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Archive for month: November, 2014

  • Remember Trans Power by Micah Bazant

Remember Trans Power – Fight for Trans Lives

Interviews | 0 Comments

November 20 marks Trans Day of Remembrance, a day to honor the many who have been killed by violence aimed at transgender people. Let’s Talk commemorates this day with art created by Micah Bazant for Trans Day of Remembrance 2014, as well as an interview with the artist.

Let’s Talk: How did you decide to do this poster?

Micah Bazant: There’s a political group run by and for trans people of color called TransJustice, that’s part of the Audre Lorde Project in NYC. We had talked about collaborating and they contacted me looking for art for their Trans Day of Remembrance event. We agreed to sell the posters as a benefit for Audre Lorde Project (you can buy them online here!) and to share the art with other organizations. Strong Families – a national network of reproductive justice groups – has been growing their trans justice work, and doing a lot of work with trans and queer youth of color. They were incredibly supportive, and shared the art with all their partners and supporters.

Trans women and trans feminine people of color were the mothers of the LGBTQ liberation movement. As a trans person, I owe my life to people like Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and so many other elders and ancestors who took so much shit and were on the frontlines of the struggle for decades. But even though trans women of color helped win so many victories for other LGBTQ folks, today they are still facing an epidemic of violence, and their leadership usually goes unrecognized.

It’s important to me to create art through relationships, to try and make sure I represent people in ways they feel awesome about, and then to offer and leverage the art to support organizing, and to materially contribute by donating from sales of the work.

LT: You also released a Trans Day of Remembrance poster last year. Can you tell us about that?

Image of CeCe McDonald by Micah Bazant with the headline "Honor Our Dead and Fight like Hell for the Living"

Free CeCe by Micah Bazant

MB: Last year I did a portrait of Cece McDonald, a young Black trans woman in Minneapolis who fought off a racist, transphobic attack – she stabbed her attacker and he died. Although it was a clear case of self-defense, CeCe was sentenced to 41 months in a men’s prison. Throughout her ordeal, she was very clear that prisons and police do not serve or protect trans people, and will never create more safety for us.

The poster showed CeCe in prison, with her hand on the visiting room window glass. I feel especially emotional about the image right now because the art was based on an actual photo of CeCe and Leslie Feinberg – another trans revolutionary – touching hands and supporting each other. We actually just lost Leslie this week – hir early death was at least partly due to anti-trans bigotry and inaccessible health care.

CeCe and Leslie

CeCe and Leslie

It’s interesting to reflect on how much has changed since last year and how much hasn’t. CeCe is out of prison now and is a movement leader and a public speaker. But, like a lot of our leaders, she is still struggling to cover her basic needs. And other trans people, like Eisha Love in Chicago, are serving prison time for self-defense, but their cases haven’t received any attention.

At the same time, celebrities like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock are changing the media landscape. And I see more movements and cultural work actively including trans people of color, like #BlackLivesMatter and CultureStrike. There is so much organizing led by trans people of color that is doing incredible work with practically no resources – groups like the Trans Women of Color Collective, El/La Para Translatinas, Casa Ruby, Black Trans Media, Breakout, and so many more. But the average life expectancy for trans women of color is still 23 years and criminalization and discrimination are still daily events.

LT: How do you describe your gender?

MB: I identify as trans and also as timtum, which is one of six traditional Jewish gender categories. It’s a non-binary, fluid category that refers to someone whose gender is not a man or a woman and is not immediately identifiable.

About 15 years ago, when I came out as trans, there was radically less trans awareness in general and also very few models of non-binary trans existence. I was cut off from my family of origin and really having a spiritual crisis, so I began reconnecting with my Jewish culture and learning Yiddish, which was my mom’s first language. I came across the word timtum in a Yiddish dictionary one day and it was defined as an insult. I became obsessed with learning about this and found that like most traditional cultures, ancient Judaism had more than two genders.

