Top 10 List Annoying White Activists (AWA) needa figure out
A super-late unofficial briefer from events transpired at Bodies of Dissent: Trans Access Conference – Peterborough, November 2008
(1) Just don’t dare say our families and social support networks are not open or educated enough
Lets get the first thing straight. If we don’t have access to resources, its because of institutionalized racism, systemic oppression, social services bureaucracy, lots of other things and because of you. Not because the Western education system didn’t educate us enough!
(2) Reports and statistics don’t speak the lived experiences of people of colour
Perhaps you have read a report that has given you numbers and statistics, perhaps you work for a social service institution where you have lots of fancy material, perhaps you do some sort of special academic/community research that you deem ground-breaking…either way, that just doesn’t mean you know what racialized communities go through and need.
(3) Stop enforcing labels and identities onto other people
Social justice, community development, transformative knowledge, and healing doesn’t happen through an obsession with naming and labels.
Its one thing to be able to identify oneself and have people and communities communicate with each other about how one identify, its quite another thing to get obsessed by what labels and words one should or should not use. Its one thing to look at words critically and what their meanings are, its another to get into an elite micro analysis of the history and semantics of such words.
Its one thing to reclaim medicalized, derogatory, discriminatory terms, its another thing to expect everybody to take on a name you think is universal.
We’ve had enough naming and labels put on us. Enough colonialism! No more colonial methods of naming and labels.
