Take Back the Night Speech by Cathy Busha

Take Back the Night Event at Front Range Community College

Westminster, CO

Read April 22, 2010 by Cathy Busha

I heard a quote on National Public Radio this week that I want to share with you because it made me smile. It was an interview about Dorothy Height, who passed away this week at the age of 98. Dorothy Height was the President of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years. President Obama called her the “Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Ms. Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from Martin Luther King Jr, when he gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In fact, she was the only woman on the stage.

In the NPR interview, someone shared a story that she was once getting ready to speak to a large audience, much like this one, and said to Ms. Height, “Oh. I am so nervous.” And Ms. Height calmly instructed, “Organize your butterflies.”

So that is what I’m doing right now, too. Organizing my Butterflies. :)

My name is Cathy Busha and I am proud to serve on the staff of Boulder Pride, Boulder County’s Community Center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and allied community, and I’m so proud to be here tonight.

Thank you to Jessy and your class for the invitation to speak. I commend you for putting together an excellent community event and for understanding the connections among all forms of oppression. You know that no one is free until we are all free…and that we must do this work together.

Tonight we mark Take Back the Night. It is a important night in other ways, too. There is a significant immigration bill in Arizona that concerns me, it is Earth Day and it is the day that Fred Phelps was scheduled to come to Boulder. I also want to talk about the role of men in our work and the imperative of building positive community.

How do all of these ideas connect to Take Back the Night? Let me see if I can make the connections…

Saturday is the last day for Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, to veto Senate Bill 1070. If she does nothing, SB 1070 will become law. SB 1070 requires local law enforcement to determine an individual's legal status if there is reasonable suspicion that he or she is in the U.S. illegally. Essentially, it legalizes racial profiling. It makes an entire group of people suspect simply because of their color of their skin.

Now why do I - a white, lesbian, US citizen - mention SB 1070 at a Take Back the Night event? I am reminded of a quote by James Baldwin: “…if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

In the words of Mandy Carter, when we understand that the fight for safety is not about just us, but about JUSTICE, we will begin to create meaningful, lasting social change.

Every day in Boulder County, without a path to citizenship, hard-working undocumented people leave for work in the morning, not sure if they will be returning to their families that night, fearful that they may be arrested and deported.

Every day in Boulder County, transgender women and effeminate gay men leave the house, not sure if they will make it through the day without being harassed or attacked…not sure they will make it back to their home alive that night.

If SB 1070 becomes law, 20 years from now we may be asked, “How did you let that happen?” I encourage you to Google SB 1070 to learn more and find out what you can do to support our brothers and sisters in Arizona, before this same dehumanizing law comes to Colorado.

Next, I wanted to acknowledge that today is also the 40^th Anniversary of Earth Day, which is just a year older than me.

If Dorothy Height is the Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement, then Rachel Carson is the Godmother of the modern environmental movement. If you don’t know who Rachel Carson is, don’t feel badly. I didn’t learn about her until I was 24 years old and in my first graduate class – in fact, it was a women’s studies class.

I learned that she grew up in Pennsylvania, just like I did. I learned that in 1962 she wrote a pivotal book called, “Silent Spring.” It is a beautifully-written, well-researched book and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. Sadly, “Silent Spring’s” messages are even more urgent for us today.

In “Silent Spring,” Carson exposed and explored the dangers of our increasing use of pesticides and chemicals. She explained how spraying trees harms the water and ground for us and future generations. At the time, this concept of deep ecology was a revolutionary scientific thought. Carson showed how all in nature is connected, and that we, as people, are simply part of nature. Of course, Native Americans deeply understood and practiced this idea for centuries.

Why do I mention Rachel Carson at a Take Back the Night event?

First, it was a crime that I had not learned about Rachel Carson in my education until I was 24 years old. How many other amazing women have simply been dropped out of history? His Story. In this sexist culture, how many other women have been silenced?

Second, just as Rachel Carson taught us everything in nature is connected, we must understand that an act of domestic violence or sexual abuse committed in a home hurts us all because we are all connected. Domestic and sexual violence are not private crimes – these individual acts harm our collective humanity.

And as difficult as it can be, we must also remember that the person who is choosing to use violence is also part of our community – part of us.

I share this because sometimes in the anti-violence movement in an effort to raise awareness and support victims of violence, we demonize and dehumanize people who choose to use violence. We want to push them out of our community and into a prison industrial system that is racist and classist by design - that locks up people for profit.

What does it mean for us to create a paradigm and a response that honors the humanity of everyone – including those who have hurt us? What does it mean to begin thinking about options like restorative justice? I’m not saying it is easy work and I’m not at all suggesting we condone any act of violence.

