Happy Pride Month! It’s been strange to be as fragmented as the LGBT community has been even before covid19. But lack of face to face contact has in particular been hard for LGBT people, especially young people who may be living with homo/transphobic or disapproving family members.

So it’s a month to honour our many communities’ resilience, our survival in spite of centuries of exclusion, hatred and scapegoating, our many ways of being who we are in spite of difficult odds. This year the evidentiary burden of genocide against Indigenous survival and the massacre of so many vulnerable people through the market logic of the corona pandemic, along with personal grief on so many levels, has made it more of reflective time than one rooted in the raucous marchers and the desperate gawkers that characterize Pride weekend on Corporate Ave., oh sorry, i mean, Church St. I probably miss the music the most!

This last week with its revelations about the active recent complicity of Catholic Church, , and God knows how many other Christian institutions– shows us how white Christians intertwined with the ruling powers as to make separation of Church and State, a total joke when it comes to the civilizing mission of settler colonialism! Two hundred and fifteen children assassinated in the name of a merciless white God. And that is only what they have let us find. The violence of settler colonialism reveals itself as a violence against the very lives and existence of Indigenous peoples. An informal apartheid made formal through the Indian Act.

So for many reasons, it’s hard to feel celebratory There’s been tons of new cultural activism and expression from Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. But I’ve gone with a familiar voice from the long-ago days of joining an anti-racist lesbian community! Menominee poet Chrystos has definitely been a voice calling for truth to power, even if that makes things uncomfortable. So I’ll leave today’s post with this poem.

Into the Racism Workshop

For Alma Banda Goddardmy cynical feet ambled
prepared for indigestion
& blank faces of outrageous innocence
knowing I’d have to walk over years of media
declaring we’re vanished or savage or pitiful or noble
My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces
but really when one eats racism every time one goes out one’s door
the appeal of talking about it is minuscule
I sat with my back to the wall facing the door
after I changed the chairs to a circle
This doesn’t really protect me
but I con myself into believing it does
One of the first speakers piped up
I’m only here because my friend is Black & wanted
me to do this with her
I’ve already done
300 too many racism workshops
Let it be entered into the Book of Stars
that I did not kill her or shoot a scathing reply from the hip
I let it pass because I could tell she was very interested in taking
up all the space with herself & would do it if I said a word
They all said something that I could turn into a poem
but I got tired & went to sleep behind my interested eyes
I’ve learned that the most important part of these tortures
is for them to speak about racism at all
Even showing up is heresy
because as we all know racism is some vague thing that really doesn’t
exist or is only the skinheads on a bad day or isn’t really a crucial problem
not as important certainly as queers being able to marry
or get insurance for each other
When they turned to me as resident expert on the subject
which quite honestly I can’t for the life of me understand
or make any sense out of
I spoke from my feet
things I didn’t know I knew
of our connections
of the deadly poison that racism is for all of us
Maybe some of them were touched
but my bitch voice jumps in to say
NOT MUCH!
I heard back that someone thought I was brilliant
Does that mean that I speak well
Or that she was changed
It’s only her change
I need

Chrystos, “Into the Racism Workshop” from Fugitive Colors.  Copyright © 1995 by Chrystos.