Ebony Ava Harper is a co-creator of the story platform of Story at Scale. Watch her video below.
NOTE: As mass protests unfolded across America in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, I resurfaced this piece of my writing. This was originally published in slightly different form in late February 2020 as a preface to the “Story Platform Report” of Story At Scale, a year-long narrative research project to find and articulate a new story to advance gender justice. Story at Scale focused on the stories that inextricably link race, class, gender, origin, religion and other elements of identity. —kc
If the “arc of the moral universe,” in fact, bends toward justice, as Dr. King promised, then gender justice has remained out of sight, around the far corner of that vast arc, for millennia. Only now is it coming into view.
This project has taught me that all roads to justice pass through gender—that to achieve justice, we must envision and articulate a compelling, joyful vision of how we will live together when gender justice prevails.
It is not easy to see this destination clearly. But the image of gender justice, blurred by tears of sadness and anger and by distance is becoming sharp in the experiences, concrete ideas, and moral imaginings of thousands of people who work themselves to a ragged edge nearly every day to achieve it.
What we are up against is a notion of property that turns virtually everything and everyone into something that can be “owned” and, therefore, exploited for “profit…”
Working with so many people of all genders, races, and classes on this project has revealed to me something profound and, now, obvious: gender justice intersects with and cuts across every fight for human rights—the struggles for racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, migrant rights, social justice. I cannot be free—none of us can be free—without it.
What we are up against, of course, is a cultural heritage, transported to the Americas by white people centuries ago, that created a notion of property to turn virtually everything into something that could be “owned” and, therefore, exploited for “profit”—including all men of color, all women and children, poor white men, all other living things, and, ultimately, our living planet.
As a straight, white cisgender man, it’s this destructive nonsense and its consequences that I am referring to when I tell my friends, as a kind of shorthand, “I have no further use for white people.” I mean I have no use for a social framework that masquerades as the natural order to uphold an unnatural order.
“Trans people . . . it’s not that we just live on the margins, we live on the margins of the margins. Even the rejected people reject us.”
Working on this project, I spoke at length and collaborated with Ebony Ava Harper, an African American transgender woman in her forties who surmounted a very tough start in life and is now an activist, creative force, and director for The National Alliance for Trans Liberation and Advancement. She told me, “Trans people . . . it’s not that we just live on the margins, we live on the margins of the margins. Even the rejected people reject us.”
My wife, Ellen Jacob, is an artist whose work centers on social justice. Her favorite quote is from James Baldwin: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
I realize now that we must center the most marginalized—the people forced to the margins of the margins—because, like great art and other dangerous efforts at creation, they are raising the questions hidden behind our culture’s false answers. Courageously, they demand new answers by constructing their true identities in plain sight.
This is some of what I’ve learned. People’s lives are at stake.
This moving video of Ebony Ava Harper’s story, “Exactly Who You Are,” uses the story platform of Story At Scale.
Credits for the video:
Written by Kym Allen and Ebony Ava Harper
Directed by Kym Allen
Performed by Ebony Ava Harper
Director of Photography: Elysia Liaw
Editor: Jessica Siqueiros
Original music by Daron Murphy
Produced by ART NOT WAR
