After reading the Kvansy & Igwe and Banks articles for class and attending the Join the Impact rally for gay marriage on Saturday with John Oddo and Lindsay Bennett AND having a conversation with my boyfriend, I realized a number of things: (1) to have any impact as social agents we need to build coalitions among minorities (minority-to-minority) and majorities (minority-majority); (2) computer technology is an effective way to create agency and activism. Kvansy & Igwe discuss how the Black community responded to the AIDS crisis which disproportionately affects them, especially women of color. Acknowledging the role of the church in the community (and Civil Rights activism), Kvansy & Igwe show how silence operates because of sex in prisons and gay black men (especially those on the DL). They also show the community on the blog critiquing this silence. Silence, as Eve Sedgewick points out in her Epistemology of the Closet, renders LGBT individuals invisible through the construction of the “closet,” a discursive epistemological structure.
Interlude: I was so disheartened when I heard that members of the LGBT community where attacking black voters and Mormons for the passing of Proposition 8 in California, which took the right of gays and lesbians to marry away after the Supreme Court granted them that right earlier this year. This type of blaming and overt racism only serves to divide us even more—obviously because there are LGBT persons of color!! The Join the Impact rallies explicitly denounced this racism and called for conversations and peaceful organizing (I do have some reservations about the goal of the rallies and the methods, but I will save those for anyone who is interested off the blog).
The issues of AIDS and silence are sites where coalitions can be forged. AND this can be done using writing technologies online like BlackPlanet and JoinTheImpact.com. JoinTheImpact was started by two women (Willow Witte and Amy Balliet) as a grassroots website calling for rallies to protest the passing of Prop 8. They built the Website on Nov. 7 and the rallies happened nationwide on Nov. 15!! They used facebook and twitter as well as the main website, which had a blog. The use of these writing technologies and the historical conditions (the passing of Prop 8, which angered many) mobilized people across the nation and in ten other countries to hold rallies at the same time.
The discursive and rhetorical strategies that Banks celebrates in the BlackPlanet website, such as tonal semantics and sermonic tone, are great for disrupting our notions of Standard English and how we teach composition courses (as well as how African Americans use technology with/for identity practices). There is more that can be done. The Barbara Jordan / Bayard Rustin Coalition is an example of African American and LGBT coalitions. Two prominent lesbian and gay (respectively) political leaders. What would happen if we used writing technologies to mobilize against the AIDS crisis, which crosses multiple boundaries (not just Black and queer) in the same way that JoinTheImpact did?
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