Today, what are the master's tools? Where is the master's house? Who lives in it? Is it the same old crusty white folks? If so, do I want to live in the master's house? Do I need his tools? I liked the idea of screwing the master's tools (or at least destabilizing them) and opting for my own DIY, perhaps gold-encrusted fur-lined fabulous tool kit.

Tool 1: Sacrificing short-term advancement for long-term justice. You'll know it's justice if it's hard to do, makes you want to puke a little, and could seriously lose you some esteem in the eyes of colleagues.

Tool 2: Realize that injustices look and feel differently and may shift entirely depending on where you are. I learned this one from Amy Sueyoshi. The oppressed in one arena can become oppressors in another. Though women are oppressed by patriarchy, women of color are oppressed by patriarchy and racism. If they're in a space together, that means that women of color need more consideration to make sure that they are not silenced. In a room full of heterosexual women of color, queer women of color need more consideration to make sure that they are not silenced.

Tool 3: Learn to decode oppressive rhetoric. Racism and white supremacy are particularly well-coded, I've come to notice. Because racism is such an...

Anyone who knows me well knows that one topic that really incenses me is genital mutilation. Lately I’ve been hearing (and reading) a lot about the circumcision/HIV trials in Africa and it has irked me enough to blog about it.

A little background: over the past decade, several studies have taken place in African nations with high HIV rates to assess if male circumcision provides protection from HIV. Basically, the researchers recruit thousands of HIV-negative male participants, circumcising half of them and leaving the other half intact. After several months the men are tested for HIV. The studies reported that, depending on the specific trial, the circumcised men had 50%-60% fewer cases of HIV than their intact counterparts, and, although they were replete with shortcomings (i.e.: they were not double blinded, and the circumcised men were told to abstain from sex for six weeks following the procedure, giving them a shorter amount of time in which to become infected), many health and HIV organizations are now promoting circumcision as a means of preventing HIV, and it seems like every newspaper and magazine in the United States has reported the findings as “promising.”

What has been left out of the medical and media reports is the curious fact that, worldwide, some of the countries that have the lowest rates of circumcision are also those that boast the lowest rates of...

By the time the supposed Black vs. gay war had been (re)launched following California's passage of 2008 Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marrage in the state, I was well aware of oppression within oppressed groups (I ranted back in Feburary about the problematic expression, "gay is the new black.")  In this post, I want to challenge the notion that being a minority automatically makes one empathetic toward other minority groups, and, further, that being a minority makes one immune to oppressing others.

As a young biracial gay feminist aspiring-vegetarian activist, I understood the experience of a minority to include empathy for other minorities and explicit efforts to challenge all forms of oppression.  In my case, being of color and gay meant being a feminist and actively challenging sexist oppression, as well as other forms of prejudice and discrimination.  This mindset continued into college, particularly when I shifted toward a queer identity.  I suppose it only took moving to Indiana and beginning...

Now 42 years ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down any remaining anti-miscegenation laws in the case Loving vs. Virginia, Mildred and Richard Loving’s challenge to the state of Virginia’s ban on the marriage between people of different races.  But, a recent Justice of the Peace’s denial of a Louisiana couple’s application for a marriage license indicates that the debates over interracial marriage are hardly over.

Keith Bardwell, a Louisiana justice of the peace, denied Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, an interracial couple, a marriage license citing concerns for their children.  The couple does not currently have children, so the justice is operating under the assumption that, once married, the couple would seek to have children, presumably through conception rather than adoption. ...

Proposition 8 passed in California on November 4th, 2008 and The Advocate released its issue #1021 in December 2008, featuring the text "Gay is the New Black" on its cover ... and I'm just now blogging about this all on February 16, 2009.  The issue remains: race and racism must be addressed among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communalities, sexuality and heterosexism must be addressed among communities of color, and the relationship between LGBTQ and communities of color must be assessed and improved.

I'm sure most people know the story by now: immediately following the November 4th election in the US, statistics were released indicating the passage of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in the state of California.  Included in these numbers were breakdowns by a variety of sociodemographic variables.  The number that caused quite a stir: an overwhelming majority of Black voters in CA approved the proposition.  These numbers were taken out of context, leading to an explicit blame for the proposition's passage on Black Americans.  Although later reports, including one from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, report a much lower percentage of Black voters who supported the proposition, the issue remains: racial hostility among LGBTQ people reared its ugly head.  Even today, with a much lower number of Blacks favoring the proposition's passage, critiques of...