Pride 2020: Resources on Queerness, Systemic Racism, and Intersectionality

OUTLaw is proud to stand up against the violence and discrimination faced by the Black community and all people of color. We have put together a list of educational resources about the intersection of Pride and race, and we recognize that all Black Lives Matter. 

LGBTQ+ History – The first Pride was a riot led primarily by trans  women of color

  • [podcast] Making Gay History 
    • Eric Marcus recorded dozens of interviews with LGBT activists while preparing to write his book, Making Gay History. He has since released many of these interviews in his podcast of the same name. This podcast includes the voices of Sylvia Rivera (Season 1 Episode 1; Season 3, Episode 1), Marsha P. Johnson (Season 2 Episode 1), and Bayard Rustin (Season 4, Episode 8). One episode which might be of particular interest to aspiring lawyers is Season 2 Episode 9, detailing the story of two lawyers who stood up to the police to help facilitate one of the earliest LGBT galas in San Francisco. 

Black Trans Women (Uplifting Narratives and Voices)

  • Dr. Lourdes Ashley Hunter:
    •  A “Black, disabled, non-binary trans woman living at the intersetions of multiple identities deeply impacted by state sanctioned violence. Her work is rooted in dismantling systems of oppression while creating and cultivating tools that work towards collective liberation for all oppressed people.” Lourdes is currently the Executive Director of Trans Women of Color Collective (TWOCC), which is a grass-roots global initiative led by trans and GNC people of color and they work to uplift the “lived narratives, experiences and leadership of trans and gender non-conforming people of color, their families and comrades while building towards collective liberation for all oppressed people through healing and restorative justice.”
    • Please check out the website! It has video from public speaking that Dr. Lourdes has done as well as more information on TWOCC and how to get involved/help the mission
      • Watch the video that is right on the homepage to get an idea of what this incredible human is all about 

Trans Women of Color History of Riots and Rebellion 

  • [documentary] “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria” (FREE!)
    • Description: This is a relatively short documentary that you can watch FREE with Amazon prime. It talks about the relatively unknown Compton Cafeteria Riot and the trans women of color that lead it. It interviews these women to discuss being trans and what that means to them. It also discusses sex work and the dangers that many of these women faced while they were sex workers. 

Trans History 

  • [book] “Transgender History, second edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution”; Author: Susan Stryker 
    • Description: Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-’70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the ’90s and ’00s.

LGBTQ+/Trans Politics 

  • [book] “Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law”; Author: Dean Spade 
    • Description: “Wait—what’s wrong with rights? Much of the legal advocacy for trans and gender nonconforming people in the US has reflected the civil rights and “equality strategies of mainstream gay and lesbian organizations—agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly equal access, nondiscrimination, and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same “neutral legal structures.” 

Black/Queer

  • Articles: 
  • Books: 
    •  “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals”; Author Saidiya Hartman 
      • Description: “Examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape.”
    • “Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity”; Author: C. Riley Snorton 
      • Description: “Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

Queer/Black/Feminism 

  • [documentary] “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry”
    • Description: So this one doesn’t really fit into one particular category as it covers a lot, but its about second wave feminism and talks about all of the organizations that were either left out or pushed out of the mainstream feminist movement. It talks about and interviews members form these organizations, many of which were focused on black feminism, or queer feminism, or just a much more radical idea of feminism. It’s really great and brings to light a lot of this movement that has been erased by Gil Stein and middle/upper class white feminism that took over second wave feminism. 

Discussing Whiteness

  • [book/workbook] “Me and White Supremacy”; Author: Layla Saad
    • Description: Updated and expanded from the original workbook, this critical text helps you take the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources, giving you the language to understand racism, and to dismantle your own biases, whether you are using the book on your own, with a book club, or looking to start family activism in your own home. his book will walk you step-by-step through the work of examining:
      • Examining your own white privilege
      • What allyship really means
      • Anti-blackness, racial stereotypes, and cultural appropriation
      • Changing the way that you view and respond to race
      • How to continue the work to create social change
  • [book] “So You Want to Talk About Race”; Author: Ijeoma Oluo
    • Description: Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy–from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans–has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. This book guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life. This work provides both white and people of color with the language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases.
  • [book]  “The History of White People”; Author: Nell Irvin Painter
    • Description: “Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events.”
  • [book] “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”; Author: Robin DiAngelo
    • Description: “antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.”

