This week's episode is going to be a little different. It's hard right now to talk about anything that isn't the racial injustice that's so prevalent in America. We don't feel like we can just sit here and talk about something else right now. So we won't.
In the spirit of Blackout Tuesday, we are using the time on the podcast this week to amplify the Black voices that we have been listening to, and those we urge you to listen to.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/black-lives-matter
https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/
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Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
This week's episode is going to be a little different. It's hard right now to talk about anything that isn't the racial injustice that's so prevalent in America. We don't feel like we can just sit here and talk about something else right now. So we won't.
In the spirit of Blackout Tuesday, we are using the time on the podcast this week to amplify the Black voices that we have been listening to, and those we urge you to listen to.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/black-lives-matter
https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
[00:00:00]
SARAH: Hi, welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay. This week's episode is going to be a little different. It's hard right now to talk about anything that isn't the racial injustice that's so prevalent in America, and I don't feel like I can just sit here and talk about something else right now, so we won't. We recognize that for the sake of our mental health, we all deserve an escape from the dumpster fire that is the earth right now. Whatever that escape may be for you, whether that's reading fiction or doing yoga or something else, but with the platform that we have, we didn't feel it was right for us, two white women, to be pulling focus right now. Feel free to use the backlog of our podcast as an escape from everything going on if you desire, but it felt irresponsible to us to ignore the issue of racism during this week's episode. I am even angrier than I was last week when I did my beef. I am angrier and angrier by the day, and I can't really focus on anything else. So, on this podcast, as I said, we won't. We would like to note that yes, it is still Pride Month, and last week we discussed how we can still celebrate Pride despite everything that's going on right now. And that's still true. But do so with the knowledge that Stonewall was a riot, led by Black trans women and other trans women of color. We owe everything we have to them. It's possible to celebrate Pride and address racial injustice at the same time, and I urge you to do so. Read up on your history and acknowledge and celebrate the Black folks who have paved the way. So, in the spirit of Blackout Tuesday, we are using this time on the podcast this week to amplify the Black voices that we have been listening to and those we urge you to listen to. It won't be a long episode. Kayla and I have both taken the time recently to read the works of Black revolutionaries and activists, including a number of queer ones. And so, we would like to take this time to read some of their words to you. And we urge you to seek out their words as well. A little while back, we retweeted from our Twitter, a Google Drive link with a bunch of writings of Black revolutionaries and activists. And that is a great place to start for finding things to read. Kayla, would you like to go first?
KAYLA: Uh, sure, I do also want to note, I've been thinking about this a lot, as I kind of think a lot about like Stonewall was a riot, and like Sarah says, we owe everything to them. I do want to note, I know a lot of asexual people and aromantic people don't feel welcome in the queer community. They might not see, you know, the, you know, everyone from Stonewall as you know, their ancestors in the community. But I think it is important to remember that… I don't know, the work that they did was fighting for, you know, the right of anyone to have any sexuality. And so even if the current community isn't great at recognizing that, it's… like Sarah said, still important to recognize those people that paved the way, so.
SARAH: A good point.
KAYLA: Okay, I wanted to start out by just reading an entire article because I couldn't pick any part from it. I tweeted it from our Twitter, it got a lot of retweets. I hope you guys actually read it. I'm glad that so many people are able to see it and share it. This is an article by Sherronda J. Brown. She is a black activist and asexual activist. She writes with frequently for the Black Youth Project for Wear Your Voice magazine. She wrote this article in 2019. I saw some other asexual folks sharing it. So, I think it's just important. So, I'm going to start with that. It is called Black Asexuals Are Not Unicorns: There Are More Of Us Than We Know.
SARAH: I would also note that y'all still go and find this article, read it yourself…
KAYLA: Yes
SARAH: Spend some time with it, give it the clicks, give it the hits. Sherronda deserves that.
