content warning: racism, deaths in custody

Living in the Matrix

Living as a queer Black woman and an intersectional feminist often feels like being force-fed the ‘red pill of truth’ from The Matrix while most of society seems to be happily swallowing the blue pill of ignorance. In fact, I’ve always wondered why the person destined to defeat the Matrix and essentially save society was a straight white man. Taking the red pill means experiencing oppression created by multidimensional systems like white supremacy. It also involves understanding how even when apparent progress occurs, it is often superficial because oppression has not been addressed or solved but merely altered. In America, this can be seen with racism having moved through stages from slavery to segregation to incarceration and police brutality. Similarly, in Australia, racism and eugenics have not been vanquished, but moved from the stolen generation to mass incarceration and deaths in custody. On the other hand, taking the blue pill leads to the belief that multiculturalism equals post-racism. It creates an illusion in which oppression is one- dimensional and easily solvable.

Being an intersectional feminist means I understand and interpret social injustices through intersectionality, an analytical framework coined by Black feminists. Intersectionality has specifically been attributed to the work of Kimberle´ Crenshaw in 1989. It is about understanding and considering how different aspects of an individual’s social and political identity intersect to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. This was, and still is, important to Black feminists because feminism often revolves around white women, who tend to focus on their marginalised womanhood whilst ignoring their white privilege. However, Black women advocate against white supremacy and patriarchy because their identities are marginalised by both, meaning they understand that these systems intersect.

I live my life seeing myself as ilundi, but aspects of my identity are categorised, labelled and separated. Thus, I’m not just ilundi but I’m Black ilundi, I’m queer ilundi, I’m female ilundi and more. Yet, I cannot separate my identity in the way that white feminists or others would like me to. Often when talking about oppression, people tend to focus on one marginalised identity category at a time like sexuality or race. So even in movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), the focus is placed on race, and more specifically, on Black men, which overlooks the violence Black women experience.

In Kimberle´ Crenshaw’s amazing TED Talk, ‘The Urgency of Intersectionality,’ she asks the audience to sit down when they hear a name they don’t recognise. She names several Black men who have died due to police brutality and, by the end, most of the audience is still standing. However, after naming just one Black woman, most of the audience sits down because Black women have been overlooked in BLM. Consequently, even within movements and spaces that are created for marginalised identities, there is marginalisation happening. Intersectionality helps us understand the complexity of identities and the way privilege and oppression overlap. Social injustices are often intertwined and have layers within them that are hard to see and distinguish without intersectionality. These systems of oppression are connected, just as sexism is supported by capitalism and capitalism is supported by racism and so on.

This connects to a phrase I’ve heard a lot: “I don’t see colour,” where some think that the solution to solving oppression is to completely ignore differences between people. As Crenshaw has said, “if we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem.” Not seeing colour completely misses the problem it attempts to solve because the problem isn’t our differences (like colour). The problem is the way we treat these differences, like not hiring someone because they are Black. On the other hand, some people emphasise sameness and so we hear phrases like “we’re all human”. But this also misses the point because we are diverse, and rights shouldn’t only be given because we have similarities. This creates a standard people must reach and are compared to, which is often cis, straight white men. There shouldn’t be a problem in being different—in fact it’s good. I mean, how boring would the world be if we were all exactly the same?

Essentially, what I am trying to say is that if we want the world to be a better place, then we need to not only acknowledge but also embrace our differences. In this Race Against the Odds, we must not only fight for ourselves but for others as well. So, if you advocate for women’s rights, then advocate for Black people, advocate for queer people, advocate for people living with disabilities, and others. We’ve come to embrace our similarities, but when will we embrace our differences? The only time is now.

Puzzle pieces

Brown eyes gaze
at red melanin roots.
Blue eyes gaze
at crystal clear skies.

One step forward
two steps back.

Arms torn
legs gone
hair ripped apart.
Classified accordingly.

Brown-skinned
Queer
She her woman.
Labelled accordingly.

A million pieces of myself
jammed into puzzles.

Puzzles show picture perfect happiness
in symmetry.
But puzzle pieces are
asymmetrical.

Curves, misshaped ends
connect to holes.
Each piece contains
fragments of images
bigger than the picture
framed on the box
for us to be.

Are there missing pieces?

Pieces knocked off the table
fall to the depths of
Hell.
Lost, forgotten, replaced.
But these bits become mountains of
wonder—
rising at dawn
yet to reach their peak.

What lies beyond puzzle borders?