Vashon Celebrates It's LGBTQ

Vashon Heritage Museum will mount a LGBTQ exhibit in June of this year. The title: “In and Out of the Closet: Being LGBTQ on Vashon Island.”  The LGBTQ exhibit marks an historical moment in Vashon’s history and will go beyond a walk through the museum by organizing events celebrating the 2019 LGBTQ Pride, the 50^th celebration of the Stonewall rebellion.

The Vashon Heritage Museum’s vision for the community of Vashon is to engage the people including marginalized groups to tell Vashon’s history.  The current exhibit of Japanese Americans is an outcome of this vision and tells the story of their community on Vashon before, during and after the internments of WWII.  The upcoming LGBTQ exhibit also is an outcome of the Vashon Heritage Museum’s vision.

The LGBTQ exhibit will showcase a significant part of the Vashon community.  The significance of the LGBTQ population on Vashon came to light when the 2000 and 2010 census counted one of the largest LGBTQ populations per capita in the country.  The Museum’s goal for this exhibit is to tell LGBTQ people’s story in Vashon’s history and today.  The Museum has reached out to LGBTQ people whose lives span decades of Vashon history giving valuable input to the exhibit.

Currently this exhibit has raised over $6,000 in grants and has a GoFundMe campaign.  Please consider going to our GoFundMe page and contribute what you can to be a part of this historical event. https://www.gofundme.com/vashon-in-and-out-of-the-closet  GoFundMe funding will be used to develop, design, construct, and install the exhibit at the Vashon Heritage Museum. In addition, if available, funds will help design and print an educational book about the exhibit, support a series of programs during the exhibit, and integrate this special exhibit and its innovations into the Museum's permanent exhibit.

Special events will go on as long as the exhibit is on display throughout the year. Ideas for the events include a panel, films, an interactive dialogue and celebratory dance.  You are all invited to join Vashon Heritage Museum at the grand opening and throughout the rest of year to celebrate with Vashon’s LGBTQ community. We invite you to keep up to date on the progress and happenings of the exhibit by visiting the Vashon Heritage Museum’s website.  https://vashonheritagemuseum.org/?exhibition=lgbtq-vashon

 

Intersectional Discriminations

African American women lead the intersectional feminist movement.  Although the concept of intersectional feminism has been around for decades, Kimberle Crenshaw brought the idea of intersectionality into focus by coining the term in 1989. To this day intersectionality has no definitive definition. The best definition out there is by Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, who defines intersectionality as the believe that our social justice movement must consider all the intersections of identity, privilege and oppression that people face in order to be just and effective.  Intersectionality should be the underlining philosophy at all levels of struggle including individual, institutional and government to accomplish human rights.

This graphic shows some overlapping layers of discrimination that exist in our society.  Across the spectrum of marginalized groups, it would be hard press to find a person that is discriminated by just one prejudice. Discriminations can also impact say a white middle class transgender who is continually ousted from job after job, where they end up working in low paying jobs because LGBTQ people don’t have job protection in this country. 

Acknowledging how different forms of discrimination intersect with and amplify discrimination is a critical way to ensure all people reap the benefits of our communities. Said simply by Anna J. Cooper (1858 – 1964) “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of human kind, the very birthright of humanity.” She said so simply what human rights is all about.

The question that comes up so often “Is intersectionality divisive?”  In an article entitled Is Feminism Hurting Gay Men? in a 1990’s Christopher Street gay men’s publication shows us an example of when a minority in a human rights movement call out oppression in that movement.  That minority is then called out as hurting the movement.  The philosophy of standing together for a single cause or you might hurt any chance of change while being reassured that your time will come has become a strategy that perpetuates discrimination particularly for those who have intersecting oppressions. Women suffer as victims of this strategy more times than not. 

Women’s suffrage as a historical example of the strategy “solidarity above all else” kept women from getting the vote for decades.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the founding mothers of Women’s Suffrage, formed an organization for marginalized groups of white and black women and black men dedicated to the goal of universal voting rights.  The abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements interlocked in this common goal for a long time.  This solidarity broke down in 1870 when congress passed a constitutional amendment ending discrimination against black Americans granting black men the right to vote.  It wasn’t until fifty years later that women both black and white got the vote. 

In supporting an intersectional activist philosophy, you may be criticized for speaking against an oppressive act by movements outside of your primary struggle.  Recently the Jewish community slammed Dr. Angela Davis for just that.  The Birmingham Institute announced they were awarding Dr. Davis their Fred L Shuttleworth Human Rights Award.  After the Jewish community in Birmingham heard the news, they wrote a letter to the institute asking them withdraw Dr. Davis nomination for the award.  In the letter they called Dr. Davis’ political work in support of Palestinians and her condemnation of Israel’s violence towards Palestinians anti-sematic. 