KAYLA: Yes, and it's on the Black Youth Project website. And I would highly recommend looking through their entire website. There's a whole tab for gender and sexuality. Sherronda has written a lot of other things for them. So definitely don't just like take me reading it, you should go give it your clicks and your shares and everything. So, trigger warning at the beginning from Sherronda, this essay contains discussions of sexual violence as well as racist violence and fetishization. Okay: “I personally know a fewer than five black people who identify as asexual, and I've only met two of them in person. The others remained virtual friends for now, but I hope to meet them someday. Of course, these are just the ones who are semi out. I'm confident that I've met other black asexuals ones who weren't just out, and I suspect that many others simply don't know that they are on the asexuality spectrum or that asexuality is even a possibility for them. I never knew it was possible for someone like me to be asexual. I had internalized so many myths about what it means to exist in a body like mine. I didn't understand what possibilities there were for me until I began to unlearn and challenge the long-held misogynistic myths about my value being tied to my sexual accessibility and my worth being determined by my fuckability. Black people are forced into a box of hypersexualization thanks to centuries of propaganda and policy born of white supremacists, colonialist ideas, and white people's racial anxieties. This imagined irrevocable hypersexuality has been used in specific ways to justify and rationalize injustices and brutalities against black people throughout history, aiding heavily in our dehumanization. ‘Lynch that black brute before he rapes he rapes a white woman, this black bitch ain’t nothing but a hoe, she can’t be raped, sterilize these animals now before breed more bastard black babies, the government shouldn’t have to be financially responsible for the kids these sex, these sex crazed inwards keep having.’ So, many of us black folks have internalized these ideas too, particularly about black women and girls. ‘That fat ass little girl knew she was… what she was doing. Black women ain't nothing but thots and hoes. That black teacher shouldn't be wearing a fitting dress with an ass that big.’ Sexuality is always written on black people, and especially black people who are read as women in a way that makes it understood as something that is immovable, eternal, and unquestionable. I once internalized these messages too. ‘You can't be a virgin, your ass is too fat,’ insisted the boys through middle school and high school. They never believed me when I said that I didn't have sex or that it wasn't something I was interested in. As my body developed, I sometimes overheard other adults whispering to my mom variations of you better watch her when they thought I was out of earshot. Or maybe they actually wanted me to hear their words and the tone that it was set in. Maybe they wanted me to understand that they had already decided that what I was going to be was not just a sexual being but one so was sent to us… that I would need to be controlled. I didn't know which was worse. Repeated messages like these warped my perception of myself and my body from a young age. I came to understand my body and myself as inherently sexual, even as I received seemingly contradictory messages that my fatness made me undesirable. And I didn't know that there was any other option for how to exist in this world. I thought that the hyper sexualization of my body meant that I had to buy into it and perform the sexual existence expected of me, or else I would not be seen as normal and valuable. In more recent years, there came a new digital wave of the already ongoing sexual revolution among black women, wherein sexual liberation was promised to the embracing of sexuality. It was and still is an attempt at reclamation, a way to take hold of the narrative among black women's sexual expression. It promotes a necessary bodily autonomy and renouncing of the shame so many black women are made to feel for simply existing as sexual beings in a search of deserved sexual pleasure. It took me too long to realize that this black feminist pleasure praxis of engaging in sex unapologetically, while undeniably valuable for many others, does not and never will benefit me. My sexual liberation didn't come until I was able to fully embrace my asexuality and understand that I am not broken or abnormal because of it. Being a black asexual woman often feels like living in the shadow of the mammy, a caricature whose asexuality is conceived of only because she is expected to mother everyone around her. Mammy is allowed to be free of the racialized hyper-sexualization only because it permits her more time, energy, and space to perform her endless duties. She is not allowed to have desire or desirability, not allowed to seek out sexual pleasures or intimacies because her entire focus should be on her domestic and emotional labor. Mammy's de-sexualization serves the world, and it does not serve her. Because we have no other dominant cultural images of black asexuality, this is the type of existence that many people expect me to have when they learn that I am asexual. This world so often makes me feel like I'm not allowed to reinforce stereotypes about my body and my desirability that are rooted in historical anti-blackness, massage noir, and fatphobia. Asexuality is already greatly invisiblized as queer identity. Black asexuality is even more so. This leaves many black asexuals with unique barriers to finding our place on the asexuality spectrum and developing community with others like us. This is why it's not enough to simply speak about asexuality awareness.
