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Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems, and to solve them together.
Haban gari? What's the news?
It's time to light the third candle on the Kinara and ponder the third principle of the seven celebrated during Kwanzaa.
Ujima. Collective work and responsibility. I saw strides in our cis brothers and sisters recognizing that the Black trans community's problems were their problems as well as I and others have been stating for years.
As for movement toward a coordinated partnership toward helping us solve them, we're getting there.
As I stated in last year's post on this principle and it bears repeating in terms of the ujima principle, seeing our problems as African-American community problems and helping us solve them helps us and the African-American community as a whole.
A healthy African-American trans community leads to us as we close ranks to build that better overall African-American community of us trans African-Americans being able to meet our responsibilities in uplifting all of our people and allow us to be in a better position to live up to the ujima principle.
As I've said repeatedly, we Black transpeople can't help do our share of the collective work needed to uplift the race if our lives are unstable because we can't get jobs or people refuse to hire us because they can discriminate against us because of virulent anti-trans bigotry. .
Our problem of battling anti-trans bigotry and oppression that deleteriously affects us is an African-American community problem as well as the NTDS survey pointed out.
Dr. King once stated that 'we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Trans African-Americans are part of that inescapable netowrk of mutuality, and it's past time our cisgender brothers and sisters recognize that.
