50 signatures reached
To: Phoenix Pride
Back to The Roots : Bring Racial Justice Back to Pride
Our pride cannot be built on detention, deportation, and police violence. In Pride season 2017, we invite Phoenix Pride to lead the LGBTQ+ institutions to defend our whole family, including people of color and migrants, in two important ways:
Make Pride Safe for LGBTQ+ people of color.
Police out of Pride: Deny Police Floats in the Parade. Police in Phoenix persecute our communities and have no place in a march that began in order to repudiate police violence against LGBTQ+ communities.
End sponsorships that promote the mass incarceration of our communities: Pride’s Parade Sponsor is the Bank of America, who finances the private, for-profit companies that run detention centers in Arizona and across the nation, like Eloy Detention Center, that are deadly for all migrants and specifically violate the rights of trans detainees.
Be accountable to queer and trans communities of color: Establish a people of color led external committee to review the safety and accessibility of Pride festivities, including the hiring of off-duty police as security.
2. Make Phoenix safe for LGBTQ+ people of color. We need a Phoenix Pride that uses its close ties to politicians and is publically vocal in support of our community.
Join our campaigns for liberation: Stand with LGBTQ+ migrants in detention in Arizona like Ricardo. Use your community weight to demand the freedom of our LGBTQ+ people.
Demand that Mayor Stanton do more than talk; urge him publicly to defy SB1070 and end operation order 4.48.
Publicly demand an end to manifestation law and city policy that targets trans and queer people of color.
Phoenix Pride is the first big-city Pride in the 2017 Pride Season. Together, we have the opportunity to lead the country with a Pride that reflects, honors and defends all of our communities’ intersectional identities.
Why is this important?
Every Pride we march to keep alive the spirit of June 1969: trans women of color led patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City to resist the routine violence of LGBTQ+-focused police raids. For LGBTQ+ people of color our struggle against police brutality and state violence continues to today. We fight to protect our community from ICE raids, over policing and police brutality, and structural injustice. Last June Phoenix Pride and Mayor Stanton organized a vigil to mourn the victims of the Pulse Massacre in Orlando. They were almost all LGBTQ+ people of color, including many migrants. When it comes to the lives of LGBTQ+ people of color and migrants here in Phoenix, Pride has been silent.
As LGBTQ+ people of color who are migrants, undocumented and poor, we face violence and injustice even while we are excluded from the priorities of LGBTQ+ institutions. Here in Phoenix:
The Phoenix Department collaborates actively with ICE to persecute migrant communities transferring victims, perpetrators and witnesses of crime alike to ICE custody under the threat of deportation.
Mayor Stanton talks tough but has refused to create substantive protections even in the face of Trump’s racist and anti-migrant crusade. Under SB1070 and operation order 4.48, the PPD is already a mass deportation force.
PPD ranks nationally in fatal shootings by police.
Manifestation law profile and criminalize trans women of color.
These realities shape our lives: One of our members, Ricardo Vasquez, is a trans man who has lived in Phoenix for the last 16 years. When he defended his family against a transphobic attack in his home, police arrested him before asking any questions. They transferred him to ICE custody at Eloy Detention Center, where he was sexually assaulted by his cellmate and remained for over a year until he was released.