[00:10:00]
KAYLA: We must also acknowledge the ways race and assumed and or assigned gender play into our understandings of our sexualities and how others project sexuality onto us. Compulsory sexuality can be and often is just as damaging as compulsory heteronormativity. It certainly was for me. And the pressures and barriers black people face in this arena are distinct from our non-black counterparts. I wonder how many other black asexuals share a similar experience to mine and how liberating it would be for them to be able to name it even if only for themselves.
SARAH: Mm-hmm. Sherronda can be found on Twitter @SherrondaJBrown. That's Sherronda S-H-E-R-R-O-N-D-A J. Brown.
KAYLA: Yes. And she has obviously been doing amazing work for a long time, both about asexuality and blackness and both. I wanted to read this first because I know that, you know, obviously the majority of our audience is asexual and I'm assuming it is going to be most accessible for people to begin or, you know, hear about race at all in the context of something that they know. So, I hope that you are able to kind of listen to this, hear your own understandings of your own asexuality in it and understand or begin to understand how race plays into it. I wanted to personally speak mostly today just about intersectionality with sexuality and race specifically, gender as well because I know our audience skews heavily to women.
SARAH: Or other non-binary or non-binary, yeah.
KAYLA: Yes. So, I wanted to talk about that I personally, that's how I was kind of brought into conversations about race. For the first time I found it very accessible and a good place to start for me personally. And so, I wanted to talk about that. So, I guess intersectionality basically meaning the intersection of different identities to understand how they work together to work against someone. So how someone like Sherronda is not just asexual, not just Black, but both. And how this kind of puts her in a double jeopardy and makes one plus one more than two in terms of facing oppression and hardships.
SARAH: Can I also just jump in really quickly and say, I'm going to get into this a little bit later when I read my stuff, but one of the things I read ahead of this but chose not to quote from is a piece called I Am Your Sister, Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities by Audre Lorde. And that also hits on intersectionality. So, I would recommend reading that to all of our listeners.
KAYLA: Yeah, there's definitely a ton of work out there by black feminists. So, the second thing that I will be reading from is from the Combahee River Collective Statement. The Combahee River Collective was a group of black feminists who started meeting in 1974. This was obviously around the time of kind of a lot of feminist movement. Yes, I'm going to be talking about feminism today.
SARAH: Kayla was in a feminism class.
KAYLA: I was in a feminism class when I first read this piece. So basically, I guess kind of the background is that a lot of you know, the feminist movement was incredibly white and was inherently white. And obviously, black feminists and black queer feminists felt extremely left out by this. So, this is kind of their statement of what they are doing and what they believe. So, this is from this statement and under their what we believe section. “Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to someone else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression, merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to black women, e.g. Mammy, Matriarch, Sapphire, Whore, Bulldagger, let alone cataloging the cruel, often murderous treatment we receive indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western Hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly from our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women, this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept, because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levely human, is enough.” I feel like that kind of speaks for itself.
SARAH: It does
KAYLA: I guess my point in reading this is I think a lot of the points they're making about the 1970s feminist movement can directly be related to today's queer movement, that when you speak about queer rights and you are fighting for queer rights, you need make sure that you are specifically and purposefully talking about Black rights as well. And like I said, the intersection of Black and queer identities together. Going along with this, this is from a piece from José Esteban Muñoz called Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Kind of a dense piece, so there's a very good chance I'm taking conclusions from this that the author did not intend, but hopefully I'm getting something right from what they intended. Basically, this piece kind of discusses the theory of disidentification, basically simultaneously identifying with something but also struggling against it and seeing the flaws in it. So, namely Black queer people struggling to find a place in a community that is systematically ignoring part of their identity. Most of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies, classrooms, publications, and conferences are decidedly directed towards analyzing white lesbians and gay men. The lack of inclusion is most certainly not the main problem with the treatment of race. A soft multicultural inclusion of race and ethnicity does not on its own lead to progressive identity discourse. Ivan Ibarro-Bengenaro has made the valuable point that the lack of attention to race in the work of leading lesbian theorists reaffirms the belief that it is possible to talk about sexuality without talking about race, which in turn reaffirms the belief that it is necessary to talk about race and sexuality only when discussing people of color in their text. This kind of directly relates back to the last piece I read. It also talks specifically about a book called this bridge called my back, which I would highly recommend anyone reads. I've read parts of it, I will be reading all of it. But it was basically an anthology collection from women of color who were feminists talking about basically how their bridge was, or their back was the bridge for many white women, how they were forced to be the burden of educating white women of doing their own work. So, the first wave of feminist discourse called for a collective identification with the female subject, that female subject was never identified with any racial or class identity and was essentially a desexualized being. Thus, by default, she was a middle class, straight white woman. So, like I was saying, when we talk about queer rights now, often we just talk about queer rights. And by doing that, people's minds obviously, unfortunately, go straight to probably a middle class, white, gay man.
