Happy Pride!
With all that’s happening in the world right now, the celebration of Pride has been placed in the backseat, and our focus is on the Black Lives Matter movement, as it should be. But I’ve seen some people be upset at how BLM is overshadowing everything else, which is unbelievable. If you broke a leg, you wouldn’t be paying attention to your arms, you wouldn’t even be paying attention to the other leg, because they aren’t broken. It’s not to say that the rest of your bones don’t matter, because no one said that. You just need to focus on the one that needs to be fixed, and is hurting the most. I have my reservations about people going out to protest while coronavirus is still rampant, but since I’m not Black, I’m not going to tell people who are directly affected by systematic racism and police brutality how to react.
You can’t support Pride without supporting Black Lives Matter. It’d be hypocritical of you to condemn the riots when the reason why we have Pride parades today is because of rioting. The LGBTQ+ community wouldn’t be anything without queer black people.
LGBTQ+ DO NOT FORGET OUR HISTORY. POLICE ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS. A BLACK TRANS WOMAN FOUGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS. WE CANNOT BE SILENT. pic.twitter.com/chLSnYzsVJ
— toni (@tonialexandxr) May 31, 2020
A little bit of history to celebrate Pride Month and the people that fought for our rights 51 years ago during the Stonewall Riots. ?️? #PrideMonth pic.twitter.com/vCT0ztqENI
— ?????. ?️?✊? (@_flawlessangelx) June 1, 2020
In an open letter, LGBTQ organizations signed on to pledge their support to the BLM movement.
“The LGBTQ community knows about the work of resisting police brutality and violence. We celebrate June as Pride Month, because it commemorates, in part, our resisting police harassment and brutality at Stonewall in New York City, and earlier in California, when such violence was common and expected. We remember it as a breakthrough moment when we refused to accept humiliation and fear as the price of living fully, freely, and authentically.”
When you talk about Pride month, and how proud you are of the community, you cannot erase the history, the important roles that Black people played, and the fact that Pride is, at its core, still a protest. Despite the progress that has been made for gay rights, Black transgender people are still suffering so much at the hands of racism and sexism. Black transgender deaths are still covered up in the media, and largely ignored in the grand scheme of things. Do the names Nina Pop and Tony McDade ring any bells? And there are so many more deaths that go unnoticed.
People across the globe have been making donations to multiple different organizations, from bail funds to nonprofit civil rights advocacy organizations. But if you still have the funds to do so, I urge you to donate to some organizations specifically made for the Black LGBTQ+ community.
Black and Pink supports Black LGBTQ+ people who are kept in jail unfairly and cannot afford to pay bail. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, Black and Brown defendants oftentimes receive bail amounts that are twice as high as those set for white defendants, leading to more POC being stuck in the system, with no way out.
Florida LGBTQ Freedom Fund also supports getting members of the LGBTQ+ community out of prison. Over the past two years, they’ve helped pay bail for people across 15 states, and focus on low-income migrant individuals. And according to an article on The Atlantic, low-income prisoners will take a guilty plea to get out of jail, even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
Articles that give you lists of organizations you can donate your money to: