The Reverend Irene Monroe

The volume and the degree to which everyday white American citizens have called 911 on blacks for sitting at Starbucks, barbecuing in a public park, playing golf to slowly, or napping in the school lounge, to name a few, not only speaks of Trump’s vile acts as aberrant to secure his perceptions of birthright, citizenship, racial entitlement, and ownership of this country, but it speaks of and to other ordinary white Americans, too.

The Stonewall turbulence started on the backs of working-class African American and Latinx queers who patronized the bar. Those brown and black LGBTQ people are not only absent from the photos of that night, but they have been bleached from its written history.

In one week this May, three transwomen of African descent were murdered- Michelle Washington, 40, Claire Legato, 21, and Muhlaysia Booker, 23. As I draw attention to these sisters, several this year in 2019 have been murdered, and, sadly, many more will be murdered.

This year on May 17th marked the fifteenth anniversary of marriage equality in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Looking back at advances such as hate crime laws, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and DOMA, the legalization of marriage equality, anti-homophobic bullying becoming a national concern, to name a few, the LGBTQ community has come a long way since the first Pride marches.

While African American sisters are opening doors, cracking glass ceilings, and disrupting Eurocentric paradigms of beauty more has to been done in terms of allowing chocolate - complexion and darker-skinned sisters, like our former First Lady, Michelle Obama, to be pageant queens, too.

Embodying W.E.B. Dubois’s theory of “The Talented Tenth,” where “exceptional black men” would be the ones to lead the race, Morehouse College has produced unquestionably a pantheon of noted black men:

Places of worship are supposed to be sanctuaries. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in our constitution, and it’s a freedom that should be upheld globally. With many of us approaching the high holy holidays these coming days and weeks ahead, nothing would be more comforting than knowing our places of worship are safe.

Since June 2011 more than 100 Methodist ministers in New England have pledged to marry LGBTQ couples in defiance of the denomination’s ban on same-sex unions. Approximately one out of nine Methodist clerics signed a statement pledging to open their churches to LGBTQ couples that stated, “We repent that it has taken us so long to act… We realize that our church’s discriminatory policies tarnish the witness of the church to the world, and we are [complicit].’’

all reports of hate crimes should be taken seriously. One hoax is no excuse for law enforcement not to do their job and see each case as a separate incident irrespective of the court of opinion.