Real Talk Episode 2: Althea and Kai on the Frictions of Solidarity

Introduction

Rev. Kai Greer and Rev. Dr. Althea Spencer-Miller discuss the frictions of solidarity across African American and immigrant Caribbean American Black political realities and within the whiteness of LGBTQIA+ church movements for LGBTQIA+ inclusion. This candid conversation dives into the shared cultural resources of blackness that can both fracture and affirm, and the scripture that encourages the queering racial justice movement work of journeying together.

Deepen Your UnderStanding and Strengthen Your Commitment to Faithful Action

Focusing

• Rev. Greer describes both finding solidarity in Black church community—“where home was to me”—while also facing denials of their full (queer-pastor-black) selfhood. List five insights that you discover through Rev. Greer’s articulation of this reality.

• What impedes you from remaining fully focused on Rev. Greer’s and Dr. Spencer-Miller’s experiences and analyses? What enables you to be more open to receiving and learning from them?

Strategizing

• When Dr. Spencer-Miller interrogates how the church LGBTQIA+ inclusion movement can feel “very White” or even “overlap with White masculine domination,” what feelings, questions, and issues come up for you that are related to your own community or church context?

• Thinking about the context of your own group, church, or community, name 2-3 specific strategies to address these concerns in ways that move racial justice forward without diminishing LGBTQIA+ inclusion and equality.

• Make a commitment to addressing one change item on your list. Break it down into the steps needed to make it happen, and schedule a timeline if needed.

Resources

Faith related resources:

• The Friends for Life podcast, hosted by Lisa Anderson and Macky Alston, two Black queer Christian leaders from Auburn Seminary. This podcast features "conversations on community, organizing, and resilience" structured as interviews of pairs of friends with questions about what is life-giving for them and what helps them to stay grounded and resilient. In the podcast's first episode, the hosts interview Raquel Willis and Rev. Lawrence Richardson. The episode is just under one hour long and explores initial grounding questions, including "who's got your back?" and moves into deeper questions: what strategic counsel do you have for leaders of faith and moral courage so that we can survive, thrive, and win in 2020 and beyond? 
  https://auburnseminary.org/friends/

• An interview with Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey on Womanist Queer Theology
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4k8yZ6iBds

• Organizations:

  • Many Voices: A Black Church Movement for Gay and Transgender Justice https://www.manyvoices.org/

  • TFAM Global - a Pan-African faith movement "connecting the radically inclusive Christian movement led by African Americans and our allies to communities in Africa and throughout the diaspora. We provide pastoral care for LGBTI people and support pioneering efforts to establish an open and affirming African Christian movement.” https://www.radicallyinclusive.org/global

  • MCC People of African Descent gatherings began in 1998. Check out the language of vision articulated in a 2017 MCC PAD conference announcement: https://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1101747410130&ca=e183da03-c28d-42f4-adcf-f9c74850c67a

Other excellent resources:

• “America for someone like me” - podcast on Blackness, anti-racism, solidarity, and internal community conversations
  https://www.wnyc.org/story/america-someone-me

• Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.
  Read the transcript:
  https://mocada-museum.tumblr.com/post/73421979421/revolutionary-hope-a-conversation-between-james)
  Listen to a reading of the majority of the conversation:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfP8OA8vu0.
  (The reading appears at time stamp 41:00-48:00.) This video records an event titled James Baldwin and Audre Lorde: A Revolutionary Hope, which was the inaugural event  of the Columbia University School of the Arts Ancestral Witnesses series. The video is 93 minutes in total and includes panel discussions and readings about the "intersections of religion and African American literature produced during the social upheavals of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and their aftermath." Topics include the role of religion in shaping ideas about Black liberation and Black literature.

• Black Feminism and the Movement for Black Lives: A panel at the LGBTQTask Force
  Listen: https://youtu.be/eV3nnFheQRo

• The Evolution of pride in the Caribbean.
  Listen to the Global Black Gay Pride Panel at:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTOyCmq9YE4

• bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue at The New School (2014)
  Listen: https://youtu.be/9oMmZIJijgY

• National Black Justice Coalition's Ubuntu biography project focuses on black communities and Black LGBTQ/SGL leaders by encouraging us to "celebrate the full diversity of Black history and people as we daily work together to support one another and build a more inclusive world for all."
  http://nbjc.org/ubuntu-partnership