 

Systemic Racism/ Black Power

    • Description: “With contemporary audio/video interviews from leading African American artists, activists, musicians and scholars, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 looks at the people, society, culture, and style that fueled an era of convulsive change. Utilizing an innovative format that riffs on the popular 1970s mixtape format, Mixtape is a cinematic and musical journey into the black communities of America. At the end of the ’60s and into the early ’70s, Swedish interest in the U.S. civil rights movement and the U.S. anti-war movement peaked. Swedish filmmakers traveled across the Atlantic to explore the Black Power movement, which was being alternately ignored or portrayed in the U.S. media as a violent, nascent terrorist movement. This newly discovered footage offers a penetrating examination — through the lens of Swedish filmmakers — of the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975, and its worldwide resonance. The result is like an anthropological treatise from the point of view of outsiders who approached their subject with no assumptions or biases.”
  • [book] Citizen: An American Lyric; Author: Claudia Rankine 
    • Description: This work recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
      • I think this book is very powerful and approachable as it’s written in poems and prose. It also really delves into not just overt racism, but covert racism as well with the telling of experiences the author has had dealing with macro and microaggressions. 
  • [poetry] “National Guard”; Author: Natasha Trethewey 
    • Description: This is a book of poems that discusses the author’s childhood and confronting the racial legacy of growing up in the Deep South, where one of the first Black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. This work really depicts a haunting conversation between personal experience with national history 
  • [book] “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools”; Author: Monique W. Morris 
    • Description: Discusses the experiences of Black girls across the US and their daily lives in school, addressing how they are highly judges: by teachers, administrators, and the justice system and are then degraded by the very system charged with helping them to flourish. This book works to expose a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices and cultural literacy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures. 

Black Feminism

  • [book] “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power”; Author: Danielle McGuire 
    • Description: Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and who’s supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. This book writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer–Rosa Parks–to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change. 
      • I really feel like this book is a must read to put it mildly! It gives a voice to the importance of Black women’s work during the civil rights movement as well as discussing the struggles of being a Black woman in terms of the constant battle between having to choose between fighting for black rights or women’s rights because these women didn’t have the privilege to fight for both. 
  • [book] “Killing the Black Body”; Author: Dorothy Roberts 
    • Description: In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. 

Intersectionality 

  • [articles] Kimberle Crenshaw, who is most well known for founding the term “intersectionality” 
    • Whose Story is it Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill 
    • Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color 
  • [essays/speeches] “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”; Author: Audre Lorde 
    • Description: Collection of fifteen essays and speeches that discuss sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class. These essays reflect the reality of struggle but also provide messages of hope. 

Critical Race Theory

  • [book] “The Racial Contract”; Author: Charles W. Mills 
    • Description: “The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged “contract” has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence “whites” and “non-whites,” full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the “separate but equal” system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy’s invisible white male bias, Mills’s explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.”
  • [book] “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination”; Author: Robin D. G. Kelley 
    • Description: “Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From the preeminent historian of black popular culture’ (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Police Brutality

  • Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Police  
  • [podcast] The Lawfare Podcast: Rashawn Ray on Police Violence (June 3, 2020)  
  • [podcast] Radiolab: Graham (June 6, 2020) – about how the reasonableness standard for police conduct came to be and how police have used the standard to their advantage 
  • [podcast] Strict Scrutiny: Made Up Immunities (June 8, 2020) – a conversation about legal doctrines that prevent police from being held accountable 

 

Abolish/Defund the Police

 

LGBTQ+ Media (Books, Movies, Other Entertainment)

    • [book] Fun Home:A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel – a auto-biographical graphic novel about a lesbian’s relationship with her closeted father. Please, read this book. It’s so good. Content warning: suicide, depression. 
    • [book] The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin – a dark and often depressing sci-fi/fantasy series set in a dystopian world where the Earth itself is revolting against humanity. If you love dystopias, geology, trans representation, or black female protagonists, this is a good series to check out! Content warning: trauma, violence, killing of children, depression.

Self-Care