"The end of the republic has never looked better"

I find myself looking back on my life. I am registered Independent, not Democrat, because in my lifetime the Democrats have not been supportive of LGBT people until very recently. For half my life homosexuals were barely tolerated. For practically all of my life trans people were horrendous and unspeakable.

And now we're here.

"The end of the republic has never looked better" is something that President Obama said at the White House Correspondents' dinner. It's not much of a joke now, is it? I realize again just how amazing his accomplishment was, to be elected twice as a black President. The old saying goes "You have to be twice as good to get half a chance," and he must have been at least four times as good, to get a whole chance. Hillary was not four times as good.

I'm not blaming the Democrats. (Although I do remember that Obama was very coy about his position on same-sex marriage.) I look back at my life and I remember when we were unspeakable. Which has been pretty much this whole time. But we were here and we are still here.

When this country was founded, white men were in charge. Yesterday . . . a significant number of Americans voted to keep white men in charge. Not a majority. If this is the meaning of America then . . . those of us who are disadvantaged under that system have to survive. That's all we can do.

I'm white. I don't identify as female. White male supremacy gives me some privilege but not enough to make it worthwhile. I know which side I'm on. We were here and we are still here.

Frances E.W. Harper: Black, Feminist, UU

This has all happened before and it will all happen again. --Battlestar Galactica 

[I delivered this sermon on September 4, 2016, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans.]

Reading:

In May 1866 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper addressed the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention in New York City, where she sat on the platform with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Today’s reading is some excerpts from that speech.

I FEEL I AM SOMETHING of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which are now demanded. About two years ago, I stood within the shadows of my home. A great sorrow had fallen upon my life. My husband had died suddenly, leaving me a widow, with four children, one my own, and the others stepchildren. I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milk-crocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer's wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away? They left me one thing--and that was a looking glass! Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support. . . . I say, then, that justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law.

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members. . . .

This grand and glorious revolution which has commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success, until throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic, the nation shall be so color-blind, as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation, whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.

I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party.

You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me. Let me go to-morrow morning and take my seat in one of your street cars--I do not know that they will do it in New York, but they will in Philadelphia--and the conductor will put up his hand and stop the car rather than let me ride. . . . Today I am puzzled where to make my home. I would like to make it in Philadelphia, near my own friends and relations. But if I want to ride [a streetcar] in the streets of Philadelphia, they send me to ride on the platform with the driver. Have women nothing to do with this?

Here ends the reading.

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The story goes, “In the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the year 1858, a young black woman entered a streetcar and sat down. The conductor came to her and insisted she leave, but she stayed quietly in her seat. A passenger intervened, asking if the woman in question might be permitted to sit in a corner. She did not move. When she reached her destination, the woman got up and tried to pay the fare, but the conductor refused to take her money. She threw it down on the floor and left.”

At that time her name was Frances Ellen Watkins. Two years later she married a man named Fenton Harper. Six years after that, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper gave that speech at the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention from which you have just heard some excerpts.

In fact, she goes on at length – longer than what I quoted – about her experience of not being allowed to ride the streetcar and being segregated in the train. She also says that Harriet Tubman, who was still alive in 1866, was not allowed to ride the streetcars in the city where she lived. Harriet Tubman.

In 1858 black people were not allowed to use public transportation. In 1958, they had to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks famously refused to do that, 100 years after Frances Watkins insisted on her right to ride the streetcar.

And here we are, not even one hundred years later. To us it seems perfectly obvious that black people should be able to pay their fare, and ride the streetcar, and sit next to white people. What’s the problem with that? How could that be a big deal?

I’m bringing this up because when we look back at history, we tend to assume that things were always simple. But when you’re right in the middle of it, it’s not simple at all, and change seems scary and impossible.

"terror" in Orlando

The first I heard of it was "mass shooting at a nightclub." I wondered if it was a gay club. Then I told myself, "Knock it off. Straight people can get killed too you know." Well, not this time.

I saw the news headlines: "Terror in Orlando." Of course, it's only terror when a Muslim person does it. Or when it's a big enough story to make the news. When transgender people are killed individually, one by one, month by month, that's not terror. When a gay or lesbian teen is harassed into committing suicide, that's not terror. No decent white American Christian has ever terrorized anyone.

I see that I'm not the only one to remember the Upstairs Lounge fire. "Until the weekend’s horrific shooting, the largest massacre of gay people was an arson attack on a bar in New Orleans on June 24, 1973." No one was ever charged. The story goes that funeral parlors refused to accept the bodies of dead queers, and most churches refused to perform memorial services.

Do you think things are different now? On Monday I stayed off of Facebook. I didn't want to see condolences from straight people. I know their sympathy is genuine. But our deaths are the same. And indeed, sympathy is not the same as grief. I don't need to read more about the people who died, not right now. I don't need to learn their names in order to grieve. This is grief. There's no need to make it stronger.

It makes things no better if our deaths are politicized. It doesn't make things much better if some express sympathy while others, just recently, expressed their intention of harming transgender people or their approval of countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. And of course there are people who are happy to get on Twitter today and celebrate the death of gays. I don't want to say that their voices are more important.

No, what I mean is that we were already dying. We were already a target. But this time it made the news.

in the midst

Sunday was Valentine's Day. So my boyfriend and I went to a restaurant we hadn't tried before. On the way over a friend texted me. I asked "Do you want to go see Janet Mock and Alexis De Veaux speak at Tulane on Tuesday evening?" and he said yes. I was looking forward to it. It was a good day.

Monday morning my 21-year-old cat suddenly started acting wobbly. Soon he was unable to walk in a straight line. By the end of the day he couldn't stand up. I literally thought "First Scalia died and now my cat is dying."

Tuesday morning. My boyfriend and I talked about having the cat put to sleep. I picked up the phone to call the vet but I couldn't do it. Instead I called my boyfriend back and asked him to make the call. So he did, and then he said "They said I can bring him in tonight."

Things I wanted: I wanted to see Mock and De Veaux. I wanted to spend time with my friend, who was still sad over a breakup. (I felt like I couldn't cancel with the excuse of being sad over my cat.)

Things I did not want: I did not really want to go with my cat to the vet and watch him die. I knew it had to be done. I couldn't bring myself to call the vet, but once the appointment was made I knew it was the right thing to do. So at 5:30pm I said goodbye to him and left him to wait for my boyfriend to get home from work.

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It's always nice to be in a group of trans people (and allies.) It's always nice. I haven't been in a big group like that since Laverne Cox spoke at Tulane a couple years ago. I knew of De Veaux from reading Home Girls back in the day, but I hadn't followed any of her work since then. And of course it was great to see Mock. They had a long and wonderful conversation.

Can I say that all of us in that room felt the shadow of death? As De Veaux put it, "It's not news that the po-po have been killing us." I was living with the death of an old and well-cared-for cat. That's not at all the same thing as deaths caused by injustice. And yet. We have some things in common. We still ask why.

We who are still here.