My Influences
Works That Have Shaped Me
The basis of my social justice education is Audre Lorde’s teaching that all oppression is connected. I started to understand this concept as a Core Youth Leader with Gender Revolution 8, a trans youth leadership program. Studying what made activists from a broad range of social justice movements successful with other trans youth from a broad range of marginalized communities made me conscious of the ways oppression has shaped us as individuals and as a community.
My studies at Hamline University have only confirmed and provided further evidence to what I learned from my community in earlier years. However, my studies at Hamline changed my mindset in approaching this idea. Instead of fighting against oppression, I started fighting for liberation. Each of these sources has been crucial to this understanding.
Each of these sources has taught me about my liberation, the liberation of others, and the ways that our liberation is woven together in the web of community.​
Influences:
Known Associates
by thingwithwings, 2016
“Queer people have been living in this country, building this country, and fighting for this country since the very beginning. I remember gay soldiers who died in my war, and even if you don't see it on their tombstones or on their memorials, they were there. They were there in every war and in every time of peace. I'm here now. I'm not going to forget, and I'm sure as hell not going to let anyone else forget either.”
Known Associates revealed to me a truth about myself that I had never truly understood prior to reading this: I am not unique. By this, I don’t mean that I do not create new things, or that I am not distinctive. By this, I mean that there have been hundreds of thousands of queer and trans people like me before, and there will be hundreds of thousands of queer and trans people like me in the future.
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For many years, I felt deeply alone in my identity and in my oppression. Although I have known others in community with similar experiences to me, and I have bonded with others over shared traumatic experiences, I have never truly seen myself reflected in other trans and queer people. Known Associates showed me that I was never truly alone; that there have been hundreds of thousands of queer and trans people, who have been purposefully forgotten by history, watching over me.
Stone Butch Blues
by Leslie Feinberg, 1993
“Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar.”
I have loved studying activistic lineages since I started my own activism -- lines of activists mentoring and supporting other activists. When looking at these, it’s important to understand how it takes a village to be a successful activist. No one has just one mentor or one influence and as more and more people are called to activism, more and more people are integrated into other lines of activists. Leslie Feinberg has a massive amount of people connected to hir. Ze spent decades working with the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the queer liberation movement, and spent the last years of hir life working on the Free CeCe Campaign. I am proud to find myself in Leslie’s lineage. Although I never had the opportunity to meet Leslie, ze guided one of my mentors, Billy Navar̃r̃o, Jr., in trans liberation work in the Twin Cities.
Through telling Jess Goldberg’s story in Stone Butch Blues, Leslie demonstrates a concept that Audre Lorde’s teachings about liberation are reliant on: the personal is political. Jess Goldberg’s experiences of pain, resistance, and liberation, while fictional, could have happened to any number of real people. The Stonewall Riots, mentioned in Stone Butch Blues, are not a just a pretty bedtime story young queer kids are told. It was a Rebellion led by real people, with real lives, who had real pain. The loss of generations of LGBTQIA+ people to violence (through suicide, forced closeting, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, rape, murder, discrimination, and more) is a pain I feel every time I, a 22 year old, am seen as an elder by younger queer and trans people. Stone Butch Blues gives me the ability to point to my elders and let them tell their stories, because they are not here to tell their own.
Black Boy
by Richard Wright, 1945
“Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant.”
The above quote is the first time that Richard Wright mentions hunger in his autobiography and is the first time that I saw myself in Richard’s shoes, not just someone reading about his life. I first read Black Boy at a point in my life when hunger was something I intimately knew. I was living in a hyper-localized state of poverty, where I went hungry most days. I understood the physical hunger Richard felt throughout his childhood and young adulthood in a way that most people in my class could not.
As his life progressed, I came to understand the other hunger Richard describes: a hunger for justice, for liberation, for a more kind world. Richard experienced consistent pain and regular trauma, and for most of my life, I hadn’t. Despite that, I found myself empathizing with Richard and finding myself in solidarity with him.
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To this day, Richard Wright is someone who I look up to. I admire his ability to get back up every time he is knocked down by oppressive forces and his persistence in pursuing his goals. In Black Boy, Richard told his story in the way it happened, not in the way that made him look the best. I try to embody that mindset in the work that I do, because I make a lot of mistakes, but I also have had a lot of successes. The most powerful thing I learned from Richard was to be authentic with myself and with the world around me.
Women, Race & Class
by Angela Y. Davis, 1981
“Their trailblazing role was all but ignored by the leading initiators of the new movement.”
One challenge activists frequently face when working for social justice is the concept of the “Oppression Olympics:” the idea that one person’s oppression is objectively worse than another person’s oppression. In reality, that isn’t true because all oppression is different. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality highlights how different oppression shows up in individual lives, while holding space for experiences with oppression that are similar.
Dr. Davis outlines how solidarity is built across oppressed communities to fight for collective liberation, and how that solidarity is frequently undermined by capitalism and prejudice towards other marginalized peoples. Prior to reading Women, Race & Class, I hadn’t thought critically about the ways that movements joined together to fight for collective justice. Although I understood that there are places that movements crossover, I always thought of movements as insular things. I hadn’t considered what solidarity could mean for my struggle for liberation and the struggles of those I love.
The Racial Contract
by Charles W. Mills, 1997
“Global white supremacy is itself a political system.”
The Racial Contract is built on the idea that the default setting for the world is not white supremacy. This is not an inherently radical view, yet many people, both of color and white, believe that it is. Global white supremacy acts to convince us that systems that are exclusive of people of color are broken, when, in fact, systems that are exclusive of people of color are working exactly as they were designed to. Dr. Mills builds on the work of hundreds of years of Western philosophical thought to present the Racial Contract, which outlines the complicity that white people, who are not actively anti-racist, have with white supremacy.
Although I considered myself to be not racist prior to reading the Racial Contract, I didn’t realize that there was a difference between being anti-racist and not being racist. Through reading Dr. Mills’ work, I realized that unless you are actively against something, you are for it. Unless you are actively for someone, you are against them. Although I had worked in anti-racist ways prior to reading Dr. Mills’ work, I had never truly incorporated anti-racism into my everyday thoughts and actions. The Racial Contract motivated me to be a holistically intentional person, and to work to inspire others to do the same.
This Land Is Our Land
by Jedidiah Purdy, 2019
“This land holds us together and apart, insecure.”
America is a country defined by our contradictions. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is one of the most enduring phrases of this country. It was written by a man who held other humans as his property through chattel slavery. America is not a broken country; to be broken implies that America was designed for everyone to succeed in the first place. For America to become whole, we must remake our systems and redefine how we treat one another. This book examines how we might do that and why we must. It approaches borders, land, capital, community, climate change, and partisanism from a place of compassion and hope.
This work has encouraged me to think holistically about the issues I have studied in my social justice education. Audre Lorde teaches that all oppression is interconnected, but I never truly understood how all liberation could be connected before I read this book. Many of the issues we are facing today feel impossible to address. From institutional racism to widespread inaccessibility, from interpersonal violence to climate change, everything feels like a mountain that is insurmountable. However, I do not believe it is impossible to address these problems anymore. This book has led me to believe that we can create a better world through community and solidarity.