Definition, Deconstruction, and Empowerment

By Vincent La
Co-Chair of the Queer People of Color Conference

Decolonization is to deconstruct our own identities and to forge leadership that reverberates throughout our different communities. Individuals obsess over the definition instead of the issue at hand and that in my opinion is what keeps progressive movements from pushing forward into leaps and bounds. We must not focus on our own personal oppressions but choose to work to our strengths to empower each other. Definitionalism is a damaging style of intellectual inquiry based on perverse, fetishistic involvement with definition. We are our worst oppressors.

I believe that decolonizing your mind is the analysis of the programmed institutions that have been instilled in us by our individual upbringings. We must critically reflect on our identities and create a harmonies of the social constructions that we innately must accept and optionally choose. Decolonization as a definition requires the full rejection of the master’s tools and house; I challenge participants to take the decolonization one step further, use the tools of hegemonic edifice of thought and practice against the oppressors of our communities. We must make the realization of the revolution imperative of cultural genocide apparent in our racial and ethnic communities and how it relates within our sexual and gender identities. We must change our world; to interrogate and to dismantle hierarchical knowledge, institutions, and practices.

To voice an echo of the past the anti-black genocide is primarily dependent on the mechanics of capitalist exploitation. We in the LGBTQ community must realize the social exploitation that we all are victims of and some take a part of. We must analyze why social structures of capitalist exploitation require the racialization, gendering, sexualization of the labor force; capitalist exploitation is immanently heteropatriarchal. We all need this to realize and actualize change for no future cultural and physical oppression.


Trust your struggle.