, J. (2015). Black girls matter: pushed out, overpoliced, and underprotected. African American Policy Forum. Columbia Law School Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of anti-discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity, politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Reivew 43(6) 1241-1299.

Embry, R. ,Lyons, P. M. Jr. (2012). Sex-based sentencing: sentencing discrepancies between male and female sex offenders. Feminist Criminology

Goodkind, S., Miller, D. L. (2006) A widening of the net of social control? "Gender specific" treatment for young women in the U.S. juvenile justice system. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 17(1), 45-70.

Graziano, J. L., Wagner, E. F. (2011). Trauma among lesbians and bisexual girls in the juvenile justice system. Traumatology 17(2) 45-55.

Guevara, L., Herz, D., Spohn, C. (2006). Gender and juvenile justice decision making: what role does race play? Feminist Criminology, 1(4), 258-282.

Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holsinger, K., Hodge, J. P. (2014). The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender girls in juvenile justice system. Feminist Criminology, 1-25.

Hunt, J., Moodie-Mills, A. (2012). The unfair criminalization of gay and transgender youth: An overview of the experiences of LGBT youth in the juvenile justice system. Washington D.C.: Center for American Progress.

Leiber, M., Bishop, D., Chamlin, M. B. (2011). Juvenile justice decision-making before and after the implementation of the disproportionate minority contact (DMC) mandate. Justice Quarterly 28(3) 460-492.

Myers, K., Raymond, L. (2010). Elementary school girls and heteronormativity: the girl project. Gender & Society 24(2) 167-188.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice. (2012). Disproportionate minority contact OJJDP: In Focus.

Peguero, A. A., Popp, A. M., Latimore, L., Shekarkhar, Z., Koo, D. J. (2011). Social control theory and school misbehavior: examining the role of race and ethnicity. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. 9(3) 259-275.

Pasko, L. (2010). Damaged daughters: the history of girls' sexuality and the juvenile justice system. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 100 (3), 1099-1130.

Potter, H. (2013). Intersectional criminology: Interrogating identity and power in criminological research and theory. Critical Criminology. 21 305-318.

Spivak, A. L., Wagner, B. M., Whitmer, J. M., Charish, C. L. (2014). Gender and status offending: judicial paternalism in juvenile justice processing. Feminist Criminology, 9(3), 224-248.

Wodarski, J., Mapson, A. V. (2008). A differential analysis of criminal behavior among African-American and Caucasion female juvenile delinquents.

Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 18

(2) 224-239.

Rediscovering Dialogue: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview with the founder and facilitator of Son of Baldwin: "The literary, socio-political, sexual, pop culture blog. Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant."

Why have you named the page Son of Baldwin? What kind of impact has James Baldwin had on you personally?

James Baldwin was the first black gay male intellectual I had ever encountered. His work was really the first time I had seen myself, my identity (as a black gay male), and my point of view represented in art and public discourse in a way that was not meant to be mocked, dismissed, minimized, or dehumanized. His was the first work that started me on the path to thinking critically about myself, the world around me, and my place in it. In tribute to that consciousness raising (which may have come much later, if at all, had it not been for him) and in an effort to answer his final call to dig through the wreckage and use what he left behind to continue the work of trying to make the world a more just, livable, peaceful place, I named the blog "Son of Baldwin." I have been told by friends of Baldwin's family that the family is quite pleased by the work being done and they believe that I am indeed honoring his legacy. That is overwhelming and I am overjoyed.

What made you want to make a Facebook page in the first place?

Son of Baldwin originally started out as a blog via blogspot. But that space wasn't really conducive to conversation. Facebook allows for a kind of direct and extended interaction and dialogue that many other sites, including other social media, don't. And for me, the conversation is the most important part. Despite how I may sometimes come across, this isn't about me. This isn't about being able to proselytize from on high and have everyone applaud the pronouncement. This is about starting conversations and engaging other people in various communities about these causes and concerns in the effort of finding solutions to some of our most pressing social justice issues.

You talk about a number of topics, from LGBTQ rights to racism, through a critical progressive lens. How did you come to this political awakening of sorts?

I think this awakening started in my childhood. I grew up during the 70s, 80s, and 90s-a child of both Black Southern Baptist and Nation of Islam traditions-in a section of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst (infamous for the racist attack against and murder of Yousef Hawkins in 1989).

Bensonhurst, at least at that time I grew up there, was a neighborhood of primarily Italian and Irish first- and second-generation immigrants. In this neighborhood, I lived in a housing project of mostly black and Latin@ peoples right in the middle of things. We were thus surrounded, if you will, in hostile enemy territory. This made everything tenuous.

As a child and a teen, I had to plot routes home from school that would help me avoid running into the mobs of white children, teens, and adults who--with bats in hand, violence in heart, and death in mind--made a regular ritual of chasing kids of color back to the projects.

