November Carnival of Aces

[cinnamon_possum]

Some Activism Should Not be Invisible

This month's Carnival of Aces is being hosted by Siggy over at the Asexual Agenda blog, and the theme is Invisible Activism. 

• Even if activism is ultimately intended to promote visibility, some of the underlying work is not visible.  What does that invisible labor look like?
• Is there any form of activism that you think has largely been invisible?

Much of the activism work I do is visible - whether it be public speaking, writing about personal experiences, or simply being present and active in the community, I have felt obligated to maintain a public presence and be a visible activist. Part of this is because I want to, and I have the skills to do so, but it would be remiss to not discuss how I feel pressured to do so. The aro and ace communities are heavily white, and as a Black aroace I feel both internal and external pressure to play the role of the one Black aspec. The external pressure maybe isn't as bad as the internal, as I've met a fair amount of ace and aro activists who don't even notice the lack of people of color at the table. 

For the activists who do notice this lack, I think the term "invisible activism" would be accurate in describing what they do to resolve it. Efforts to find more people of color to join their efforts are rarely or barely public. It's instead discussed behind the scenes, or in a space with other established activists, rather than where POC might hear it and feel 1) encouraged by the efforts being put forth by white activists and 2) encouraged to reach out and provide their insight and perspective. As someone who is already involved in ace and aro activism, I am used to people encouraging me specifically to do more things because of my position as a POC, but I am one person with one perspective, and cannot provide all of the diverse insight that this community needs. This is both because my perspective is limited, because POC is an umbrella term that includes a lot of people, and because I am literally one person. The insular nature of current ace and aro activism means has shown me that there are very few POC currently involved, and very few are joining. 

The privacy and invisibility of these integrative efforts present some major hindrances. It makes it look like these activists are doing nothing. As a Black person, I have very little interest in reaching out to white people and asking if they've considered that their activism efforts have been exclusionary and segregated. Their possible answers will fall into one of three categories: yes they know and they don't care, no they don't know and they need it explained to them why that's an issue, yes they know and they're working on it. That leaves only a 33% chance that any offer I make would be well received. It is more likely that I will have to either go through the emotional effort of being on the receiving end of racism (because yes, acting like a community advocate and not paying attention to the racial diversity in said community is racism/white privilege at work), or the effort involved with explaining the importance and relevance of intersectionality to people who may have never considered it. Neither of these are appealing, and it's not fair to expect POC to subject themselves to this in an effort to make connections with other activists. It's something that, to some extent, is unavoidable and has to be done anyways, so creating a situation in which it's really hard to understand what exactly you are walking into with a specific activist or organization is further exhausting the few activists of color a community might have. 

Making it difficult for POC to further their involvement and leaving it ambiguous as to whether you want them around at all is not what any facet of the queer community needs from their activists, and particularly not something the ace and aro communities can afford. One of the very first interactions I had with the online asexual community was seeing a widely circulated Tumblr post claiming that asexuality upheld white supremacy. Another common piece of rhetoric I remember was how asexuality was "just" white people "trying" to be oppressed. This idea of asexuality being by and for white people is fairly prevalent, and something I see discussed a lot among aspec POC. When I've heard it discussed among white aspecs, it's generally as a direct response to the "trying to be oppressed" accusation, to which they either respond without any mention of intersectional oppression or they use intersectionality as a prop to make their point. The nuances of identifying as asexual while also being a POC are almost always completely ignored, with more lip service given to how asexuality is white and how white people are dealing with it. This is not actually providing resources for POC to come to terms with their ace or aro identity. This is not providing useful discussion for activists of color to build off of. This does not even create conversation that aspecs of color can join. 

The current lack of POC in aspec activism and the invisibility of efforts to reach out to them means that any discussion happening around whiteness and racism in the community centers white people, which are not the people who need to be centered if the goal is the desegregate the community and make activist efforts more representative of the people they are allegedly advocating for. To be clear, there are already people of color in the ace and aro communities, they do not need to be recruited in, they actually need to be included and represented in advocacy work. It is the nature of activism that some of it will always be invisible. I'm not asking that TAAAP livestreams all of our meetings. I'm maybe asking that AVEN at least lets us know what they're doing*. I am saying that as a black person who has become involved with both ace and aro activism, and frequently feels "required" to be a very public activist due to the lack of visibility of POC in these communities, that it is not enough to simply hope for more POC to become visible aspec activists. It is not enough to discuss it in your private meetings and then never do anything about it. For simplicity's sake, here are some actionable things that an organization or individual activist can do to further racial equity in their own work:

• Make a public post on social media that they aim to advocate for people of all ethnicities in their community, and that they are accepting advice on how to better do so.
• Respectfully reach out to individual POC in that community to ask for input.
• ^^ When doing so, make sure to be asking input on something specific, such as an event that is being planned or materials being written.
• ^^ Understand that asking POC to put in this kind of work is labor, and they deserve respect, professionalism, and compensation for it. 
• When holding in-person events or localized virtual meetups, consider making a land acknowledgement.
• When creating resources such as blog posts or glossaries, have a diverse group of beta/sensitivity readers.
• When a racialized tragedy occurs, such as the murder of a black person by police or the drilling of sacred land for oil, reach out to relevant organizations to see what can be done to help. Sharing a donation link and news article explaining the event to social media is reasonable.
• If your work is currently centered around white people, or all organizers in the organization are white, make public statements reflecting on why that is and how you hope to do better.
• ^^ An example of this is admitting that most people recruited were in one social group and that group was predominantly white, and that more work needs to be done to reach out to groups that gather in other spaces and attract different kinds of people.
• Be willing to form coalitions with other organizations and activists that have a different focus. If an organization centered on queer liberation forms a coalition with an organization centered on justice and equity for Black Americans, this can open the door to a lot of impactful work and dialogue. 
• Publicly address days and months such as Black History Month, National Day of Mourning, and Hispanic History Month. This can be as simple as a retweet. 
• Share the voices of activists of colors by linking to their blog posts, inviting them to conferences, recommending them to event organizers, and engaging with them on social media. 
• Be willing to try, be willing to make mistakes, be willing to take criticism.
  

Activism, especially when visible and open to critique, is very hard, but an equitable world will not happen on its own. Making ace community spaces inclusive and useful for aces of color will not happen over night, and can not happen if activists think that they are too busy, too uninformed, or worse, too white to do anything about it. The community was made white. The activism that has been done so far has lead to an image of the community that is white. It has to be remade into something else. This is not the kind of work that best happens behind closed doors or alone. This is the kind of work that needs to be visible - white aces cannot cure the whiteness of this community on their own.

--

Here's a Carnival of Aces that specifically focused on the intersection between asexuality and race/ethnicity. Only 4 of the 10 submissions are about non-white experiences. 

Here's a few Black ace experiences (one, two). Here's a few Asian ace experiences (one, two, three). Here's a piece on colonization and asexuality and another on white supremacy and sexuality in general. Here's an post addressing the construal of the ace community as white by aphobes.

*Allegedly AVEN is doing something to address racism?? This is something I've heard mentioned but have seen not an ounce of. Uncertain if the people I heard this from were collapsing AVEN's response to something else with "dealing with racism", or if AVEN made some statement about addressing racism and then retreated to their top secret HQ. 

As a general note, in my personal writing I use aspec to mean ace, aro, their spectrums, and the ways that they overlap. I also recognize that there is heavy overlap with aplatonic and agender identities. Lastly, I always use ace and aro to include the spectrums by default - I do not divide aromanticism or asexuality from the spectrum of gray experiences attached to them. 

Comments

[sennkestra]

Thank you for writing this post!

Regarding this part: "*Allegedly AVEN is doing something to address racism?? This is something I've heard mentioned but have seen not an ounce of. "

Was this maybe from someone thinking of Yasmin Benoit? She's technically a member of the AVEN Board of Directors, and she's a black ace who has spoken out about her own personal experiences being black and ace, including dealing with racism in ace spaces. However, I get the impression she (and some other members of the board, like DJ) are not actually that closely involved with AVEN in terms of day-to-day operations, so I don't think I'd associate any of that with AVEN as an organization, although I can see how someone would think so if they weren't as familiar with the weirdness of AVEN's structure. I'm also not aware of any other race-related projects at AVEN.

[sennkestra]

(Actually, I guess there was also an Aces & Ethnicity panel at the AVEN-hosted UK AceCon this summer, so maybe that could be what the person you spoke to was thinking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOoPIJ61Yhg&ab_channel=AVENLivestreams)

[cinnamon_possum]

That would make sense. It may have been a statement from her or a statement from AVEN in solidarity with her? Probably something vague that the people I've heard from then extrapolated on to mean something else.
And I have seen that panel and I was happy they included that category at AceCon :)

[packbat]

That bit about the Carnival of Aces on asexuality and race/ethnicity just makes me feel so disheartened.