Race in the LGBT community: As we fight the world’s prejudices, do we still need to face our own?

After a series of town hall meetings for African-American and Latino community input, One Colorado launched the People of Color Caucus, a focus group with regular meetings to generate recommendations and process community perceptions among LGBT people of color, organized and co-founded by Cristina Aguilar and Karen Collier.

“Originally we used to be called the T-POC [Transgender and LGBTQ People of Color] caucus. There was desire for continued dialogue, to discuss issues that weren’t specific to an individual community,” Aguilar said. “It came out of not only the survey but the communities that wanted to come together.”

Aguilar and Collier continued to coordinate town hall meetings and community discussions, including a breakout group discussing ways to challenge racism in the LGBTQ movement at a summit last September for people of color.

As part of that conversation, Collier said, the breakout group formulated a vision: “What does our dream for our movement look like?” – reflecting the issues LGBT people of color said they had faced. Among the goals were equal access to services and housing and acknowledgment of cultural diversity instead of “colorblindness.”

“I think these responses, in the context of visioning how our lives could be ‘better,’ exhibit the sense that, one, access or the lack of it is unfairly based on financial and social wherewithal,” Collier said, “and that, two, ‘colorblindness’ is an oppressive way of viewing a person or group because it encourages devaluing and overlooking part or all of one’s identity.”

Aguilar said, “The racism in the LGBT movement is no different from racism outside the LGBT movement. There is, however, an additional stigma that comes along with it – people of color have not only the minority label that comes from being a person of color but also from being LGBT-identified.” That includes prejudice and stigma driven by people in the LGBT community itself. “We wouldn’t be doing this work if there wasn’t a lack of awareness that this issue exists, or an invisibility factor,” she said.

“No one really wants to have to own up to the reality that they may be struggling with their own issues with oppression,” Collier added. “It’s not a very popular thing – or a very accepted thing to admit to being racist. But we haven’t been working on racism [as a society] long enough for it to not be true.”

“I think it’s important to say that racism is not necessarily an intentional act,” Collier went on. Yet, “it feels that way and looks that way when you’re encountering it.”

At a recent function, Collier said, she noticed that at a large fundraising auction sold items attached to prices that many people in attendance likely could not afford.

“Events are strategically planned to raise money,” she said, and often the largest LGBT fundraising events are high-dollar events. “I wonder sometimes if the means of people of color are considered.”

Aguilar said, “To build on what Karen said, one of the things we’ve worked on is access points and sliding scales.”

In a world where “racist” is often perceived as a crude insult or cuss word regardless of how it was intended, Collier and Aguilar both seemed to express that their emphasis in combating racism is more on educating the willing than shaming them.

And white LGBT people have a model for playing a positive role – familiarity with the concept of allies.

“Part of why we have the Ally Awards annual event is to honor people who have the courage to come forward in support of the LGBTQ community,” Collier said. “It may be that their beliefs or lack of exposure to people of color is not as positive or ‘politically correct’ as it could be. But being able to talk about it gets it on the table. There’s some discomfort coming to the table for fear of being ‘exposed as racist,’ but it’s really more about sharing in a philosophical conversation; finding a way to heal the scourge of racism is not staying stuck on the idea that someone is racist. It is dealing with the institution of racism or oppression as it plays out in our experiences.”