TED Speaker Hosts Gender Justice and Race Workshop

“Wait a minute ...” Joshua Allen wrote on their Facebook profile at 1:33 p.m. last Sunday, “I just closed the TEDxMiddlebury conference and after I was done talking people stood on their feet and started clapping. What the actual f***?!”

Joshua Allen, a self-identified “organizer, abolitionist and freedom fighter,” visited the College last weekend to challenge the ideas the college community has about Gender Justice and the Black Lives Matter movement. On Sunday, Nov. 7, Allen gave a speech titled “A World Without Cages” at the student-organized TEDx event in the Mahaney Center for the Arts (MCA).

The next day, Allen continued the discussion about the intersection of gender justice and race in their workshop called “Organizing at the Intersection of Black Lives Matter & Gender Justice” in Warner Hall. Over fifty students and a handful of staffs, faculty and community members participated in the workshop.

In an interview, Allen explained why they were surprised by the enthusiasm they received at TEDx.

“I was shocked and of course, honored,” Allen said, “because for centuries in the U.S., the work that people like me do, that black people, that radicals do, who engage with work that is anti-state, has constantly been delegitimized as labor that can be respected.” To have been invited to an institution that has been predominantly white since day one, and then to be given a standing ovation at TEDx, was “something that goes against the tradition in American history,” Allen added.

But if the students’ impassioned reaction for Allen’s TEDx speech and their workshop offering on Monday afternoon are anything to go by, then there is a critical mass in the student body which is eager to challenge the American tradition.

And they can do so in ways both large and small, as Allen encouraged them to do in the check-in question he asked at the start of their Monday workshop. They invited each person to say their name, preferred gender pronouns, and “what they are feeling like today outside of the gender binary.” Many of the students, professors, staff and community members in the room offered deeply resonating or flat-out hilarious answers: someone was a kazoo, others a sneeze that never came, or sensual poetry. It was like a ride through the field of infinite possibilities, a testament to the unfathomable range of human experiences that nullifies the two options permit- ted by the gender binary.

Allen then had the workshop attendees respond to two statements: 1) LGBTQ folks who are black are more likely than their white counterparts to experience homophobia in their family, and 2) The category of “people of color” is a useful construct for understanding the various forms of structural inequality that currently exist between white people and everyone else, respectively.

While the response to the first claim was quite mixed, most attendees assented to the second statement. Allen, in explaining why they disagreed with the first, traced history back to the sodomy laws which white European settlers imposed upon colonized populations throughout their worldwide empires that introduced rigid gender norms which were not there before. As such, they argued that homophobia is much more at home in the Western tradition than the common stereotypes of black families would have people believe.

As for their second statement, almost every student who spoke admitted that they found themselves in a dilemma when using the term “people of color.” They thought the term useful when they wanted to identify the United States as a white supremacist nation-state, but they are at the same time cognizant of the danger of lumping together the varied experiences of different immigrant communities, especially blacks and non-blacks. Above all, as Allen reminded me in the interview, there is a crucial distinction between indigenous people, who are the original inhabitants of this land, and blacks and people of color, who are immigrants. By denying that there is a difference in kind amongst the injustices that these groups have been sub- jected to historically, users of a term like “ people of color” risk submerging important historical truths about this country.

In a final exercise, the attendees were divided up into two large groups, and each first discussed within itself their responses to their prompt before they summarised their conversation for the larger group. The first prompt dealt with the reality that “gender non-conforming and Non Binary folks are more likely to be harassed by the police, physically assaulted and earn less than $10,000 a year than their binary trans counterpart,” and the second with the statistics that only 47 percent of survivors of physical violence to LGBTQ people of color report their attacks to the police.

The first prompt opened the discus- sion up to broader themes such as the way the gender binary and the nuclear family serve as the basic building blocks of a capitalist society.

Reflecting on the second prompt, attendees mentioned the victim-blaming culture of police procedures, which simply
puts the survivor through another facet of their traumatic experience of living in the U.S.; the internalized homophobia among LGBTQ people of color, which prevents survivors from admitting to themselves that they have a serious enough case to report; and the likely failure of community policing programs due to racist ideas that underpin who constitutes a “suspicious” person and who does not.

In the end, Allen challenged everyone to think of multiple ways to work in soli- darity with bodies that we identify as the Other, and with that, they rushed off to the airport to catch a flight that would bring them to South Africa to meet with other organizers there.

For the Middlebury community, Joshua Allen is an example of someone who is working tirelessly to demonstrate that the past has not really passed, the present is pregnant with infinite possibilities and the future does not simply lie ahead of us: it is slowly gathering itself together, a present-future that we can become a part of, too.