Queerness Demands Antiracism
June 17, 2024
A Conversation with Dr. Rolf Nolasco and Dr. Jennifer Harvey
By Benjamin Perry
“It’s not a well-kept secret that queer hierarchy is very racialized—white gays are at the top, Black and brown bodies are at the bottom.” Dr. Rolf Nolasco’s tone is blunt when assessing how this system afflicts LGBTQIA+ folks of color. As Professor of Spiritual Formation and Pastoral Theology at Garrett, and the author of Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul, he is deeply troubled by harm reverberating in communities who profess a commitment to liberation. “Within queer culture, we encounter the MEOWs–moneyed, educated, ostensibly cis-white males who sit at the apex, and their agenda usually takes primacy,” he explains. “This privileged position grants them many choices, while others are only given one–either to live while staying in the closet or be surveilled, incarcerated, or die.”
This, he says, is the problem with any queer ethic that reduces LGBTQIA+ liberation to just questions about sexuality and gender. “In this stratified existence, it is easier for those at the top to be blinded by their own myopic gay agenda and become oblivious to or dismissive of the plight of those at the bottom, like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan,” he says. “Queerness isn’t just about sexuality. It is about interrogating every system and structure of hierarchy and oppression—whether it has to do with one’s sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, class, religion, or the color of your skin .” Indeed, those of us who have spent significant time in LGBTQIA+ subcultures often witness how concerns about sexuality and gender can be weaponized to avoid discussing race. There are so many threats facing our community, this distorted rationale contends, that we can’t become distracted or divided by antiracist concerns. “Sometimes as a community, we are so focused and attentive only to issues around queer sexuality that we ignore the larger socio-political and cultural forces that shape the conversation,” Dr. Nolasco says. “In the process, we replicate or reproduce the kind of oppression from which we’re trying to free ourselves.”
In her new book Antiracism as Daily Practice: Refuse Shame, Change White Communities, and Help Create a Just World, Dr. Jennifer Harvey wrestles with how white people are called to resist white racialization. Professor of Christian Ethics at Garrett, her work explores how this question fundamentally shapes what it means for white people to live an ethical life—LGBTQIA+ white people very much included. “Queerness and antiracism are not proxies for one another,” Dr. Harvey says. “We can’t even necessarily use the word ‘community’ when we’re talking about multiracial groups of people, because community is not a foregone conclusion if antiracism isn’t part of the central work happening in a space among queer folks.” She points to the dynamics Dr. Nolasco describes—when antiracism is treated like a distraction—as forces that inhibit true communal life. “The moment I say, ‘Let’s just focus on queerness,’ my whiteness is crystal clear,” she says. “Any time our dominant identity is not explicitly subjected to scrutiny, it will be operative in the room.”
Queer white people must develop our moral muscles for antiracist work just as diligently as we develop queer ethics, Dr. Harvey explains. To these ends, she suggests folks reflect on our own experiences of coming out. “Coming out as queer required our willingness to take risks, even in spaces where we were then imperiled or at the cost of losing relationships that matter to us,” she says. “I, like many people, lost family members when I came out. The only way you find the courage to face that kind of loss is because you get in touch with the possibility of the love and liberation that may come on the other side of such a decision.” In the same way that out queer people recognized our silence as something that inhibited life, Dr. Harvey says we must understand whiteness as similarly destructive. “White supremacy is death-dealing for all of us,” she observes. “Until I’ve been in truly celebratory, multiracial space where justice is in the air, I actually don’t know in my body what it feels like to live outside the oppressive system of whiteness and white supremacy–what it might feel like to learn to choose against whiteness.”
While wholeheartedly in agreement, Dr. Nolasco points out that—when white queer people enter antiracist coalitions—there is a real danger for folks to behave in ways that reinforce white supremacy instead of dismantling it. “It’s fascinating to see how white folks take up so much space and time in their activist work,” he notes wryly. “Frequently, queer people of color are invisibilized even within liberatory spaces.” He suggests that part of white people’s work is to intentionally decenter their voices. “White folks need to knowingly and humbly recede into the background and for us people of color to take up space fiercely and unapologetically” he offers. This posture of humility is not, however, an excuse for apathy, and part of what Dr. Harvey outlines in her book are practical strategies to stay engaged without overstepping our roles. “How do we come into consciousness without getting overly self-involved?” she asks. “We need to show up in spaces where people of color are leading justice movements and do what is asked with an active posture of, ‘I am here to support, amplify, and be a willing participant in the labor that leaders tell me must be done.’”
A common thread between both professors’ thinking is how antiracism is queerness followed to its faithful conclusion. “Our queerness signals an ongoing quest for flourishing and liberation in all aspects of our existence, that it is already happening, albeit fragmentarily.” Dr. Nolasco notes. “Queerness embraces all.” And for white people, Dr. Harvey notes, transgressing the expectations of whiteness is fundamentally related to transgressing boundaries of sexuality and/or gender. “When you live in an oppressive structure that demands a false, constraint filled, and oppressive definition of who you are, queering those expectations is what it means to proclaim freedom,” she says. “Antiracism is the queerest part of my life: the possibility of community instead of hierarchy dictating who we are.”
For LGBTQIA+ people of faith, antiracism is queer theology, too. “It’s very spiritual for me,” Dr. Nolasco says. “It’s tied to believing in a queer God, unleashing the queer Spirit to set our hearts ablaze so we can be free in this world, participating in God’s ongoing liberation.” Part of what he hopes to offer in Hearts Ablaze are parables deliberately crafted to give queer folks of color spiritual sustenance, bread for their journey. “We must create spaces where we rehearse and lean into what it is like to live in abundance,” he says. “The interior life is very important to the kind of exterior life we wish to live.” Dr. Harvey offers robust agreement. “When we experience something different, it feeds the moral, physical, emotional and spiritual hunger for a better world,” she says. “Whiteness tells us who we are through binaries, hierarchy and oppression. Queerness is a willingness to disrupt all of that.”
Click here to purchase Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul. Antiracism As Daily Practice: Refuse Shame, Change White Communities, and Help Create a Just World will be published July 16, 2024. It is available for pre-order now wherever books are sold.