I think a big part of trans liberation is decolonizing ourselves from the enforced gender binary, which I see as a fundamental tool of colonialism and white supremacy. Part of my work is reclaiming and reimagining my own culture as anti-racist, anti-zionist, and trans-fabulous.

I’m excited that gender non-conforming people are creating more space and language to describe ourselves, especially in culturally specific ways. The U.S.-dominated narrative of “trans” as a “new” phenomenon can also become a vehicle for cultural imperialism. Just like we are facing a global crisis of extinction around different languages, seeds and species, and we need that biodiversity to survive, I believe we need a cosmos of different understandings and stories about gender.

LT: What are you hoping to communicate in this poster?

MB: TransJustice and I decided we wanted to create an image that centered trans feminine people of color and that showed trans people loving each other across differences in age and gender expressions. We also wanted to keep shifting the narrative around Trans Day of Remembrance, since so many observances of the event had become really problematic. Often you’d have a bunch of mostly white trans masculine people or white cisgender people reading off the names of trans people who’d been murdered. The list of people murdered would be all Black and Latina trans women of color. It was like the one time of year that trans women of color were acknowledged and then only as victims. We do need to honor the dead, but we also need to fight side-by-side with the living.

Janet Mock wrote a great piece on this:

We can’t only celebrate trans women of color in memoriam. We must begin uplifting trans women of color, speaking their names and praises, in their lives. We do this by making their work more visible, by investing resources into their daily organizing, by hiring them in organizations that fight for gender justice, by ensuring that we not only speak the names of the fallen, but of the active.

We want to remember trans power and push people to take action for trans lives all year round.

LT: How do you think about the role of art in social change?

MB: I think artists have always played a crucial role in social justice movements, and I see many artists and organizers trying to figure out more powerful ways to work together. I love that movement artists are building our own networks and ways of sharing our work, that don’t rely on elite art world institutions, and can have a much broader reach than those institutions.

At the same time, a lot of organizers are unsure about how to work with artists or about the impact that art can have on their work. As an artist I used to feel like it wasn’t my place to suggest that. But after seeing how some of my art was shared by thousands of people and had a big impact on grassroots campaigns, I’ve started being more pro-active, with really great results.

If you are an artist and want to contribute to any social justice struggle, I really encourage you to reach out to people working on that issue and suggest your ideas. As artists we want our work to have a life in the world, to have passionate relationships with people beyond our sketchbooks. Organizations can help make that happen, and our work as artists can help make social change look irresistible.

—

Feature photo: Remember Trans Power by Micah Bazant

  • Navina Khanna speaks at the James Beard Foundation Award Ceremony. (Photo: Ken Goodman)

What Is Really Making Us Sick?

By Navina Khanna   |  November 3, 2014
Reflections | 2 Comments

The following is the text of the speech given by Movement Strategy Center Innovation Fellow Navina Khanna, recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s 2014 Community Leadership Award, at the foundation’s conference, “Health & Food: Is Better Food the Prescription for a Healthier America?” held in October in New York City.

When we talk about disease and disparity related to food, we often talk about obesity and diabetes. Those things are real and are prevalent in many communities. I see them in my own family and I’ve walked the streets of my hometown of Oakland, talking to hundreds of residents about how these illnesses affect them and their families.

Sometimes when we talk about disease and disparity related to food we talk about food chain workers – the 20 million people who work from field to table – and the repetitive motion injuries, pesticide poisonings, and other stressors that they face. These things are real too. I’ve worked with, organized with, marched with and fasted beside farmworkers, and I’ve talked to workers in processing plants and food retail about the long term effects of these jobs, including the low wages and working conditions.

Occasionally, when we talk about disease and disparity related to food, we talk about cancers, reproductive issues, skyrocketing asthma rates and contaminated drinking water. These things are real too. I see them in rural communities in California’s Central Valley and in my parents’ homeland of Punjab, where the 1960’s Green Revolution took hold.

