We are not free until all of us are free - Why does Johnson suggest that quare folks cannot afford to exclude even their homophobic family members from their alliances?
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Quare is a term that articulates identities, especially across race and class. As individuals living in systems that are dominated by white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, quare folk have a special relationship with identity, both to their queerness and racialisation. In his paper on Quare Studies, Johnson elaborates all the lessons on queerness and Black queer identity that he has learnt from his homophobic grandmother. People of colour, queer or not, have often found themselves outside the norms and values of dominant society, which has led to the suppression or negation of their legal, social, and physical relationships and rights (Cohen). Being a person of colour, especially Black, in an extremely white supremacist society, often feels like an uphill battle where one must fight constantly for their humanity. This is why quare folk cannot afford to exclude their heterosexual and even homophobic siblings from their fight for liberation. It is white supremacy that has broken down communities of colour for generations, ravaging us, leaving us poor, and devoid of humanity in the eyes of dominant white society. White supremacy is responsible for social ills like misogyny and queerphobia in our communities, they are not endemic to us as White society would like to have us believe. Quaring all disciplines and identities whether racial, class or gender, is important because it helps us articulate key differences that would not be done under queer theory - differences in experience that are unique to being racially marginalized. Our siblings, queer or not, are all suffering under white supremacy and colonialism, so we cannot exclude them from our lives or our fight. Even in the case where homophobia is evident, it doesn’t negate one’s fights against racism, classism and misogyny, as Johnson mentions about his grandmother (Johnson, 130). At the same time, it is important to call out and root out homophobia within communities of colour, both through academic credentials and political praxis (Johnson, 148).
I would like to add that answering this prompt motivated me to think about the material that I had read in Homa Hoodfar’s paper, where she mentioned how Muslim women have to constantly pick a battle between fighting sexism or racism owing to the false constructs created by Western colonial society about themselves and their communities. It is this Orientalist and racist construction that chooses us to pick a battle when the actual war is against White supremacy.