SARAH: Mm-hmm
KAYLA: And because there is nothing added to it, because race is not explicitly brought into the conversation, it isn't brought into the conversation at all. I don't know if that made a sense to anyone. It barely made sense to me when I was reading it. However, …
SARAH: Well, what I was going to say is that a lot of the quotes you've given, what you have said, have come from a very rhetorical, academic, and as you said, dense standpoint. And if you, the listener, didn't get all of it, that's okay.
KAYLA: Yes, that's completely fine.
SARAH: I didn't get all of it. I'm going to have to listen again, and I'm sure I still won't get all of it. But there are a lot of different entry points into this discussion, and you can work up to it. And we urge you to be a part of the discussion regardless. Thank you, Kayla. And now I'm going to go into some of the stuff that I read. My first couple of quotes are from James Baldwin, who was a gay black activist. 60s, 70s, he died in the 80s. And I have a couple, short little quotes from him. These first two are from… I'm not sure if this was a speech or an essay. But either way, it was from 1963.
[00:20:00]
SARAH: It's called We Can Change the Country. Just have some little excerpts for us. All right. “This is not and never has been a white nation, if my forefathers had not damned all those rivers and picked all that cotton and laid all that track, there would not be an American economy today.” Which true, a little bit of a jump for this next one. But my second quote that I have here is: “it is important to bear in mind or to recover the notion that we are responsible for our government and the government is responsible to us. The government is supposed to represent us. It is time that the government knew that if the government does not represent us, if it insists on representing a handful of nostalgic southern colonels, the government will be replaced.” Just a little…
KAYLA: Tea
SARAH: Just a little revolution, some revolutionary words for you. But then the next couple of quotes I have from James Baldwin are from, this was a talk given in 1961. It's from Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States. So, this first quote that I have kind of goes into the history of black America. So, he says: “the last cooling off period relating to the n-word problem, as somebody put it, occurred during the reconstruction and we are paying for that now. It has escaped everybody's notice that it doesn't go back as far as the Civil War. It doesn't go back any further than 1900. Those laws that we are trying to overthrow in this country now, now again being the 60s, are not much older than I am. Faulkner says they're folkways and one would think they came from Rome, but they came out of southern legislatures just before the first world war and they are no older than that. Now if they can be put there, they can be taken away. A reminder that y'all, it's not ingrained in the United States. We can change shit.” All right, this next one comes after capitalism a little bit. “The tragedy of this country now is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. What they care about is not rocking the boat. What they care about is the continuation of white supremacy so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when you move in. Now when this is challenged, bitter tears come to their eyes and they say to you, you sound as if you think white people don't have any decency. Well, this is much too simple. That is not the question. The question here is how long can Americans believe that the rest of the world, including me, will take the will for the deed? If the country means what it says, why is the question which ends every argument, would you let your sister marry him? Why would I want to marry her?” The next couple of things I want to read are from Audre Lorde, who was a black lesbian activist, poet, all sorts of things. I mentioned one of her essays earlier, a few short little quotes from… well, the title of it is The Transformation of Silence and Language Into Action. So, oh, and sorry, this was 1977. She says, “my silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself. A black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?” And then, she says, “for we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition. And while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” You got to say it, folks. You got to just say shit when you mean it. The next quotes I have from Audre Lorde are from... This was actually a pretty famous little quote, this first one is. I'm about to spoil it by giving the name of the reading. The reading is called, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. It's from 1984. And I say that I'm spoiling it because the quote is as follows, “For the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Then she goes on to say later, “Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.” That's the tea. My final thing that I want to read is written by Nicole Hannah Jones for the 1619 Project for the New York Times Magazine. There are a lot of essays for this project. I urge you to read as many as you can. Also follow Nicole Hannah Jones on her Twitter. She's @nhannahjones, that's a very good account and her name is Ida Bay Wells, which is very funny. She talks in this article a lot about the history of Black