It is hard to believe, but it is already June, Pride Month. Perceptions of time for many are warped during the pandemic that our state and nation continue to face. Despite the radically different reality that many face, some things about our world remain the same. People of color continue to lose their lives at the hands of police. This rings true for the life of George Floyd in Minneapolis and for the life of Tony Robinson in Madison, right here in Wisconsin. In Louisville, Breonna Taylor was shot to death by police in her own apartment in the middle of the night as her boyfriend called 911. In the case of Ahmaud Arbery, three white men participated in his murder as he went for a run. Local police stood by and let those men remain free for more than two months. Too often, those who are sworn to serve and protect all fail to do either.
Art & Soul Innovations and Proud Theater stand with those participating in demonstrations across Wisconsin and throughout the nation. It is tragic that people must risk their health to call for justice in the face of a global pandemic, but justice is an essential service. While many in the queer community enjoy more freedoms than in the past, true liberation is impossible without coliberation and realizing the intersectional nature of injustice.
The queer rights movement arose from a series of uprisings, including at New York’s Stonewall Inn and San Francisco’s Tenderloin, that many condemned as riots. While it is easy to condemn forms of protest that are uncomfortable, to do so is to ignore and condemn our own movement’s history. Queer people, and especially white queer people, can not continue to stand by as public institutions continue to perpetrate violence against the vulnerable. And we can not ignore the real violence that words and prejudice also have. It is easy to point to Amy Cooper in Central Park as an extreme example of prejudice and privilege, but that was not an isolated incident. This is one of the reasons why police continue to harass people of color: white people call the police when it is completely unnecessary. Everyone who fails to fight for justice on every level, including individually, is complicit in upholding the system of white supremacy.
Black lives matter. We need to recognize that and take steps as a society to ensure that such basic statements about fundamental humanity are no longer required.