• ELIXHER
• On August 22, 2013

As we gear up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, LGBT publication MetroWeekly chatted with advocate Aisha Moodie-Mills, an out lesbian, about how far we’ve come since the historic event. Check out an excerpt below. Read the full piece here:

That is, however, hardly the end of this dynamo’s résumé. You might catch her and her wife, Danielle Moodie-Mills, on their fun and informed weekly Politini podcast. Speaking of her wife, this couple’s D.C. marriage was made possible, in part, by work they did securing marriage equality for the District. And maybe you caught the couple’s Aug. 16 piece for The Washington Post? Or Aisha Moodie-Mills’s column in The Atlantic assessing the Supreme Court’s rulings on marriage equality and voting rights?

From Capitol Hill to popular culture, Moodie-Mills is seizing the stage with her brand of progressive politics and activism. Inarguably, she is carrying forward the torch that shined brightly Aug. 28, 1963.

MOODIE-MILLS: I’ve always pushed back against folks who talk about the Civil Rights Movement and talk about this march as exclusively about rights for black people. This was also about economic justice, about the fact that here we are, a community being disenfranchised, and we’re also poor as a result. So, if we had some economic stability, if we could get onto the rungs of the middle class, that would improve some of our condition.

Economic justice should be a critical priority of the LGBT community, as well. By almost every metric LGBT families, families raising children – particularly those of color – are more likely to be living in poverty than anybody else in America. Same-sex families, particularly lesbians of color who are raising children in the South, have a major issue. We have allowed our movement to become so upper-middle-class, dominated by this kind of myth of gay affluence, that we miss the mark in talking about economic security and economic justice.

Editor’s Note: Aisha and her wife, Danielle, write ELIXHER Magazine’s “10 Things That Have Us Talking” column. Check it out in our summer issue here.