More States Allowing Same-Sex Marriage

The momentum for same sex marriages continues after a federal judge declares Pennsylvania’s same sex marriage ban unconstitutional. What does this ruling mean for the overall movement? A panel, including Politini co-host and ELIXHER Magazine columnist Aisha Moodie-Mills, discusses.

Via MSNBC.

The Intersection of Racism, Homophobia

There’s good news and bad, as is always the case with LGBT rights issues. With D.C. Black Pride in full swing this weekend and the country reeling from the latest eruption of ugly racism — Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s comments and bewildering CNN interview — and homophobia — the reaction to out football player Michael Sam, who kissed his boyfriend in a clip shown on ESPN last week — illustrate how thorny life can be at the intersection of the black, LGBT experience.

“I wouldn’t even call these isolated little pockets,” says Sharon Lettman-Hicks, an LGBT ally and executive director and CEO of National Black Justice Coalition. “[This is] the 60th anniversary of the Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling and it’s very clear that structural racism does still exist and African Americans deal with it everyday in some form or fashion of their everyday lives. For Donald Sterling to be talking to a person of color in those terms shows an attitude that’s deeply steeped in an attitude of superiority, to use this boy dynamic in how he characterized a grown black man, it’s just deeply steeped in structural racism.”

Continue reading over at the Washington Blade.

CeCe McDonald Shares The Struggles Of Being A Trans Woman In A Male Prison Facility

Transgender activist CeCe McDonald was sentenced to 41 months in prison for manslaughter after a racist and transphobic attack against her turned deadly. She joined HuffPost Live to talk about what it was like to serve her time in a men’s prison.

McDonald joined HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill to describe how she, acting in self-defense, stabbed someone who had been verbally and physically assaulting her. She said she would have been victimized for being trans regardless of whether she was in a men’s or women’s facility.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

On bell, Beyonce, and Bullshit

Out of respect for elders, I haven’t been pressed to weigh in on why the venerable bell hooks might find it reasonable to refer to Beyoncé as a terrorist.

Yet, I felt compelled to respond this morning, after reading this piece from Rev. Osagyefo Sekou at Truth-Out.org, that indicts an entire generation of Black intellectuals for apparently “believ[ing] that the system is a good system that only needs to provide greater access to the historically othered.” Who exactly are these people who believe this liberal claptrap?

Because of this alleged belief in the “goodness” of our current racist, capitalist, patriarchal effed up system, we supposedly “rush to defend the black embodiments of neoliberalism Obama and Beyoncé.” This generation of Black intellectuals apparently “directs its fever-pitched critique at the blatant racist and sexist actions of individuals while it is unable to articulate the ways in which Beyoncé and Obama undermine the very possibility of anti-neoliberal discourse.”

Continue reading Professor Crunk’s commentary on the Crunk Feminist Collective.