First, a quick thank you for your patience. We launched quite a few new projects right in the middle of quarantine, and like so many teams, the TNQ team is adjusting to this new reality and having to shift our methods for how we deliver content to our community. July slipped by faster than a blink, but we are still here, and so are you (and so is *racism*), so let’s get to it.
For paid subscribers, we'll also be getting two new podcast episodes out since we didn't get one out in July.
On that note, thank you for your generous partnership with TNQ. Like nearly all live video production, we are shutdown due to COVID-19, but all of your contributions and your subscriptions to this newsletter go where they always go: helping make possible the next season of TNQ.
As you know, powering the necessity of anti-racism is a deep connection to our ancestors who fought with their very lives for freedom and for the recognition of Blackness in its full humanity. With the passing of John Lewis this week, we were reminded once again of how many of the Civil Rights generation we’ve lost, and how few are still among us. We are deeply aware of the passing of the torch.
This week, also, would have been the James Baldwin’s 96th birthday. When today’s white culture reconstitutes the Civil Rights Movement, it seems they remember King (though inaccurately), begrudgingly acknowledge Malcolm X (rewriting his history), and often leave off James Bladwin altogether. This is no accident.
Baldwin stands at the vanguard of Black queer leaders who understood the promise of America and, therefore, felt the compulsion to hold it to account.
We know injustice for some means injustice for all, and our self-education is the beginning of reconciling a better future. For this reason, we will be elevating and celebrating LGBTQ Black leaders who have paved the way for an intersectional view of injustice.
While there are many, here are just a sample of the culture-shifting leaders you can dig into with us this week:
Gladys Bentley, entertainer and culture-maker from the Harlem Renaissance
Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights leader and adviser to MLK
Alvin Ailey, Choreographer and educator
Barbara Jordan, Congresswoman
Marsha P. Johnson, AIDS and transgender rights activist
Audre Lourde, Sociologist and author
Which of these Black queer leaders will you research and get to know more? Which will you post about? Read a book from? How will it change your way of engaging your community, your family, your faith, your workplace?
Make sure to tag @tnqshow in your IG, Twitter and Facebook posts this week.
Anti-Racist Patriots and the White Gaze
Baldwin was—for a time—a beloved figure of white liberalism. As the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s passed into the 1970s, he began to recognize that mere affection between white and Black would not end racism. American systems themselves propagated anti-Blackness, and the systems would have to be held to account. He also called out how the white gaze, the dominant way that prevailing culture recasts Black people into their own image, centering the white experience, had already started to undo the dissent of the Civil Rights movement and domesticated his own voice.
He vowed to quit playing the role of “the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father.”
We would be wise to consider Baldwin’s leadership in this as the nation mourns the loss of the great John Lewis. Watching Congressman Lewis be editorialized last week by some of the exact same people who oppose what John stood for (namely the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act) has been bone-chilling to watch.
Prevailing culture has always sought to moderate and domesticate the cause of anti-racism. By making it a pet project of middle-of-the-road liberalism, white culture can claim the mantle of change with actually making change.
We are glad that so many people who are new to the cause of anti-racism have found an educational resource in The Next Question. But we want to be clear, TNQ has always been and will continue to be here to center black voices, to build a community for activists and leaders where they don’t have to answer the 101 questions. All are welcome to the TNQrew, but we, like Baldwin and Lewis, are not here to be the Great Black Hope.
We will celebrate and center Blackness.
We will create space for the beauty of Black stories to be told.
We will challenge and call out the upending of racist systems.
We will not settle for “hearts and minds.”
We are here, as always, for the malcontents.
If you haven’t yet watched the entirety of President Obama’s eulogy at John Lewis’ funeral, it is a call to action against the racist policies and systems of our time.