Instead, we must begin to understand that we are all – all of us - connected to one another. What if we understood that, like each individual aspen tree, we actually share the same root system? If we work to address issues of violence from that place of compassion and connection, we will no longer be working against violence, but perhaps working for peace and love and justice. Our solutions may begin to address root problems of violence rather than symptoms. We may begin to actually see an end of violence. We may finally Take Back the Night…

Finally, today is also the day that Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church were scheduled to come to Boulder. Westboro is the group that pickets by holding bright neon signs with extreme images and language of hatred and violence against Jews, the LGBT community, Catholics and others…

Phelps makes me sad…but perhaps not for the reasons you may think. He makes me sad because he mobilizes people in a way that I, as a community organizer for the past 15 years, have not been able to. As a community organizer, I am sad that it takes Westboro’s extreme messages of hate to shake people out of their complacency and bring them together. As I heard someone say this week, “We need a common enemy to come together.”

Is that really true?

What if instead, we gathered to celebrate one another as a community? What if we showed up en masse for each other’s graduation ceremonies? Or for the birth of a child in our community? Or when one of us has the courage to come out or transition? What if we made signs that said “Welcome to our Neighborhood!” when someone new moves in?

Sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it? Yet, I hold this vision of building a progressive community that is for something positive rather than against something negative.

I am reminded of the year I worked at a state university as the Director of the LGBTQ Office. A student leader came to me and said, “We want to protest at the President’s office.”

Intrigued, I said, “Tell me more.”

And she said, “Well, we don’t have a resident hall that has rooms that are safe for transgender students,”

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, the President has asked me to research other state universities that do have gender neutral housing. He asked me to develop a list of options and then meet with student leaders to discuss what would work here. Would you like to be a part of that committee?”

“Oh” she said, looking disappointed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “I thought you’d be excited that the President supports housing for transgender students?”

“Well, I do. But it’s just that we really wanted to protest. Is there something else we can protest against?”

So why do I share this story at a Take Back the Night event?

So often we put our collective energy against something. For many, Take Back the Night is a night to raise awareness about men’s violence against women. We often talk about how women are victimized by men – which happens far too often and we must name.

I’ve been hit four times in my life, including a punch in the face that made my lip swell. All four of those violent acts were committed by the same woman – my first female partner.

What does it mean to begin to understand that gender oppression also hurts men, and that some women also use violence? What does it mean to not be against men, but be for peace? What does it mean to interrupt the myth of safety of the lesbian utopia? What does it mean to have an analysis that is more complicated and honors multiple truths?

I am reminded of another story from the year I worked at the same state university. I was facilitating a social justice workshop. We had 30 women sitting on one side of the room, and 30 men on the other, facing each other. The women shared painful stories of times they had been called misogynistic names by men, when they had been made to feel unsafe and times they have been victimized.” Women sobbed as they shared their stories. Finally, one woman stood up and looked at the men across the room with anger and disdain.

She said, “Here we are, crying and pouring out hearts out and you’re all just sitting their, unemotional and stoic. Don’t you care?!?”

Most of the men dropped their heads and eyes in (further) shame. One young man had the courage to stand up. He said, “I wish you could see the knot in my stomach and feel the burning in my throat. It’s so hard to hear your stories and I wish I could cry…”

So we asked him, “Why aren’t you able to cry?”

And he shared, “As a child, I remember being bullied and beaten by my dad for crying. I don’t remember the last time I cried. I don’t know how to cry anymore.”

We asked the group of 30 men, “Please raise your hand if you identify with what he’s saying,” and they all raised their hands. Everyone one of them said they were afraid to cry or had forgotten how to cry – a basic human need. They went on to share how difficult it can be to be a ‘real man’ and how they have done things they are not proud of to try to live up to this socially created idea of manhood – so they wouldn’t be labeled “fag.” They promised to redefine ‘manhood’ for themselves and work on changing the culture of manhood for other men and boys...and for women.

Men are not the enemy. In fact, most men are good men. What we want is peace and justice and safety for everyone. We must begin to include men in our work in meaningful ways, which honors their experiences, too. Men also suffer because of the limited roles and emotions we allow men in our society. In fact, the only emotion that is socially acceptable for a ‘real’ man to express is anger. Perhaps this is why many men wanted to counter-protest Fred Phelps - perhaps they wanted a concrete excuse to display their anger and rage.

Or perhaps they wanted to feel connected to others – to feel part of a caring, mobilized community.

If so, let’s not wait for Fred Phelps to mobilize and gather together again…to be connected to one another.

In closing, how do we begin Take Back the Night for all of us? How do we build a vision that includes each of us, connected together as a community - immigrants, transgender people, poor people, elders, youth, people who are incarcerated, people with disabilities, Muslims, and all the others who have been pushed to the margins?

We must work from the place of compassion and deeply understand that we are all connected – even to the people we don’t like or who have harmed us. Indeed, as queer people know better than most, love takes courage.

It is not easy work – but to create meaningful, lasting social change, I believe it is our only work.