Liberate
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How does this erasure manifest?<br />
Embedded in this community is a dangerous desire to maintain black unity at all<br />
costs. It is almost impossible to critique certain organizations or individuals, and<br />
those who do so are often ostracized, even when one is rightfully criticizing the<br />
highly elitist, cisheteronormative, and sexist behaviors that push many of us further<br />
into the margins. It is uncritical and facetious to believe that we are all marginalized<br />
in the same ways – to ignore the fact that many of us cannot breathe in<br />
this community that is supposed to be our safest space.<br />
As black women, our genders and sexualities are treated as negligible and divisible<br />
from our experiences of blackness. The fact that we are the ones charged with<br />
both healing from trauma and then correcting the same violent behaviors that hurt<br />
and disrupt our lives is indication enough that a singular blackness that is detached<br />
from other manifestations of systemic violence, determines the disposition<br />
of black life on campus – the type of oppression that we are willing to mobilize<br />
against.<br />
This illogical approach to systemic violence results in the privileging of black,<br />
heterosexual men’s wellbeing and this has been prominently exposed in the few<br />
conversations around sexual assault that we have had. At one particular talk that<br />
I hosted, as the discussion progressed, it became clear that the central concern<br />
around sexual violence is how men can best avoid culpability as opposed to a<br />
victim-centered approach that encourages ethical and mutually beneficial sexual<br />
encounters. To put it more bluntly, the dominating concern seems to be “how<br />
much access men can get to black women’s bodies without being held legally accountable<br />
for their actions” when it should be “how best can we listen to women<br />
and ensure that we are making our community safe for them.” At worst, this is a<br />
violent erasure that sees black women’s bodies as collateral damage to men’s unnecessary<br />
technical gymnastics in negotiating the clearly outlined parameters of<br />
ethical sexual behavior.