From nojojojo over at Angry Black Woman:
“…25 million Americans are underinsured and I know full well I’m not the only brown one of those. Consider the number of us who are disproportionately affected by poverty, and compare that against the fact that health insurance premiums keep rising by as much as 150% per decade while wages remain essentially flat (note: PDF). Consider how little media attention, medical research, and government funding is accorded to health issues that primarily or disproportionately affect people of color, like sickle cell anemia. Consider also how the intersection of race with gender or other factors, and the lingering effects of colonialism, cause literal epidemics of poor health care, addiction and/or violence in some PoC communities, like ongoing rape and involuntary sterilization among American Indian women. (See also unusualmusic’s insightful linkspams on women in prison, intersexed women of color, and more.)
This is killing us. It is killing us. The current health care system of the US kills people across the board, yes. But it’s killing more of us. And it’s leaving a greater proportion of us in abject poverty or lifelong trauma if we survive.
So we, especially, need to fight back.”
From Kenyon Farrow at Grio:
When Obama delivered his “gay agenda” speech to the well-fed, well-scrubbed mostly white crowd of gays and lesbians at the Human Rights Campaign’s Annual Dinner on Saturday night, anyone outside of the LGBT community would have assumed by the applause that the entire “gay community” is in agreement that access to serve in the military, gay marriage, and hate crimes legislation are our primary issues. But in reality, HRC’s political agenda is not what I want. It does not speak for me, nor for the lives of many other black, poor and working class LGBT people.
Given the fact that we’re in a long recession where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in almost every month of 2009, and national unemployment numbers are at nearly 10 percent, why are we not talking about the issues that most people are concerned about – health care and the economy – and their impact on the LGBT community? The truth is, for many people at that dinner who could afford the cheapest ticket at $250 a plate, jobs and wages are of little concern.
It’s not as though there is a lack of evidence that supports the idea that LGBT folks are impacted by poverty. A report on lesbian and gay poverty in the US by the Williams Institute this spring showed that lesbian and gay couples were as likely to be poor as straight couples, mostly due to the impact of race and gender.
Read the rest of the piece here.
Continue reading about Black working class gays left out of national gay rights agenda
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Continue reading about President Obama addresses Human Rights Campaign
It’s important to keep on eye on how this develops as certain corporate conglomerates try to centralize the internet, block the flow of information, and make it less democratic.
“The head of the FCC plans to propose new rules that would prohibit Internet service providers from interfering with the free flow of information and certain applications [...]
