Introduction to the “Challenge” panel

During WOW 2000, on Saturday morning, August 5, there was a panel presentation on the theme of “Challenge” at WOW2000. The presenters were Gwynne Guibord, John Selders, Erin Swenson, Urvashi Vaid and Melanie Morrison (who also served as moderator). What follows is Melanie’s introduction to the panel and her presentation...

by Rev. Dr. Melanie Morrison
Saturday, August 5, 2000 (a plenary session on at the WOW 2000 conference)

The members of this panel have been invited to look within this welcoming movement and then name and discuss the barriers that divide us, the attitudes that diminish us, the behaviors that wound us, and the privileges and structural power that render some of us less visible than others.

I need to say that although this panel may be called a panel on “diversity,” the work of hearing each other across difference must not be limited to any one segment of this conference. Naming and addressing racism within our welcoming movement must become an abiding concern for each and every one of us. Tolonda eloquently and courageously challenged us to take up this work when she spoke to us this morning. She gave us all a great gift. I hope that this panel will continue the conversation she so bravely began.

Contrary to popular opinion, we who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered are not part of a culture. There is no such thing as the LGBT community. What gets mistaken for the LGBT community is a white, financially secure, more-able-to-be-out-and-visible group of LGBT people. But, in fact, we are many races, many classes, many cultures, many communities. We are, indeed, everywhere but we are often separated from each other by racism, ableism, and classism. Our experience of oppression and marginalization does not make us immune from oppressing and marginalizing others – including sisters and brothers within this movement.

The late poet, essayist, and activist Audre Lorde reminds us of this fact in the question she posed to a largely white women’s conference more than twenty years ago:

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

To become a fully welcoming movement, we need to be prepared for the winds of self-scrutiny to blow into every corner of our lives – those corners where we seek release from our oppressors and those corners where we may discover our oppressive heel print upon the face of others.

The people on this panel are going to invite us to engage in this kind of self-scrutiny. These panelists are people who, out of different contexts and communities, share the yearning and the conviction that this movement can become more inclusive, more just, more diverse, more complex, more colorful, more deviant, and more outrageous in the ways it transgresses the status quo.