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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2022 ● FEATURES ● THE JUSTICE
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VERBATIM | BELL HOOKS What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.
ON THIS DAY…
FUN FACT
Congress passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in America.
All puppies are born deaf and cannot hear until they are around three weeks old.
For queer students of color, community on campus is vital — and hard to find The Justice spoke to Nicholas Ong ’23, Kyla-Yen Giffin ’23, and Julie Le, former department coordinator of the ICC and the GSC, about how difficult it can be for queer students of color to find community at Brandeis. By NATALIE KAHN JUSTICE EDITOR
When Nicholas Ong ’23 started his first year at Brandeis, it didn’t take long for him to find LGBTQIA+ communities on campus and meet other queer students. But something was always missing. “I always found myself in white queer spaces,” he told the Justice in November 2021. Ong is Cambodian and grew up in a culturally diverse area in Providence, Rhode Island. At Brandeis, however, he struggled to find other students who were both queer and people of color. Ong explained that while he always appreciates and feels validated by being around other LGBTQ+ people, the experience of being the only POC in a room of white people — even when those people are queer — is something that Ong says is profoundly alienating: “Even though we [can] relate to the queerness aspect of it, it just isn’t the same.” Kyla-Yen Giffin ’23 is halfVietnamese and is bisexual and non-binary. They came out as queer not long before starting college. When Giffin arrived at Brandeis, they were excited to be around other queer people and be a part of LGBTQIA+ spaces. They joined Triskelion, the LGBTQIA+ club on campus, and quickly became friends with other queer students. However, Giffin soon came to the same realization as Ong that, in their experience, all of the LGBTQIA+ student groups and spaces they encountered
Design: Natalie Kahn/the Justice
at Brandeis were predominantly white. Like Ong, they found it difficult to find other queer students of color and experienced a similar sense of isolation in the white-dominated LGBTQIA+ spaces they were a part of at the University. “Something that I know me and my other friends who are people of color talk about a lot is that we feel a lot more safe going into spaces that are all people of color — even if they’re not all queer, or none of them are queer — than we do going into a space that’s all queer but also all white,” Giffin told the Justice in November, “There’s just a bit of an innate feeling of safety when you’re around other people of color versus other white people.” Ong explained that being a queer person of color — QPOC — is not simply the sum of its parts. It is a unique and complex identity in itself that manifests in joys and struggles which can only be truly understood by those who experience life within these intersections. Because of this, queer students of color say that the sense of safety, belonging, and understanding that they feel among other QPOC is lacking in whitedominated queer spaces as well as in non-queer, POC spaces. Giffin stressed the value of “intentional spaces” whose main purpose is to provide safety and community for those in specific minority groups. “When there aren’t intentional spaces for queer people of color, then that also means that there really aren’t
safe spaces for us,” they said. Giffin spoke about the lack of these spaces on campus and how this affected their first few semesters at Brandeis. “I think it would have definitely been a lot easier to learn and realize things and build community if we had a space like this earlier on,” they said. “A lot of us look back on our underclassmen years, and we think about how we didn’t have that and how it took a very long and often difficult time to come to those under-
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When there aren’t intentional spaces for queer people of color, then that also means that there really aren’t safe spaces for us. KYLA-YEN GIFFIN
standings and find people and spaces we felt safe in.” Having experienced firsthand the struggle of finding community as a QPOC at Brandeis and the isolation that this results in, as well as the eventual joy and important benefits of finally finding QPOC friends later on in their college experience, Ong, Giffin, and a handful of other students decided to take on the responsibility of creating the intentional space for
QPOC that they felt was lacking on campus. In late September of 2021, the Queer and Trans People of Color Coalition had its first event, which was attended by over a dozen enthusiastic queer students of color. “People were really happy to see it happen,” Ong said of the event, adding, “It was just so necessary and it finally happened.” Having a safe community for QPOC students to support each other and talk about shared experiences is particularly important in the face of the unique struggles and forms of discrimination that these students face as a result of being a part of multiple marginalized communities. Ong said that being POC can make it more difficult or dangerous to be “physically out” as LGBTQIA+, which he describes as presenting oneself in ways that are considered visibly queer. This is something that he feels his white queer peers don’t entirely understand or relate to in the same way. Giffin said that people of color, especially those who are queer, are often not taken seriously in academic and social settings on campus. “There’s definitely a lot of instances of microaggressions and racial gaslighting stuff that pretty much all of us have experienced,” they said, adding that some QPOC students have experienced increased policing and surveillance on campus. Giffin said that in their experience, the University generally ignores or fails to adequately address these problems.
