Loving Day, Juneteenth, and the Right to Family

June 12th is the anniversary of the supreme court case Loving v. Virginia that struck down the law banning interracial marriage of Black and White people. Juneteenth is the celebration of June 19, 1865, the day the Union soldiers read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas. For RH Reality Check, Echoing Ida writer Cynthia Greenlee explains what the two have to do with one another.

In June, I celebrate two commemorations that may not make it onto standard calendars of holidays and observances: Loving Day on the 12th and Juneteenth on the 19th.

Each of these days should remind us that, within the African-American freedom struggle and broader movements for equality, there has always been a struggle to determine the right to marry, select an intimate partner of one’s choice, and to form the families that we want.

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, a 1924 law that banned marriages between whites and “coloreds,” was unconstitutional. That law made illegal all formalized unions between whites and non-whites, including Blacks and American Indians. Blatantly eugenic in nature, the act aimed to maintain the purity of whites and accomplish the impossible and retroactive task of “genetic segregation” of populations that had been intermingling since Jamestown and the arrival of the first Africans to the shores of what would become Virginia, in 1619.

Almost a century earlier, on June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, bearing news that the Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the rebelling territories more than two years prior. Though there are multiple stories about why such important news hadn’t trickled down to the enslaved people there, a Union General read a decree that there was to be “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” (Well, not really: The rest of the executive order came with the warning that the freed people were expected to remain quiet and at the places where they were enslaved, to work for wages and for the very people who had just owned them, and would not be “supported in idleness”—setting up a labor system stacked against them and to the benefit of literate ex-masters with few scruples about using violence.)

So what does Juneteenth have to do with Loving Day?

Read the entire piece.

Let’s Talk About Transxenophobia, Gender Autonomy, & Reproductive Justice in the Latin@ Community

This post is originally appeared on the California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ) blog.

Let’s Talk About Transxenophobia, Gender Autonomy, & Reproductive Justice in the Latin@ Community: An Interview with Bamby Salcedo

When I was a 12-year old child, I came to the U.S. to live with my mom. Growing up in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, I knew a lot about the U.S., growing in a border town allows for ample (albeit unbalanced) cultural exchanges. Still, moving to the U.S. at that age I remember being overwhelmed by fear and culture shock.

Not long after I arrived and had registered in school I was asked to visit a local community clinic to receive tuberculosis medication. It was at that clinic's waiting room where I first encountered several transgender Latina immigrants. At 12, I didn't know what it meant to be cisgender or that the word was used to describe those of us who conform to society's definition of "proper" gender identification. Until that point, I had not thought about the implications of living in a society that imposes gender identification upon us based on genitalia. Until that point I did not know the struggles of transgender Latina immigrants who were and continue to be systematically and institutionally punished for being their authentic selves. But it was there, at that clinic that I began to listen to the conversations about their everyday lives.

At 12, I was not supposed to listen to adults talk so openly about their migrant, gendered, and sexed lives, but I found myself listening so intently. In retrospect as a young immigrant who had recently arrived to the U.S. and as a young person questioning my gender and sexuality, those conversations offered a vision of what my life could be now that I lived in the U.S.

With time, I came to understand that as a female-bodied person that embraces femininity, I am considered cisgender. I also came to understand that being cisgendered comes with many unearned privileges. We move about our lives with more ease than many people, especially trans women of color. From something as simple as using the bathroom, to notions of "belonging" in social circles and dominant society, cisgenderness provides a person with privileges most of us are unaware of. Add to that: ability, race, class, sexuality and migration status and the questions of who belongs in society and who doesn't become even more complex.

As a cisgendered person, I identity as queer, am romantically involved with a cisgender woman and am attracted to people of various genders. Being able-bodied, cisgender, queer, and immigrant is complex. I can't exactly say my identity puts me at the top of the social latter. I continuously endure racism, classism, misogyny, and homophobia on a regular basis. Yet as a cisgender person my identity does grant me enough room to move around social and academic circles with a level of ease that is not permitted to most transgender women of color in the U.S.

I have worked as an HIV prevention counselor, a case manager for people with severe mental disabilities, and I am currently a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. As an academic, I joined forces with Bamby Salcedo and the TransLatin@ Coalition, to conduct research on the quality of life of transgender Latina immigrants in the U.S. through a two-year study completed in 2013. We published a report titled TransVisible: Transgender Latina Immigrants in U.S. Society.

The study is based on the data we collected from over 100 interviews with transgender Latina immigrants living in the U.S. Some of the key findings were shocking because they provided concrete evidence of the social and economic hardships that many members of this community experience daily. Among our findings we learned that sixty-one percent of participants had experienced sexual abuse. Eighty percent of participants, who had suffered sexual violence, did not file a police report and forty-five of participants reported feeling no support from local authorities.

When it came to medical services, we found that ninety-one of participants did not have a job that provided medical insurance. Because of this sixty-one percent of participants said they go to an emergency room when they need to see a doctor. In addition we found that although the vast majority of respondents in the study greatly desire having legal authorization to live and work in the U.S., seventy percent of participants indicated that they did not have a U.S. driver"s license. Still out of all those who participated, thirty-nine percent reported it was "very difficult" to obtain legal documents that reflect their name and gender identity.

