Some valuable excerpts from the article “Civil rights leader David Johns is fighting to reclaim the future for Black & queer America” in LGBTQ Nation:
“
“People forget that democracies have to be defended by each generation and that education is its midwife.”
…
“Culture wars are manufactured to drive wedges” within coalitions working toward shared progressive goals, Johns said, and to “spur misinformation and disinformation, to have people believing their privilege protects them from the assaults that so many of us have experienced.”
…
In recent years, the far right has aimed its cannons at attacking Americans who are gender nonconforming, who complicate the assumed and enforced narrative of a rigid gender binary. Johns thinks we could all take a page from Somй in embracing and acknowledging gender nonconforming people as those who have found liberatory fulfillment within an existence characterized by liminality by seeking and celebrating the fuzziness of straddling worlds, communities, and identities.
…
MAGA fascism remixes Jim Crow authoritarianism with xenophobia, antisemitism, and the moral and sexual panic of McCarthyism. It thrives on a blinkered individualism that counts “do your own research” as its rallying cry, embracing the might of terrorism as its enforcement mechanism. It engineers a false sense of unity through the creation of a common enemy (anyone whose identities would place them under the umbrella of “woke” or “DEI,” its adopted terms of derision). It is a politic of isolation, dissatisfaction, and demagoguery. But it is not new, nor is it insurmountable.
The most effective methods for subverting its power and its violence, Johns asserts, are the classics, […] including community, mutual aid, doing away with colonialist ideas that “access to anything is based on a state-sanctioned relationship between heterosexual people.”
…
“If we don’t do this better together, then we all suffer the consequences, and so many of us will die,” Johns warned. “… We have better odds of surviving this hunger game if we all go together. And so my hope is that that lesson from our ancestors would be a compelling one.”
“
[from the article “Civil rights leader David Johns is fighting to reclaim the future for Black & queer America” in LGBTQ Nation]
The Little Prince and the Fox 