{"id":23,"date":"2008-03-22T12:13:28","date_gmt":"2008-03-22T19:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/?p=23"},"modified":"2008-03-22T12:13:28","modified_gmt":"2008-03-22T19:13:28","slug":"power-privilege-and-the-effects-of-assimilation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/uncategorized\/power-privilege-and-the-effects-of-assimilation\/","title":{"rendered":"Power, Privilege, and the Effects of Assimilation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Power, Privilege, and the Effects of Assimilation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Firstly, this talk is going to present far more questions and reflections than any real answers.&nbsp; This is an opportunity for each of us to make decisions for ourselves and to challenge ourselves to engage our communities on questions of power, privilege and assimilation.&nbsp; But, really, what is with all the buzz words in the title of this talk?&nbsp; Around activist scenes in Boston, and the country as well, the words power, privilege and assimilation are thrown around like confetti at the pride parade yesterday.&nbsp; What are these terms that are so readily at the tips of our tongues all about?&nbsp; I am going to take a moment to share with you my experience with these terms. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Power can be an amazingly beautiful thing.&nbsp; We have people power, the power for those who come together to create transformation together.&nbsp; People power fosters energy of love, resistance, compassion, revolution, a true ability to encourage spiritual, emotional, cultural, really any sort of growth.&nbsp; Power can also operate beautifully within the individual.&nbsp; The power to make decisions for one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s self.&nbsp; The power to recognize areas of needed growth within.&nbsp; The power to seek pleasure, joy, love, and on and on.&nbsp; Each of us has the ability to choose to be powerful within ourselves and within our communities. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>However not everyone has access to the same types of power.&nbsp; Unfortunately there is also abusive power.&nbsp; We live under a system of institutions that gives some power over other people.&nbsp; There are those who have access to tear at the lives of others; to take resources from some in order to strengthen their own selves.&nbsp; Power over others creates injustice and takes away community as well as individual autonomy.&nbsp; Power over looks like patriarchy, racism, misogyny, capitalism, heterosexism, and all forms of oppression.&nbsp; Systems of power over create another system, a system of privilege. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Privilege, in the context of this discussion, is an unearned advantage given to one person or a particular group of people to create avenues of access for them at the expense of others.&nbsp; For example, we have spoken here numerous times about the reality of White privilege.&nbsp; We live under endless institutions and systems that create access and privileges for White people at the expense of People of Color.&nbsp; Our sister in struggle, Peggy McIntosh, wrote an article about the invisible knapsack of White privilege.&nbsp; It is often difficult for White folks to notice all the ways White privilege operates in our daily lives.&nbsp; That experience is an intentional creation by the systems of racism and White Supremacy we live under.&nbsp; The illusion of a balanced playing field tears at our ability to create true people power.&nbsp; As a person of numerous privileges it is my responsibility to learn what it means to be in solidarity and to listen to those most harshly affected by the systems of power over that privilege me at their expense. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What has this got to do with assimilation?&nbsp; The word assimilation leaves a chalky, dry taste in my mouth.&nbsp; When I hear that word I think about marginalized communities being forced to abandon their identities and take on the culture of their oppressor.&nbsp; I think of people who have had their language taken from them, their dance taken from them, their clothes taken from them, their roots ripped from within them.&nbsp; The Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, uses assimilation as a positive aspect of the development of immigrant communities.&nbsp; The tests about US history, the forced English proficiency, the mandatory working or schooling, are all part of a system to, supposedly, welcome new individuals into this great melting pot, this home of the free.&nbsp; I picked up a post card at Harvest Coop the other day that read, essentially, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153why is it that in the U.S. melting pot those at the bottom get burned while all the scum go to the top?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d&nbsp; While ICE might think assimilation is a necessary part of becoming acculturated to our society today I want us to look at it as the deprivation of ones culture and self in order to integrate into mainstream\/oppressive society. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Just as many communities have had to deal with and suffer through assimilation tactics, movements within the United States have had similar issues.&nbsp; There are many greatly discussed movements in our recent history; the Civil Rights Movement of the 60\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is certainly one of the most popular.&nbsp; This movement that became so popular during and in the aftermath of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.&nbsp; The campaign to boycott the Montgomery Bus system did not begin as an international campaign with 10\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s of thousands of individuals involved.&nbsp; This campaign did not begin as the brainchild of Dr. King.&nbsp; This campaign was started by a crew of Black church ladies.&nbsp; There were three other women who refused to get up from their seat before our best-known heroine Rosa Parks did.&nbsp; This was a grassroots campaign of mostly women who organized their community to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enough is enough!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d&nbsp; Certainly Dr. King gave incredible additions to everything he worked on however the women from the Civil Rights Movement are so regularly left out.&nbsp; Because of the deep-rooted effects of patriarchy women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s voices have been silenced over and over again.&nbsp; The campaign that was once grassroots and community based became lead by yet another charismatic leader who was forced into roles of compliance with what much of the dominant culture wanted from him.&nbsp; There was clear resistance to this assimilation but it was a reality of daily life within the struggle.&nbsp; Assimilationist tactics worked throughout the Civil Rights Movement and tore at the communities involved.&nbsp; Unfortunately there were those who had more access than others in the beginning of the movement and those who began to gain more access as their work became better known who could not connect together all the issues of classism, racism, patriarchy, militarism, and so forth.&nbsp; Their choice to move up in the system left others out to dry. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These same struggles of assimilation have occurred within the women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s movement with White women moving higher in power at the expense of Women of Color, in the Union movement as the building trades unions have completely forgotten the concept of, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an injury to one is an injury to all\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, it has occurred within the Irish, Italian, and European Jewish communities who chose to become White and abandon their cultural heritage in many ways in order to gain the privileges of politics, economics, and other resources. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Assimilation also works on a very personal level.