"How We Are with Each Other": Conversations on Queer Healing and Black Liberation

Charlene has worked as a local and national organization builder, organizational development facilitator, and movement infrastructure builder. Qui has worked as a healing justice practitioner, community accountability process facilitator, as well as a transformative justice practice educator and trainer. Both of our work centers a Black queer feminist lens grounded in abolition praxis. Together we sat down to reflect on how we are with each other as comrades working in movements for Black liberation; and the lessons we've learned doing that work over the past fifteen years.

What are some foundational elements of being in right-relationship with our comrades?

Qui D. Alexander [QDA]:

I've been thinking a lot about trust. So much of the conflict that we have in movement is because people don't trust each other. I don't always see efforts in organizing spaces to do trust-building work together; there's an assumption that if we organize together we already trust each other. Part of that trust-building is recognizing that you're gonna disappoint people. There's no such thing as being a perfect organizer; like you're never going to make mistakes, or you're never going to hurt someone, those things are inevitable, even if they are not intentional. What we must be grounded in is how we react and respond to those actions. That is the practice: you mess up, you repair, you rebuild, and keep moving, which is so important for building trust.

I think vulnerability is also part of that practice. We're often taught vulnerability makes us weak or allows us to be taken advantage of. In a world where we've had to protect ourselves from state violence, anti-Black racism, and all these other systems of oppression we end up in a fraught relationship with vulnerability. I think it takes vulnerability to say I fucked up, these are the ways I fucked up and this is what I am going to do about it. I think the hesitancy comes from the fear that our organizing will not be taken seriously or our work is being questioned. But I think that the ability to be vulnerable with people is important for our organizing.

Charlene A. Carruthers [CAC]:

I totally agree with you. What I often-times see in movement spaces, especially those that are for trans and queer folk, is something that's called vulnerability but it's really a verbal diarrhea of trauma: "I'm just gonna spill out everything that has ever happened to me." Everything. And that's me being vulnerable because I'm sharing with you all the terrible things that have happened in my life. And what I learned from listening to Brené Brown is that vulnerability is about tapping into yourself. It is a call for a certain level of honesty, for the sake of what you're trying to build with other people for the sake of a relationship.¹ We can ask: what is it that I need to share to show up as myself for the sake of the kind of relationships we're building with each other? In movement, it has to be about the type of work we're trying to do.

Do I need to know every single painful thing that has happened to you in your life? No. What I may want to know is something that has happened to you that has taught you something or something that connects to something that I have shared so that we can maybe relate to one another on some level, and me admitting that I don't have the answer, or I don't know what to do, or I didn't know what to do is a type of vulnerability. It's an opening of myself, not of my story and what happened to me because I'm not what happened to me. I'm not what happened to me. I am not what people have told me. I'm a reflection of...