By Shayler Richmond
Healthy community is founded on promoting healthy individuality; removing assumptions, unlearning prejudicial behaviors, and disbanding labels that stem from stereotypes.
Personal identity is a fact not a concept to be inferred by outsiders. Practice celebrating your culture without a need to consume others identities. Who a person is isn’t your discussion unless you’re invited to the table, and still you have no say.
As a man your explanation of women’s issues holds minimal bearing. Lived experience will always outweigh perception, regardless of how much education or assumed power is attached to it.
Identity can’t be bargained with and culture is not for sale.
There isn’t a price on blackness, you can’t buy blackness: blackness is in my being; it’s in how air fills my lungs and how I breathe it out; it’s in my pain; it’s in my tears; it’s in my embrace; it’s in my daps; it’s in the structure of my legs and the strut of my walk; it’s in my posture; it’s in my tone and word usage; it’s in my love; it’s in my life and it will be in my death.
You don’t own my masculinity. My masculinity is not determined by your perception or social construct. I am a man, therefore what I do is masculine unless I determine it not to be. I am a man. Do not bind masculinity to your toxicity; kings deserve to be free.
My sexuality is mine. My sexuality is not based on your inference. I am what is true to me. Your assumption of what goes on in my bedroom has no bearing on my sexuality. Your ignorance has no bearing on my sexuality.
I can be this today and that tomorrow. My identity is mine and isn’t up for debate, so respect our pronouns.
Everything in this world is constant. Nothing is stagnant and intersectionality exist. Wholeness is a sum of all parts not some.
The human lust for power has created a power struggle externally in society and internally in humanity, however, true power is in owning your truth and conviction lies in honesty and authenticity.
Many heterosexual liberal traditionalist are likely to place cisgendered men and women who also present as heterosexual in a box; this is the straight and narrow, no curves. These are also the people that tend to claim heaven's gates are designed for them alone.
We are all accountable for loving deeper. Stop talking, open your heart, then open your mind. Be sincere in reflecting on why you’re lost in people wanting to be seen in their entirety.
For the queer community to be a culture built on breaking molds; queer culture is riddled with reinforced labels attached to repressive stigmas.
The queer community has worked to distance themselves from the confinements of the self-righteous heterosexual system just to create an equally inhibiting system.
We each are one of one. Trends are trends and people are people. Projecting your views onto and into the existence of someone else is working backwards not forward and isn’t Godly. Trends will rise and fall, but there will never be another human exactly like you.
We are not the machine. We are not statistics, so don’t assume. Allow people their individuality and accept them for them. Allow people to tell you who they are without a need to corral them into a group. Choose to see the humanity in people.
Leverage your privilege to create space for someone else to be themself. We are the world.