&nbsp; It happens for many different reasons.&nbsp; I often break those many different reasons into two categories, privileged assimilation for access to power over others and survival based assimilation for access to power for ones self and oppressed community.&nbsp; I feel as though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been in both at different times in my life.&nbsp; Here at the Community Church of Boston I have assimilated in some ways to the culture here.&nbsp; I have over heard a number of times that I talk about queer things too much and that I bring gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues into our congregation a bit too often.&nbsp; The truth is that my radical, leftist politics stem from my identity as a queer person.&nbsp; One of the things about me that does not come out very often here at church is that I can be quite the fabulous queer.&nbsp; My voice becomes lower when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m here, my dress is far more conservative, and I use other tactics to my advantage.&nbsp; I use these assimilation tactics in order to better fit in here and to better serve this community.&nbsp; These are assimilation tactics that I use to privilege myself and to give me greater access to our community without having to be completely out about the very queer identity I carry around with me the rest of the time. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I have also assimilated into a culture for survival.&nbsp; When I was in prison for 6 months I was confronted with a community I was completely new to with no understanding of the rules that existed around me.&nbsp; I had to shut up about who I was on many levels.&nbsp; I was closeted about my sexual orientation during most of my time, all of my issues with authority needed to be contained if I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to spend my entire time in solitary confinement (45 days was plenty), I had to assimilate into the uniform dress code, I had to say goodbye to hugging people I cared about, I eliminated most of my femininity, my conversations had to leave out so much of who I was.&nbsp; Assimilation for me in prison was about survival.&nbsp; This was a time that I chose to give into a system in order to take care of myself. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Who gets to decide what is assimilation for survival and what is assimilation for privilege?&nbsp; Do I get to stand here at this podium and spout off those who I think are abusing their privilege and assimilating into the dominant systems of oppression?&nbsp; I am not sure if I have that right.&nbsp; I do, however, often make my personal judgements about individuals but even more so about movements I am involved in. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday was the annual gay pride parade.&nbsp; The pride parade happen in June because this is gay pride month.&nbsp; We celebrate gay pride month in June because we are remembering the nights of the Stonewall Rebellion.&nbsp;&nbsp; In 1969 at the Stonewall Bar in the Lower East Side of New York, before it was the swanky, bourgeois, gentrified community that it is today, a crew of drag queens, queer people of color, low income queers, and others of the most marginalized queer people had enough of the cops coming in night after night forcing them to pay bribes to the cops and give sexual favors to them in order to not be busted as it was illegal at that time to sell alcohol to so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153homosexuals\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.&nbsp; The patrons of that bar and the kids living in the street had enough of the cops and they fought back for nearly a week, though only June 28th is attributed as being the night of the Stonewall Riot.&nbsp; The queens and the queers took over Christopher Street.&nbsp; Nearly 2000 fought the 400-person police force with high heels, broken beer bottles, even a street sign knocked over off the street.&nbsp; That was the night that kicked off much of the modern day queer movement. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>However the marches in 1969 and the work of the early Gay Liberation Front has been forgotten by the gay pride committees around the country today.&nbsp; We went from having queer liberation marches to having gay pride parades for straight people to ogle at.&nbsp; We went from having a message of collective liberation and standing in solidarity with Black Power, the Cuban revolution, the Brown Berets, and womanist liberation to a theme this year in Boston glorifying militarism, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ask.Tell. Proud to Serve our Community Country and the World\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.&nbsp; The mainstream gay and lesbian, wealthy, white elite, has chosen to push forward their own agenda and assimilate into the capitalistic, militaristic, imperialist dominant culture that we are living under.&nbsp; The assets and resources of the queer community are going into repealing the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ask, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell\u00e2\u20ac\u009d laws and into marriage \u00e2\u20ac\u0153equality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when queer youth are committing suicide at rates astronomically higher than their heterosexual counterparts.&nbsp; The prioritization is off when low-income queer people still can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get access to HIV\/AIDS medications or when transgender folks are still excluded from anti-discrimination legislation and are continuously targeted for violence yet not supported by the gay and lesbian community that claims to stand with them.&nbsp; The tragic assimilation of much of the gay and lesbian movement has taken a once radical community and white washed it with camouflage and wedding cakes in order to best move up the most privileged members of the community at the expense of all the others.&nbsp; Because there are queer people in EVERY community around the world, any queer movement that does not challenge racism, patriarchy, militarism, imperialism and all other forms of oppression is a movement that is simply perpetuating oppression rather than fighting it. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Even with all this assimilation happening within so many movements around us, Immigration; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender; prison reform; religious; union; and so on I have immense hope.&nbsp; There will ALWAYS be those who choose to struggle for collective liberation and not settle for personal advancement.&nbsp; Here in this church we regularly see the interconnection of struggles and the deep impact of building coalitions to advance all of our struggles.&nbsp; We have a deep and rich history of being on the side of radically inclusive justice and we must remain there.&nbsp; Each step we take up gives us an opportunity to remind ourselves not to take that step on top of someone else.&nbsp; I encourage us to examine ways in which we choose assimilation in our lives.&nbsp; We may do so for survival and we may also choose to do so in order to privilege our voice or our struggle at the expense of others.&nbsp; Please take the time to sit with your choices.&nbsp; We have the responsibility to love and care for each other.&nbsp; We are called to it as activists.&nbsp; We are called to it as human beings. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>To close in the words of Audre Lourde, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.&nbsp; And I am not free as long as one Person of Color remains chained.&nbsp; Nor is any one of you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Power, Privilege, and the Effects of Assimilation Firstly, this talk is going to present far more questions and reflections than any real answers.&nbsp; This is an opportunity for each of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.communitychurchofboston.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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