When will you listen?
For the last 50 years, our queer ancestors have shouted from the tops of their lungs, that we need to remember our queer siblings, within our fight for freedom. Our Queer siblings working the streets, our queer siblings in jail, without housing, without money. Do not forget our racialised queer siblings, our trans siblings, our queer siblings with disabilities! If our liberation is centered around the white middle-class who pass, we will never be free, because there is no liberation to be gained, within assimilation of the few. So I ask you again.
When will you listen?
When our liberation is lead by faces, that look like those who oppress us, we have failed. How can we dine at the rich man’s table, when his plates are served on the back and bones of the people we have oppressed. Our streets are flooded with the blood of our past, and we choose to turn a blind eye to the truth, so that we can sit at his table, and eat with his bloody forks and knives.
So when will you listen?
When we forget our community in the efforts to sit at the rich man’s table, we have failed our siblings, and our ancestors, who have fought for the rights we have today. So when will we start to listen to their words of wisdom? To center the most marginalized of our community? To learn from the black women, who have done the studies on intersectionality, done the writings, who have given us the answers to our liberation? When will we listen to them?! When will we move out of our egos, and our entitlement, and not just assimilate, but actually liberate every single one of us!
So when will we listen? To the history of our movement, to the voices of the past, and learn from them! It is time that we step out of our colonial entitlement, and address the pink elephant in the room. That while we wash the rich man’s dirty underwear in our rainbows, our community suffers below us. That the drops of rainbow water never will wash away our oppression, as long those leading seek out the validation of sitting at the rich man’s table! So I’ll ask again, When Will We Listen?
[Resten af talen er transkriberet af Danske Taler]
Vært: Brynhildr! Brynhildr! You are making the whole community proud right now, thank you so much for doing that. Because Brynhildr, obviously this is important, but why is it so important to you?
It is important because I see my community everyday getting beat up at the Central Station and the pigs that are the police arrest them. I see my community suffer and so do I with them, I can’t leave my house without violence at my door, it is an everyday thing, so if we choose to celebrate and not be political our liberation will never be achieved. So I would like for all of you to remember a very special quote from Marsha P. Johnson and especially the people at Copenhagen Pride. You need to listen and learn. “There can be no celebration for some of us without the liberation of all of us”. Marsha P. Johnson.