When people think of Black LGBT history, they tend to start and finish with Stonewall. It was vital to LGBT liberation, but in dealing with the history of the Black LGBT community, we need to go back further to the 1920s, hrough the civil rights movement, the AIDS epidemic and up to today.
Ranging from baggy jeans to bucket hats, hoop earrings to lettuce trim tops, there are so many overlooked fashion trends that have been made and set by the Black community and we need to give them the recognition they deserve.
Mary Seacole was born as Mary Jane Grant over 200 years ago in Kingston, Jamaica. While her mother was Black Caribbean, her father was white and so she was born a free person, unlike most Black Jamaicans of the time. When she was young she learnt Caribbean medicine from her mother (a doctress), mainly practicing on animals such as dogs and birds. Her mother owned a boarding house called Blundell Hall, and from the age of 12 Mary began to help run it and care for many of its injured inhabitants.
Science is something that is sometimes overlooked when discussing the idea of race as we get swept up in identity politics. Since the Human Genome Project made it possible to examine human ancestry in much more detail and the ways that humans migrated out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago to all parts of the world, it has shown the idea of race to be much more of a social construct that a biological one. ‘Race’ cannot be biologically defined due to genetic variation among human individuals and populations. The concept of the ‘five races’ (African, European, Native American and Oceanian) is now outdated as it was shown there is far greater genetic variation within these ‘races’ than between them. I think this is quite a unifying discovering as scientists have proven we are much more scientifically similar than many would have thought despite having a long and painful history of people acquiring a racial superiority mindset. Science, yet again, comes through to prove the ignorance and ludicrous ideologies of groups such as white supremacists.
As a Black person myself, I have heard phrases that undermine black oppression and belittle our feelings as a minority group. They say, “But slavery happened over 400 years ago”, or “but the UK is one of the least racist countries.” That is correct but should not be a sentence used to invalidate the fact that racism still occurs towards Black people and is something that hinders them in today’s society.
