when is the appropriate time to discuss antiBlackness and why does it depend upon the convenience of white people & nonblack people of color?
⭐️ “within every group of which Black people are a part of, the nonblacks within it will fervently ignore us because they do not want to be reminded we exist.”
⭐️ “I state firmly that Black trans women/transfems are not only Captive Maternals, but are the Captive Maternals of Black feminism and queer theory. Further, Black feminism and queer theory are sustained through the airbrushing of transmisogynoir for the sake of academia.”
⭐️ “Say Her Name is trending because people are using it for Brianna Ghey, who is white, and i need y'all to understand that that phrase/hashtag was created for Black women who are victims of p*lice violence. i've seen white people say that they didn't even know this, and that's extremely troubling because that means y'all genuinely do not care about Black women, particularly Black trans women. i'm going to be very frank, one of the reasons why we aren't where we should be in terms of infrastructure fighting against transphobia is because ppl have accepted the systems that facilitate Black death because y'all have assumed it won't come for you.”
⭐️ “lol at people telling me "these white people didn't mean to be antiBlack", like wow, y'all turn into reactionaries the moment Black people stand up for ourselves.”
⭐️ “use like #HerNameIsBrianna #RememberBriannaGhey or #DignityForBrianna instead”
⭐️ “The reason SayHerName is exclusive is because without them *NO ONE* would listen to us. we say her name because no one else will. We say rest in power cause no one else lays us to rest *because of race*. These are black specific sayings for black specific violence 😵💫”
⭐️ “what's getting me is that these white trans ppl are getting told by transphobes "don't politicize her death" and correctly replying "her death is political". now they're crying that Black trans women are correctly politicizing their appropriation of a /political/ slogan. it is /political/ why Say Her Name took off in this instance rather than in the previous instances of Black trans women killed in the UK who were erased, deadnamed, and vilified in the media like Naomi Hersi in 2018.”
⭐️ “When it comes to white people & nonblack people of color co-opting terms from Black folks, especially terms that have been developed as part of collective struggle, the "we" matters. These folks are diluting a specific term with the same vague inclusiveness that you're using.“
⭐️ “nonblack people every day: be nice to the whites or we'll stop pretending to care about you negroes d-ing".”
⭐️ “a good chunk of the defensiveness over desiring the appropriation of slogans constructed to attack antiBlack violence / within the Black liberation struggle is bc of the expectation that Black ppl do this mvmt-building labour and nonblack ppl can just take these things 'readymade' after and apply them out of context. this both works to prevent shining a light on the specificity of antiBlack violence, and avoids the wider work of mvmt-building that does not depend on the embedded expectation of this kind of underclassed labour. on the contrary, a tight knit connectivity of struggles is more achievable when movements are able to acknowledge that the communities they represent are not 'topologically flat'. now is the time more than ever to build an ecosystem of counter-narrative against the bloody weight of these murderous hegemonic forces that don't have to clumsily take from each other while pretending everyone has an identical experience, but that which influence and converse with each other. so as to construct something multilateral with multiple roots and connectivities grounded in a critique of capitalist relations.” “it's because antiBlackness is ubiquitous within nation-states which makes the infrastructure our liberation struggle anti nation-state in practice, which runs counter to assimilationism. attempts to "reform" the system are attempts to restructure antiBlackness. like, things formed to address antiBlackness simply cannot be neatly mapped onto other forms of struggle on a one-to-one basis. it only appears that way because ppl know deep down that antiBlackness laces and informs struggle more broadly.”
⭐️ “one of the main reasons these white ppl are mad at me is because i reminded them that they could've been using Say Her Name for Black trans women this whole time but they haven't because they don't give a fuck about us. Black people have been noting for decades that whenever we do the work to create something with much less resources than white people, white people swoop in to capitalize off of that. if you're telling me you /need/ Say Her Name, you're admitting you /rely/ on our dispossession.”
⭐️ “not the first person to talk about or bring up the misappropriation of Say Her Name, and every time it's happened, the Black person who brought it up has been hounded and dogged for "division" and "it's not the right time". so when is the right time?”
⭐️ “white people & nonblack people of color are going so far as to claim that no Black trans women have been murdered in the UK and been deadnamed by the media like literally that very thing didn't happen to Naomi Hersi. here is an article about it and the silence about it: https://gal-dem.com/silence-failing-naomi-hersi/“ “here's Stonewall's reporting on it at the time: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/cy/node/65106”
⭐️ “Mind you, the #SayHerName Campaign was launched in 2014 by the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and, as it stands, is one of the primary record keepers of Black women murdered by police.”