The question posed to us here is, “What’s really making us sick?”

Before we talk about what’s really making us sick, I think it’s important for us to talk about what it means to be healthy:

Imagine vacant lots becoming vibrant gardens.

Imagine family farms and food traditions thriving.

Imagine a social culture that reflects our agriculture, where diversity is strength, where young and old work together, where both interdependence and self-reliance are valued.

What would it mean for us to live in a society where we were actually able to care for ourselves, each other, and the land? For us to be truly nourished by community, not fed by competition? For everyone to have the right and the means to thrive materially and culturally, free from exploitation of themselves or any other living beings?

What we often don’t talk about when we’re talking about disease and disparity is the system that’s designed this outcome: a system that values profit and power more than people or the planet, a system of patriarchy, exclusion, and exploitation of resources.

The system is sick, so we are sick.

It’s a system that devalues the lives of Black men, women, and children – to the point that our tax-subsidized police force is killing them.

It’s a system that devalues the lives of Mexican men, women, and children to the point that we’d rather invest billions of taxpayer dollars in militarizing a border than keeping families together.

It’s a system that devalues children so much that our school food directors are fighting for pennies to keep our babies’ mouths full.

These are signs of a sick society and it’s no accident. Profit and power are the most sacred things in this system that feeds our brokenness, our broken relationships – to our sense of self, to the land, to our cultures, to our communities, to each other.

The US food system is built on exploitation. It was founded on “free land,” on the forced migration of people from Africa. It now thrives on economically driven cross-border migration. It exploits human and natural resources: we are literally exploiting ourselves to extinction.

As the system becomes more consolidated, and as we tie food speculation to our financial systems and political systems, we’re pushing farmers off the land, forcing urban and cross-border migration. We’re depleting soil, polluting air, and creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We’re eating products that clog our arteries and kill our kids.

All of us are hurt by this broken system. But some are hurt more than others.

Fifty million people in the US are food insecure, meaning that they don’t have the means to procure their next meal. So we absolutely must talk about access to food and to land when we talk about disease and disparity.

And we absolutely must talk about how much money people have. We must talk about wages when we talk about disease and disparity – including the wages and working conditions of the people who work in our food system, a system that boasts five of the eight worst paying jobs in the US.

But we can’t just talk about reforms in an economy that was never designed for life to thrive. We have to rethink our economy.   We need a revolution.

Revolution (noun): “a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized or in people’s ideas about it.” — New Oxford American Dictionary

So here’s an idea.

What if –

  • Everybody had the right and the means to produce or procure their own food? Had the right and the means to prepare, and to share and to eat it?
  • What if everyone had the right and the means to do this in a way that didn’t hurt them, or any other people, or exploit other living beings along the way?

Life is sacred. What if we treated it that way?

Whoever controls our land, our water, our air, our seeds, and our food, controls our lives. But what if we loved ourselves enough to reclaim ownership of our lives and of our relationships?

We can approach food systems change, disease and disparity in many different ways. Let’s compare two examples:

  • The Berkeley Soda Tax: People are already being taxed twice – for the production of the product and for the public health impacts. The proposed Berkeley Soda Tax doesn’t change the profit-driven, exploitative model. It doesn’t lead to life affirming, real solutions.
  • Next door to Berkeley in Richmond there is Urban Tilth run by a third generation Richmond resident who hires other Black and Brown residents who live within three blocks of their program sites and pays a living wage for their work. They are reclaiming their labor, reclaiming their cultures, reclaiming vacant land. And even when their members can’t pay rent or medical bills, they know that they can still feed themselves and feed each other. They know their community, their land, their governance.

Not all of us are from a community like Richmond but all of us have a role to play in seeing, supporting, and sustaining real solutions that are created by real communities — solutions that affirm life and help us all reclaim control of our own lives.

—

Feature photo: Navina Khanna speaks at the James Beard Foundation Award Ceremony. (Photo: Ken Goodman)

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