5. Stonewall 50: Whose Movement Is It Anyway?

Intersectionality Matters!

Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw

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4.7 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2019

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, the wrenching demonstration against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar and refuge for queer and trans people in Lower Manhattan. The courageous act of resistance that took place over the course of several days in 1969 is widely perceived as the catalyst to the modern LGBTQ+ liberation movement in the United States. As Pride month reaches an exuberant crescendo this weekend with World Pride in NYC, an event that’s one part party, one part protest, questions about the trajectory, priorities, and composition of the movement persist, including how to best foreground the lives and concerns of members of the LGBTQ+ community whose experience is filtered through the interstices of more than one form of oppression. On this episode of Intersectionality Matters, host Kimberlé Crenshaw ponders these questions with two of the movement’s torchbearers: Barbara Smith, trailblazing Black feminist critic and co-founder of the Combahee River Collective, and Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, also known as Lady Phyll, co-founder and executive director of UK Black Pride. Tune in for their fascinating insights on living in the overlapping margins of race, gender and sexuality, the future of LGBTQ activism and their commitments to retrieving the experiences of queer Black women from a location that resists telling. Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (@sandylocks) Produced and edited by Julia Sharpe Levine Recorded by Elizabeth Press, the Sanctuary for Independent Media, and Michael Kramer Music by Blue Dot Sessions With: Lady Phyll (@msladyphyll), Barbara Smith (@thebarbarasmith), and the Reclaim Pride Coalition (Colin Ashley, Robert Baez, Francesca Barjon) (@queermarch) Intersectionality Matters: ig: @intersectionalitymatters, twitter: @IMKC_podcast Additional support from G'Ra Asim, Naimah Hakim, Madeline Cameron Wardleworth, Peter Gaber, Ezra Young ~~~ NYC Trans Day of Action Friday, June 28 from 4-6pm: https://alp.org/events/15th-annual-trans-day-action NYC Dyke March Saturday, June 29 from 5-8pm: https://www.nycdykemarch.com/ Queer Liberation March Sunday, June 30 from 9:30-3pm: https://reclaimpridenyc.org/ World Pride Parade Sunday, June 30 at 12pm: https://2019-worldpride-stonewall50.nycpride.org/ UK Black Pride Saturday, July 7 at 12pm: https://www.ukblackpride.org.uk/

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Kimberly Crenshaw, and this is intersectionality matters.
0:05.2	The podcast that brings intersectionality to life by exploring the hidden dimensions of today's most pressing issues, from say her name and Me Too, to the war on civil rights and the global rise of fascism.
0:19.2	This is an idea travelogue. It lifts up the work of leading
0:23.5	activists, artists, and scholars and helps listeners understand politics, the law, social movements,
0:30.4	and even their own lives in deeper, more nuanced ways. Just as we were finishing up our last podcast on apologies, the New York City Police
0:45.0	Department issued one for their actions that led to the Stonewall uprising 50 years ago.
0:51.4	The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong, plain and simple. And for that, I apologize.
0:57.6	I vowed to the LGBTQ community that this would never happen in NYPD 2019. Now this comes after
1:04.6	decades of the NYPD resisting demands for an apology. In fact, just two years ago, O'Neill himself declined apologizing for
1:13.1	the race, saying that, well, the past was the past. Now, some see this as a step in the right direction,
1:19.5	and I have to acknowledge that, unlike some of the bystander apologies discussed in the last
1:25.5	episode, Joe Biden's non-apology, for example. This one at least
1:31.3	acknowledged past wrongdoing on the part of the police. But some see this apology as another step in
1:38.8	the depoliticizing and corporatizing of the movement. That's something that Barbara Smith knows all about.
1:46.0	On June 19th, she penned an op-ed entitled,
1:49.0	Why I Left the Mainstream Queer Rights Movement.
1:52.0	In her iconic and no-nonsense way,
1:55.0	she explains why she, one of the key figures in the history of queer freedom, has become isolated from the current
2:03.9	gay rights movement. Barbara Smith has been in the driver's seat of the literary and political
2:10.0	vehicles carrying black feminism into the public square for a half century. The titles she is
2:16.9	edited and the project she's co-founded, tell it all.
2:21.1	All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave, black women studies.
	...

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