Portia Burch is a Black queer activist and Omaha native with a specific focus on anti-racism work and abolition. Portia was activated by the murder of Michael Brown Jr. and the subsequent protests and riots in Ferguson, MO. As consciousness shifts towards reckoning with racism and white supremacy in the world, Portia is working to create spaces that are just and equitable as a way to build communities that are focused on healing and growing. She does this by curating and nurturing spaces to unlearn and decolonize behaviors that have upheld racism and white supremacy culture. Her priority is and will always be the uplifting of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of the global majority. She is intentional in her work so that people working to be active anti-racists and social justice accomplices understand that by making the groups they advocate for their priority, the decolonization becomes a natural act and creates effective change.

What You Will Hear:

• The motivation for and importance of podcast episode “Let’s Heal Together: Make the Most Marginalized Voices the Ones Most Heard”
• The unaddressed white supremacy in the LGBTQ+ community
• Why black women, cisgendered, lesbian, hetero, and trans are still the most disrespected and silenced women
• How Portia deals with moments of hopelessness
• Surviving suicide attempts.  Lifeaversaries

Quotes:

“I need for queer white people to remember that they are white first…….You can be white and gay, white and bi, white and poly, white and pan, any of those things, but you're white first, which means that if we're standing  in a line and we're talking about anti-black rhetoric, you can appear to be straight and you don't have to deal with any of that. You might internalize it, but are you directly harmed by it? No, because nobody knows that you're queer.  For me, if I wanted to, I could tuck my queer away, but I'm black all day long.”

“Twitter is the place where critical and cognitive thinking goes to die.”

“White women need to know that they still benefit from the patriarchy because the men that are in office, even though they're making laws that are detrimental to all white women, it's gonna hit them last.  It’s gonna go through us first.”

“A sense of urgency is a characteristic of white supremacy.”

“Rest is an act of resistance, rest is an act of liberation and rest is a requirement not a reward.  The sense of urgency isn't helping anybody because we're rushing to do things  and  what we're actually fighting for isn't working.”\

“If you're not checking in with you, if you're not touching in with you,  part of you starts to die.”

“it's important to be loved. It's important to allow people to love you. It's important to share that love with somebody else. Whatever that love looks like, platonic, romantic, whatever the case may be, it's just important to have people.”

Mentioned

@portia.noir

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https://portiaburch.com/

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