Proud Pauli

Pride Month may be officially over (though, given Queer Standard Time, it will continue to play through the end of the week here at Surrenders because we still haven’t passed the Equality Act so at very least we get a couple extra days in lieu of full civil rights…) Also, any time is a good time to learn about our badass queer elders.

The thing about history is it always matters who gets to tell theirs. Whose stories do we uplift and whose lives do we ignore? The answer is painfully obvious to anyone paying any kind of attention. Straight white men have always had their history told. But women? POC? Queer people? Gender non-conforming folks? Yeah, good luck with that. So learning about our true history and respecting our trailblazing queer elders is largely up to us. So it’s exciting to see Pauli Murray – a Black non-binary legal scholar who influenced legal greats like Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – finally get their due.

I think we can all relate to their simple desire for a better, kinder, more equal world. A world where we are all free to be our most authentic selves. A country that won’t fight against our most basic humanity. How remarkable to be able to express all this so convincingly in a culture that did not even have the words yet to describe how they truly felt about themselves.

One need only look at the current totally manufactured and completely racist right-wing campaign against Critical Race Theory to realize how crucial an accurate telling of history is in our everyday lives. A whole political party right now is trying to tell you that America is not, and never has been, a racist country. So they are doing everything in their power to make sure their false history is taught instead. Because who gets to tell their history helps shape what the world will look like in the future. And, honestly, they would rather not share. Too many would rather we didn’t tell the truth about ourselves, so that they may continue to ignore and forget the hard work and harder battles that got us to where we are today. Our union may still be imperfect, but we wouldn’t make the progress we have without those the history books routinely leave out. Happy Bonus Pride Days, kittens.