This blog post and Instagram post tell the story of my journey through this course, as well as some of the most valuable lessons I feel I learned from it. The quotes that I have assembled here are a reflection on our entire semester, with a focus on recovery and reparation for colonial acts and ways to move forward. The theme is more of a “where do we go from here?” type thing than anything else, and I chose quotes that stuck out to me as reminders of what we can do in our day-to-day lives to resist/recognize the scourge of colonialism and its lingering impacts.
My journey through this course has been a really privileged one, as I’m a middle class white queer person– I have never had to deal with and never will have to deal with a lot of the sorts of oppression we have discussed. For this reason, it is all the more important for me to use my position to amplify and uplift the voices of oppressed folks around me.
The first quote sets the tone for the remainder of the piece, and is something that each of us should remind ourselves of every single day– no matter who we are, or where we are, we are living on indigenous land. (Our school is on Lenape land!) Recognizing this is vital to any decolonial study. The next quote, by Micha Ca’rdenas, recognizes transgender women of color as being perhaps the most marginalized group that we collectively must protect and share the voices of. My third quote, from María Lugones, illustrates that when we make the effort to travel to one another’s “worlds”, we can recognize, aid, and better love one another. (I do not love how this one turned out edit-wise, but Canva was frustrating me.) The next quote is also from Lugones, and emphasizes the importance of coalition building in the collective struggle to disrupt colonialism.
I wanted to incorporate poetic language into this essay as well, because art in addition to scholarly work is vital to our resistance. For this reason, my next slide is a quote from Anne Waters, recognizing her value as a lesbian of color who “refuses to be washed out.” I then picked a quote from the Young Lords Party, whose important work shows, again, the importance of collective efforts, and urges POC to use “[their] culture as a revolutionary weapon.” The seventh quote, also from the Lords (written by Iris Morales) points to the U.S. prison system as a “form of genocide” (which it is) and urges the reader to have discussions about dismantling this system– a theme that has begun to gain (relative, though not exact) traction in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, with the idea of restoring the voting rights of felons and freeing those convicted of non-violent drug offenses. I hope these discussions continue and lead to real action.
Photo 8 is a quote from Joanne Barker, emphasizing the importance of remapping indigenous folks onto their native lands. This call for, effectively, reparations and “social recontextualization” really stuck out to me as a major theme of our course and my own class learnings. The following photo furthers this point, with a quote from Gloria Anzaldúa- “This land was Mexican Once, was Indian always and is. And will be again.” Who could’ve put it better?
The final quote, I feel, really ties this whole project together, with my favorite reading so far in this course– and of course, it’s Remedios. Again, this quote emphasizes collective healing and collective action, for the betterment of all peoples. And that, right there, is the story I would like to tell.
As far as my process for this assignment, it was difficult to limit myself to one theme and to find quotes that played off of each other perfectly– especially when there were so many I wanted to use. However, I really enjoyed going back through our readings to find them, and think it worked out nicely.
