“As a Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother of two including one boy and member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself part of some group in which the majority defines me as deviant, difficult, inferior or just plain "wrong".
From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppressions."
- Audre Lorde, “There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions”
A debate has been sparked over the claim that the Orlando Massacre in which 50 individuals – mostly queer, Latinx identifying – were slain early Sunday morning. As a Black, queer woman, I am having intense internal conflict about where I stand in this debate, so I have decided to write this article in an attempt to work through my thoughts and feelings:
I think that it's incredibly important to question and complicate the ways in which the dominant media is framing this massacre: Why is this penned as the "deadliest" mass shooting in US history when a quick Google search will show that that is historically inaccurate? What are the implications of that? It is possible, even likely, that the language used to frame the Orlando massacre is a reflection of the amount of value that society -- more specifically the mostly white authors of these articles -- puts on certain individual's lives and histories. The Orlando Massacre being defined as "the worst" massacre in US history is not only historically inaccurate, but is also incredibly disrespectful to the victims of these other massacres. Implicitly or explicitly making a value judgment about the severity of a massacre is inherently making a value judgment about its victims.
You. cannot. erase. Black. history.
You cannot erase Black lives.
On the other hand, as a Black Facebook commenter and English professor pointed out to me, there is a nuance between between the terms “massacre” and “mass shooting”. According to him, the difference is that a mass shooting is when “one assailant is the culprit”. If this is true, it is a problem that the two terms are being used interchangeably in the media right now. It is a problem because of the ways in which the dominant often intentionally frames things in a way that obscures both history and truth. Likewise, it necessary to acknowledge that it is not only the dominant, right-wing media that is guilty of this, as shown by following post that I saw in the Black Studies & Critical Thinking Facebook group.
While I am not sure about the other un-cited figures, I know for a fact that the figure for the 1919 Elaine Massacre (referred to here as the "Arkansas massacre") is definitely inflated - historians argue that there were somewhere between 100 and 300 Black victims, not 854.
I am incredibly wary of the ways in which certain Black nationalists have been perverting my previous argument to justify their homophobia, spread hate speech, and devalue the lives of the mostly queer individuals that were taken in Orlando.
At the same time, I do see how this argument can be read as a detraction from the event at hand.
I just received a tweet from a guy back home saying that it was homophobic and queer-erasing for me to ask "Do the 100+ Black lives that were taken in the Elaine Massacre in 1919 matter or is it only a massacre when there are non-Black victims?"
This is one of the instances in which two of my identities -- my Blackness and queer-ness -- are clashing and I do not know what to believe. Honestly, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, which I recognize is kind of a cop-out argument. Never the less, I think that the only way that I can negotiate these two intersecting, and sometimes conflicting, identities is by acknowledging both of them.
It is absolutely possible and necessary to discuss the Orlando massacre and mourn the lives of the mostly queer victims without using evaluate statements like “deadliest” or “worst”.