What was different for me when I got back to the projects, having often but not always escaped the battering from racists, is that the battle didn't end there. I had to then contend with the other black and Latin@ peoples who wanted to pound on my head because they perceived me as gay.

When you are not safe in any of the worlds you inhabit, you sort of don't have a choice but to become politicized. You kind of don't have a choice but to "wake up" because if you don't, you'll be murdered. Reading the works of authors like Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and others helped to direct these concerns and grievances, and made me feel less alone and more empowered to do something about my circumstances.

Something that I have noticed about you is that you actively allow yourself to be called out by others and acknowledge when you messed up and allow yourself to be corrected. Why do you think that this does not exist in larger political circles, especially liberal or progressive spheres?

My opinion is that this willingness to be wrong and be corrected doesn't happen in larger political circles and spheres because many of the people working within those areas actually think this work is about them. They believe that in order to be trusted and effective, they have to feign perfection and position themselves as above reproach. Can you imagine?

Many people doing this work think that in order to be trusted they have to lie. The truly sad thing about this contradiction of a strategy is how often it works, and how often complicit audiences are willing to believe the lie if it confirms their system of reality. I guess what I'm saying is that many people doing this work are politicians in the most cynical sense of the word, and that occupation is not something I have any interest in whatsoever. I'm a writer by purpose, training, and profession, and I've never pretended to be anything other than that.

In short, I think ego is at the center of this unwillingness to be incorrect.

You recently made it a requirement that people who post photos on the page to provide a written description. What prompted this?

This comes from a desire to ensure that as many people as possible are able to participate, as fully as they can, in the conversations and discourses happening in the space. Blind and Deaf/Hard of Hearing people are active members of the Son of Baldwin community and this policy makes it possible for them to be even more vibrant participants in discussions. This is one of the ways I'm trying to address my own collusion in institutionalized ableism/disableism.

What are your thoughts on online social justice work? Do you think that it can make a serious difference in people's lives and on a larger scale? (I often hear people saying that tweeting or writing doesn't really do anything.)

For starters, I think online social justice work has been a blessing in the sense that it has given a voice to many peoples and communities whose voices were often missing, excluded, or silenced in sociopolitical discussions. Additionally, the Internet has made it possible for many more people to have access to these debates and discussions, such as disabled people/people with disabilities who are often unable to access on-the-ground events because many organizers are unwilling to make accommodations, or poor peoples who simply cannot afford to travel to these events.

There are many absolutely amazing and brilliant online social justice activists doing work that honestly, truly matters, and are, despite narratives to the contrary, affecting the discourse and changing minds.

But like everything else, there is a deeply disturbing dark side to online social justice work.

One of the things I deeply dislike about much of the social justice activism and social justice spaces I've encountered is how intentionally vicious they are. And I'm not talking about viciousness between social justice activists and trolls. I'm talking about the viciousness between peoples with the same goals, but who might have different strategies for obtaining those goals. I've seen some really hateful, ugly, deeply dishonest and self-serving stuff happening in conversations in these spaces-including my own. I'm not talking about disagreements or even heated disagreements. I'm talking about full-on attempts at destroying each other-from credibility to personhood. I'm talking about people who truly get off on making others feel as small as possible so they can feel big.

I'm talking about intentionally committing violence against and silencing other people. I'm talking about people lying and slandering others with the intent of spiritually murdering them as though they were opposing a concept rather than a person. The Internet often helps with the depersonalization of people.

When you think you're arguing with, and trying to obliterate, digitized images and typed words instead of a living being, it's easier to be joyfully inhumane, spiritually toxic, and intellectually genocidal, then reward yourself by calling it "social justice." It's easy to be gleeful about shitting on an opponent (an opponent that you, yourself, manufactured for your own dubious purposes, by the way) and high-five each other about the havoc you wreaked when you can treat the carnage as a concept rather than reality.

I'm talking about people who wear the cloak of victimhood like a Trojan horse in order to sneak into the village, get close to you and- surprise- become the victimizers you never expected. There are people who use their marginalized identities and communities not for the purposes of liberation, but as a hustle, as masturbation, as a way to elevate themselves to a place where they are above reproach. I'm talking about the people who have the audacity to use "trigger" not as a real expression and sign post of lived trauma, but as a strategic pretense to silence any opinions they don't like.

It's like they play this game where the more marginalized identity boxes they can check off, the more they can't be criticized for any behavior they engage in, no matter how abusive and counterrevolutionary. Therefore, the goal is to check off as many marginalized identity boxes as they can-even if they have to invent them or pretend to belong to them. Whoever has the most, wins.

To me, that's the original pimp strategy and I guess what I'm saying is that I don't like pimps. But I have discovered that there are so many of them in this arena. Some folks are out here big pimpin' and calling it "radical" of all things.