people and their contributions to American democracy. So, my first quote from her reads, “but it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of Black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been and continue to be foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country's history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role. It is we who have been the perfectors of this democracy. The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves, Black rights struggles paved the way for other rights struggles, including women's and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different. It might not be a democracy at all. Later she goes on to talk about a little bit more of post-Civil War America. So, she says, as the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation's failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life, a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.” And then I would like to end on this last bit, which is a bit hopeful. She says, “the truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been born on the backs of Black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but Black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Fegen, put it, ‘enslaved African Americans have been among the foremost freedom fighters this country has produced.’ For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet somehow, we still believe in its best.” So, I know my quotes kind of hit on a lot of different topics, but I hope that some of them at least got you thinking and they will maybe lead you to do more reading on those subjects. So, thank you for listening. We won't be doing beef or juice this week. We won't be reading patrons. Instead, we would like to leave you with some things that we would recommend to watch, to listen, to continue, to educate yourselves on this topic. I have a few written down. I don't know if you had any, Kayla.
KAYLA: I have a couple.
SARAH: Okay. The ones I would suggest are the podcast Pod Save the People, the cast recording of A Strange Loop. It was an off-broadway musical by Michael R. Jackson. It won a Pulitzer Prize. At times, it's really difficult to listen to, and that's the point. I recently ordered the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and it hasn't arrived yet, but I'm very eager to read it. And I haven't gotten to watching this one yet, but my sister highly recommended it, so I will say 13th on Netflix. It is a documentary, and I've heard nothing but good things about it. Kayla?
KAYLA: Yeah, so I'd obviously recommend Sherronda J. Brown for especially everyone who is asexual. Like I mentioned, the Black Youth Project and Where Your Voice are both projects she works for. I would also recommend the website podcastsincolor.com. It is literally just a directory of podcasts by people of color.
[00:30:00]
KAYLA: So, if you want to listen to people who are not us, who actually know what they're talking about, I would highly recommend checking that out and supporting the people that put it together because it is not their entire job to run this and they need your support. I would also recommend following Victoria Alexander on Twitter @VictoriaALXNDR. She is a scholar and a black woman and she has been putting together a lot of great, I don’t know, resources of books to read. There's an entire document called the Anti-Racist Resource Guide that kind of goes through everything in a very easy to understand way of just like racism, you know, implicit bias, a lot of recommendations of things to read, to watch, to listen to. So, I would highly recommend checking out her Twitter and finding those resources.
SARAH: Mm-hmm. I'd also like to make a note. Last week when I went on my rant about racism in America, I noted that other countries, if they don't have the same issue, may have, they probably do have similar issues, even if it's not explicitly against Black people. And I urge all of our non-American listeners to also engage in activism in your own country for what you can for the underrepresented people in your country. I urge all of our listeners to keep signing petitions, keep using your voice, keep donating where you can, keep amplifying Black voices. Kayla, do you have anything to add?
KAYLA: Yeah, I think just to reiterate what I said, that no matter how you identify, you do owe at least a large majority of your life to Black people, to Black activists. We would not be anywhere where we are today. And to remember that even when these protests slowly stop happening, even when whatever happens, that we need to keep this conversation going. We cannot continue to talk about queer rights, about asexual rights, aromantic rights, anything without explicitly talking about people of color. Like I talked about, if we do not explicitly talk about it, people will assume we just mean white middle class men and women, and that can't continue to happen. Black people have done, and people of color have done far too much for us to continue to ignore what they have done. So, I don't know, just keep that in mind.
SARAH: Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next week with some more quote unquote normal content, but a reminder that the fight for racial justice doesn't end. Black Lives Matter.
KAYLA: Take good care of your cows.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]