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Bailey ’23 (Marlon, Professor of African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies @ Washington University in St. Louis, “THE CONSTITUTION HAS NEVER RECOGNIZED US AS FULL PERSONS: OR TO WHAT POLITICS ARE OUR “PROTECTIONS” RETURNING?”, ConLawNow, Volume 15, Issue 1 (2023))

Let me close by discussing my work with the Ballroom community which is a Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ cultural formation, which creates, promotes, and affirms forms of gender and sexuality, family, and community for its queer members that go unrecognized and are under attack by the law, no doubt. This community also collaborates with community-based organizations to provide support and care for people who are experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, depression and other forms of marginalization and dispossession. The increased popularity of Ballroom culture offers needed exposure and professional opportunities for LGBT people of color, particularly Black queer people. However, there is a downside to Ballroom’s expansion throughout the globe. The culture has become vulnerable to appropriation. The Black and Latinx communities who created this cultural phenomenon have not gained the recognition they deserve. As white LGBT and heterosexual communities engage and appropriate Ballroom cultural practices throughout the globe, the racism/white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia that Black and Latinx LGBT communities face, daily, get lost. Yet these experiences are very much part of the Ballroom story. I suggest that we draw from and work with Ballroom communities, recognizing and acknowledging the context out of which the culture emerged sixty years ago and collaborate with the community through not only research, but conceptualizing, modeling, and reimagining Care for LGBTQ communities of color. While I have confidence in community recognition over State recognition, over the constitution and the legal systems in the U.S., I believe that we need to take heed to the critical issues that Professor Spindelman raises about the consequences for communities and movements concerned about race, gender, and sexual equity, anti-racism and anti-homophobia, and the protection of reproductive rights and autonomy. We need to forge communities through coalition, and we also need to lean into the realm of cultural politics because that is where the law is and has always been about a political struggle over personhood.

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