I don't know why, but that shocked me. I did some research to determine whether this was a new phenomenon brought on by the anonymity of the Internet. What I discovered is this behavior pre-dates the Internet. Shirley Chisholm, for example, was the target of disgusting attacks by people who should have been in solidarity with her. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison said such despicable things about James Baldwin that it would make your skin crawl. Much to my dismay, I learned this in-fighting and hostility isn't novel in any respect.

Sometimes, I've been accused of being egotistical, which, okay, fine if that's your opinion. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not trying to be a pimp at this stuff. Part of why I don't do public speaking gigs, etc. is because I'm not trying to become some kind of object of celebrity or fame. I'm not trying to become some kind of some kind of commercial figure or commodity.

I'm not trying to be that person who maneuvers themselves closer to the president in group photo opportunities because they are trying to climb some political ladder. Those people want to be "The One." Not me, though. I'm not trying to be the "go-to" expert. I'm not trying to be in the spotlight. I'm not trying to be anyone's leader. I'm not trying to make money off of this work. I'm not trying to play like I'm perfect and have all the answers. I'm learning right alongside everyone else. I'm not here to be worshiped like some god-thing, but regarded as a human being who is growing and evolving, falling down and getting back up again with increased knowledge. I'm a participant in this conversation.

But increasingly, these aren't conversations anymore. Increasingly, these are encounters with people with not-always-legit agendas trying to push those agendas as liberation strategies. These people are about switching places with the oppressor and will use whichever of the"master's tools" (as Audre Lorde called them) is necessary to do so. However, I'm not interested in being chained and I'm not interested in chaining anyone else. That, for me, is the politics of inertia and I'm interested in progress. I want everyone to be liberated.

Part of the genius of this violence-strategy that some people who call themselves marginalized employ is that it's difficult for the victim of the violence to discern whether the violence is legitimate or illegitimate. Because many of the people in this work are so committed to justice, they err on the side of it being legitimate even when it isn't. So they endure the emotional, psychic, psychological, spiritual, and sometimes even physical abuse because they're afraid if they don't, they will be labeled as a part of the problem. Speaking for myself, I've allowed people to abuse me, even flat-out lie about me on an ongoing basis, just so I wouldn't be perceived as an oppressor and anti-justice (because of the ways in which my identities intersect, in and out, with privilege and oppression and marginalization). To save my "reputation" among the social justice crowd, I've been a masochist. It's so incredibly complicated. And I do not have the answers for it. But I do have the bruises.

So, I'm no longer engaging the brutality. I'm moving away, not from the difficult and needed conversations, but from the egotistical violence. If your concept of social justice is about amassing power at the expense of other victims of hegemonic abuse, I cannot be down for your cause. And if that makes me "bad" at doing this social justice stuff, then so be it. If you need me to be the villain so you can feel like the hero in your own story, play on playa. But you'll be playing sans me. I won't give you the attention you're seeking. I will absolutely refuse to see you no matter what tricks you employ. I've got other work to do.

You are quite critical of the race and class politics of the mainstream LGBT community. Due to this split on multiple levels, from racism to ignoring transgender people, would you say that there is even a real LGBT community? How can people work towards having more inclusive spaces for marginalized LGBT members?

I would say, currently, that there may be LGTBQIA communities, plural. But the singular community that is commonly addressed in media and conversations is one that is actually serving the needs of one particular subset of the communities-namely, white, middle-to-upper class, cisgender, non-disabled, gender conforming men.

James Baldwin said back in 1984 that the gay movement was really about white people who lost their white privilege struggling and petitioning to get it back. I see no lies in that statement if the national platforms and conversations, if the faces of the movement are any indication.

I witness tons of conversations about why "black people are so homophobic" (which we can actually trace, ironically, to white colonial intervention) but relatively few to none about why "why white gay people are so racist." The answer, as Baldwin surmised, was because white gay people are still, at heart, white and Whiteness, which is inextricably linked to the idea of racial superiority, is at the root of most of our problems.

To get to a more inclusive space, people (of all races and creeds) have to give up their addiction to Whiteness and white supremacy. People (or all genders and sexualities) have to give up their addiction to patriarchy and narrow-minded views of masculinity, femininity, gender identity, and sexuality. People of all physical realities have to give up capitalism and incessant materialism, which are commodifications of humanity, and stop treating human bodies as machines that are valuable only for what they can produce for the State-a deeply ableist point of view.

The problem is convincing people to give up the things that define their current comforts. We have to get people to be willing to be uncomfortable, at least for a while, until we can figure all of this out. This may be a continuous journey, rather than a destination.

At the end of the day, what do you want people to get out of your Facebook page?

My dream for Son of Baldwin is that it serves as a place where we can have uncomfortable conversations about social justice issues without dehumanizing one another. We might occasionally yell at one another. We might occasionally have to be corrected for our errors and apologize for them. But I hope out of the consternation come viable solutions and a greater respect for each other's humanity.

Visit Son of Baldwin and get in the conversation.