For more on the finding of TransVisible: Transgender Latina Immigrants in U.S. Society visit: http://www.translatinacoalition.org/

The 50th Anniversary of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer: Remembering What Fannie Lou Hamer Taught Us

Ever feel like history is repeating itself? Well, it does. This summer is the 50th anniversary of Mississippi's Freedom Summer where organizers, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, fought for voting rights and reproductive justice. In her piece for RH Reality Check, southern organizer and Echoing Ida writer Jazmine Walker explains what we can learn from Hamer's lessons and what we should do going forward.

Fannie Lou Hamer, image via Wikimedia Commons

This June marks the 50th anniversary of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer—a campaign launched to end the systematic and violent disenfranchisement of Black people in Mississippi by registering them to vote. This effort was not only to draw national attention to the terror Black people experienced as they fought for their right to vote, but also to cultivate the organizing skills of a network of local leaders.

Fannie Lou Hamer was one of those leaders. She used the power of storytelling to compel America to recognize the humanity of poor Black people in Mississippi.

This is also the 50th anniversary of Fannie Lou Hamer sharing her experiences on a national stage during her testimony at the Council of Federated Organizations’ sponsored hearing at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. She shared the brutal injustices she suffered for trying to vote, as well as the injustices of forced sterilization of Black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Hamer’s inclusion of sterilization in a hearing primarily organized to ensure the protection of Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers and lay the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act highlighted how both the right to vote and reproductive freedom were necessary to justice for Black women in Mississippi.

Fifty years later, we have seen a separation of voting and reproductive rights in mainstream movements that has only accelerated Mississippi policymakers’ transparent attempts to roll back the gains of Freedom Summer, through aggressive legislation to institute voter identification laws, close the state’s only remaining abortion clinic, and generally limit the reproductive choices of Mississippi women.

The zealous legislature has successfully launched a multi-pronged attack of reproductive and voter suppression that endangers the already precarious livelihoods of Mississippi’s Black women and families. As advocates, our demand for justice must also be multi-pronged to avoid a return to dehumanizing policies that Hamer recounted during her testimony.

In her testimony, Hamer connected reproductive rights and enfranchisement. She revealed:

One of the other things that happened in Sunflower County, the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied. They are getting up a law that said if a woman has an illegitimate baby and then a second they could draw time for six months or a five-hundred-dollar fine. What they didn’t tell is they are already doing these things, not only to single women, but to married women.

As Hamer noted, in 1964 the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a sterilization bill that would criminalize women for having children by fining or imprisoning women who birthed children while unmarried; women could elect to be sterilized in order to avoid imprisonment and/or the fine.

Read more at RH Reality Check.

Listen to Youth: Adult Allies Must Support the Repeal of Illinois’ Forced Parental Notification Law

This post by Renee Bracey Sherman is part of the Echoing Ida project and originally appeared on RH Reality Check.

While forced parental involvement laws aren’t new, more states have been passing them or tightening their existing laws to decrease access to abortion for teens. (Parental signature via Shutterstock)

As May comes to a close, so do National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month campaigns. Some of the conversations this month highlighted the need for comprehensive, age-appropriate health and sexuality education, and to ensure young people have access to contraception.

But sadly, it was also a month filled with messages that judge and shame pregnant and parenting teens and young women who seek abortion.

One place where the tension between supporting and shaming really comes through is in my home state of Illinois. The issues of young people, sex, pregnancy, parenting, and abortion have been heating up in recent years due to a fight around the implementation of the forced parental notification law.

The Parental Notice of Abortion Act requires an abortion provider to notify the parent or guardian of a young person age 17 or younger who’s seeking an abortion within 48 hours of the teen receiving care. If a young person does not feel they can go to their parent or guardian, there is a provision that allows them to request a bypass from a judge. Of course this is not a simple process—it requires navigating the complex court system, in addition to missing school to see a judge who might let their personal feelings about abortion block the young person’s access to reproductive health care. In a small town, where everyone knows each other, it can also mean that a young person loses any and all privacy around their medical decisions; shaming gossip spreads fast amongst the cornstalks.

The Illinois law, originally passed in 1995, was held up in the courts for years, but last summer a ruling came down that the archaic policy would be enforced starting this past fall.

“Not only does this law make a difficult decision more dangerous for the most vulnerable of youth, but it interferes with healthy and trusting family communication,” explained Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH).

ICAH’s youth leaders are working in partnership with the Chicago Abortion Fund, Parenting for Success, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to support young people who are hurt by the law while raising awareness and building support to repeal this policy. In April, the coalition sent youth leaders to Springfield, the state capitol, to make their voices heard.

Laws like this one keep young people from accessing the basic health care they need—especially when access to reproductive health care is already dwindling across the country. While forced parental involvement laws aren’t new, more states have been passing them or tightening their existing laws to decrease access to abortion for teens—which doesn’t make sense at a time when teen pregnancy, abortion, and birth rates are, and have been, at record lows.

Not only do youth know what they do and don’t need, research also shows that such legislation isn’t necessary. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 90 percent of 14-year-olds and 74 percent of 15-year-olds surveyed said they involved at least one parent or guardian in their abortion decision. Those young people who didn’t cited that they were worried that they may be thrown out or experience other abuse by their guardian.


Read the rest of the article on RH Reality Check.