By Sikivu Hutchinson
Last week, activists from the Black Lives Matter Los
Angeles (BLMLA)
coalition spearheaded the Occupy LAPD encampment, demanding a meeting with LAPD
Chief Charlie Beck as well as the firing and prosecution of the officers who
murdered Ezell Ford. The issue of black self-determination—queer, trans, disabled,
undocumented—is at the forefront of this thriving mass movement, which not only
challenges white supremacy but challenges the orthodoxies of mainstream
patriarchal hetero-normative civil rights organizing. On Tuesday I spoke to BLMLA activist Povi-Tamu
Bryant, who was waiting to address the LAPD Commission after the
dismantling of Occupy LAPD’s encampment and the arrest
of fellow BLMLA organizers Sha Dixon and Dr. Melina Abdullah. Dixon, Abdullah and Bryant, along with fierce black
women BLM founders Patrisse
Cullors and Alicia Garza, have brought an intersectional lens to the
movement in an era where black youth of all genders and sexual orientations
don’t see the complexity of their communities represented in hyper-segregated
classrooms with apartheid curricula. Bryant’s comments on Ethnic Studies and the
need for culturally responsive education were especially relevant in light of
the recent implementation of a new California law banning
suspensions for willful defiance in grades K-3. Willful defiance has long been
used to target and criminalize “unruly” black children as early as preschool. For children of color, criminalization at the
preschool level is often the first phase in a path that leads to pushout in
later grades and incarceration in adulthood.
It is also one of the most devastating tools in the destruction of
culturally responsive education. This
partial victory is important in context of the growing leadership of community
organizers who have waged daily resistance to police and state violence which
has resulted in the stolen lives of black youth like Ford, Aiyanna Jones, Tamir
Rice and Rekia
Boyd.
SH:
Historically
when we look at civil resistance to state violence there has been a lot of
focus on black male leadership and black male victims, often to the exclusion
of black women who’ve been murdered, as well as of black women activists who
have been on the frontlines of movement organizing. What motivated you to become involved with
Black Lives Matter L.A.?
Bryant:
I was motivated to
become involved last year after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I realized in that moment again just how
little black lives are valued, and it made me feel like it was important to be
around black folks, to share my rage and grief with black folks and to be
showing up for myself, my community and my family. BLMLA has a particular frame around the value
of all black lives mattering; showing that black trans lives matter, black
women’s lives matter, black disabled lives matter and black immigrant lives
matter. Having that frame allowed me to
show up as myself—as a black queer gender-bending woman—and it has allowed me
to really be involved with lifting up the disparities that black communities
face.
SH:
You
mention the impact that state violence and dehumanization have on queer black
women in particular and we know black trans women have high rates of physical
abuse and criminalization. How has that critical
consciousness been factored into the emerging movement in terms of bringing
forward activists that are doing intersectional work?
Bryant:
With BLM we went from a
hashtag to a movement. We’ve tried to be
super-intentional about creating space that lifts up the voices of folks that
aren’t often lifted up when we think about black liberation and black
struggle. We come out of a very visible
civil rights history in that a lot of the leaders that held up are often black
men. We see a lot of that happening
today. We’re trying to disrupt that
narrative and flip the frame around what it means to do movement work to allow
things like emotional labor be understood as movement work, to allow things
like healing justice to be recognized as movement work. We work with amazing orgs like the Trans
Women of Color collective, who’ve been informing our thought process and
dialogue and building our infrastructure around how do we make our space
inclusive of trans women. How do we make
sure that the violence that’s experienced at super high rates by trans women is
part of our narrative.
SH:
There
has been an increase in very frontal criminalization of black girls (both
nationally and here in L.A.) which flies under the radar, especially with
regards to national policy emphasis on young boys of color such as President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper
initiative. How can we incorporate the
intersectional work BLM is doing into high schools and middle schools when it
comes to classroom engagement with young people?
Bryant: We’re
thinking about all black lives, including black youth who have been at the
forefront of our conversations. I think
there’s a way for empowerment. I think
that’s important to inform policymaking decisions and decisions about the use
of funding. We recently got Ethnic
Studies passed – what are those curricula going to look like and how are they
going to lift up the lives and leadership of black queer folk, black women,
black youth and all of these folk who are at these marginalized intersections?
How do they actually get folded into the conversation so that the students see
themselves reflected in that curriculum?
Educators should be engaged in this dialogue around what it means to
have an intersectional approach in the classroom. I think there are tons of institutional
barriers already, but to not even be able to see yourself in the classroom--that’s
adding layers of trauma to what we’re already experiencing in the
classroom. There’s a part of me that
thinks that’s the very least of what we can do.
I think that we have some people around the table in BLMLA and in BLM
nationally who are thinking about these things.
