Spreading Queer People of Color Exposure on Penn’s Campus
Devin Salazar ’14
Category Archives: Submissions
A Brown World
It is an interesting facet of language that, as much as it is used to bind groups of people together through history and “culture,” inherent in it is exclusion. To begin to deconstruct our identities, we must use language that forces us to create an outside world; we must first assess what we are not. How can we, as scholars, as thinkers, begin to understand a world that forces us to exclude ourselves from so much of it? While we can argue that there is only so much one can experience, there is a difference between saying that we have not experienced something and constructing an identity that excludes the possibility of such experience. Thus, I stand in opposition, not only to our languages, but to these very notions of exclusive identity. I stand Brown; not in color or race, but Brown in thought, in action, in motivation, and in ideology.
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Bridge to China
dad
Had a different way
of making flower rolls
My family was divided
over this
Eventually
mom learned to accept his way
over her father’s
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Rhythm of the Roots
The smallest pieces of the smallest place
And the writings that wrote us out
All the things erased
The lines that were drawn
And ties cut
Strings made into rope
That made the nooses
To strangle all things passionate and beautiful
And suffocate desire
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Through a “Western” Lens
From the time of first contact on the continent of Africa by Europeans centuries ago, the sexualities of Black people, and eventually other people of color, have been seen through a western European and, more recently, White North American lens. Africans were seen as essentially subhuman by their colonizers; they were seen as animals, parts of nature, and “since primitive man was supposed to be close to nature, ruled by instinct, and culturally unsophisticated, he had to be heterosexual, his sexual energies and outlets devoted exclusively to the ‘natural’ purpose: biological reproduction” (Murray and Roscoe xi). At the same time, sexuality was used as a marker of difference between Africans and Europeans:
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