These examples of the Women’s Suffrage movement and Dr. Davis’s show the danger of a single-issue movement. The social justice movement here in the United States has the potential to be the next grand social movement if all social justice organizations take up an intersectional philosophy.  This social justice movement seems fragmented encompassing groups with a single issue.  Now I know that taking on an intersectional philosophy can be daunting. People just naturally are passionate on issues that they themselves experience.

Nonprofits and individuals who take up the call of social justice even in support of a single issue have the opportunity to impact institutional social justice at an intersectional point.  Governments here in the Northwest have for many years had Equity and Social Justice programs which seem hopefully from the outside.  But on a closer examination these Social Equity programs primary goal is for the government’s internal agencies to adopt an equity perspective in the implementation of their programs.  Now that’s not a bad goal but what I have found through reading and research is these programs have not accomplished what they set out to do. 

In this research it has become evident to me that any programs not having a human rights mandate are not forceful enough to create significant change. For example, local governments struggle with homelessness.  King County’s and Seattle’s homeless population grows indicating a failure in policy while cities like New York and Washington D.C.’s homeless population decreases.  What’s the difference in policy philosophy, New York and Washington D.C. have a human rights mandate.

Human rights as much as we have been led to believe that United States is the champion on human rights worldwide in our communities we have a long way to go to accomplish human rights which would lead to an institutional out look of intersectionality. 

Human rights is a logical philosophy to adopt for any intersectional program working on social justice.  Anything short of this fails to accomplish any broad base change.  All you have to do is listen to Trump for a short time to make a list of all the marginalized groups targeted by him and main stream America.  Trump has amplified the need for working on intersectionality.  Just think about intersectionality in the progressive work that you do, start recognizing where you can identify intersectional oppression and you will start to see the difference in your work.

Changes are Coming

History took a turn this week when Nancy Pelosi and seventeen women were sworn into Congress bringing the number of women in congress up to 102.  This filled me and hopefully all of you, who have been dedicated to resisting the era of Trump since the 2016 election. The first woman elected, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, in 1917 started a trend of change not only for women but for the Nation as well.  The election of women since this time continues to indicate change is coming.  These recent elections are no different.  Our Nation has lost ground on all fronts particularly Human Rights since the 2016 election. Now we can bring about this change with a little help from our elected officials.

News like this is like fresh air in a stuffy room when gender wars have escalated on a daily basis as we watched Trump bully women including his opponent Hillary Clinton.  Emily’s List, an organization established in 1996, became instrumental in electing these women to political office.  Emily’s list gained notoriety in part because of the Women’s March in January 2017.  Emily’s list has been an important organization in the grassroots women’s movement where women have been jarred into action responding to Trump’s anti-women rhetoric.  Benefiting from their consistent vision of a government that reflects the people it serves by electing decision makers who genuinely and enthusiastically fight for greater opportunity for all Americans, Emily’s List successes in 2019 benefits all of us.  

Like Emily’s List many of us want is to see someone who reflects who we are to be in the room where policy is made.  The 2018 election’s accomplishment brings representation closer to actually looking like the American people.  Not only does Nancy Pelosi and newly elected women bring a women’s voice to national politics but they also bring racial and ethnic diversity.  New women in Congress include the House’s first two Native American women—Deb Haaland (D., N.M.) and Sharice Davids (D., Kan, the first two Muslim women—Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), a Somali-American, and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), a Palestinian-American.  With a woman at the helm in congress, and input from the new diversity adds to what we progressives can accomplish in 2019.

Speaker Pelosi showed the world what she is made of in the televised meeting with Trump when she held her ground contradicting Trump’s alternative facts with truth.  This kind of assertiveness from Speaker Pelosi has already helped accomplish breaking the glass ceiling for women twice now.  The first time in 2007 when she became the first woman to be voted Speaker of the House and then, January 3, 2019 when she became the only women and the third Speaker of the House to regain the Speakership after their political party lost power.  In this new congress Americans are in a position to participate in the United States policy making like never before.

The first change Speaker Pelosi did was change the rules of the House of Representatives making bi-partisan legislature possible. Next on Speaker Pelosi’s and the Democratic Party’s agenda is voting rights.  The message for us in the resistance here is not to back down, not to think that the road to change will be easy now.  Like all of you I get tired participating in our democracy on a daily basis.  But when we get complacent as we learned in the 2016 elections money and men in power move in turning the outcome that we expected to take a turn to a disastrous end. We all worked hard these last two years to get where we are today and the 2018 elections only lay the ground work to build momentum for our vision of a country where we have the unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness” equally for citizens and non-citizens alike.

Let’s celebrate the victories of the 2018 elections, roll up our sleeves getting ready to escalate the resistance in a climate where we hopefully have more leverage.  Join this new diverse congress, support warriors like Stacy Abrams, and Andrew Gallium who fought a viscous battle in the last election and haven’t given up even though they lost their elections.  Let’s get behind longtime progressive politicians such as Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders to keep us as a country moving ahead to a place of compassion, hope and respect for basic human life.