Why police rainbow flag raisings endanger LGBTIQA+ communities
In response to the rainbow flag raising at Alice Springs Police Station as part of FabAlice 2021
Police don't make us safe.
As sexually diverse and gender diverse people, we are marginalised under dominant social structures that view us as inferior, deviant, and freaks. Every day we have to fight to exist as who we are. We do this amidst homophobia and transphobia. And we do this under a legal system designed to criminalise our behaviours and our bodies, our identities and our relationships.
This criminalisation is enforced by police. This is their role. To police and control our trans bodies, our queer lives. To use violence against us to force us to conform, to force us to be less queer, less gay, less fabulous, to sweep us off the streets, to drive us back into the closet. Weather through discrimination from individual police members, specific laws targeting sexually and gender diverse people, police violence directly against our bodies, or the inherit colonialism and class structures police enforce on the ground, reproducing poverty and dispossession, police remain a constant and dangerous threat to LGBTIQA+ people everywhere.
Rainbow flag raising events such as this one are designed to legitimise the role of police and their violent actions. To use the LGBTIQA+ community, to use our fabulousness, to 'rainbow wash' the blood off the hands of police and the colonial-state. Because we all see it! Police shooting young Aboriginal people, running them down with their cars, chasing them out of town. Three Aboriginal people have died in police custody in the past two weeks alone on this continent, under the so-called "care" of police. In what world can we accept this violence? Wrapping it in a rainbow flag won't make it go away. The violence of policing will still be there, only papered over, "cleaned".
LGBTIQA+ people should never be a part of this "cleaning" process. Our task is liberation, not only of sexually and gender diverse people, but of everyone who suffers under poverty, ongoing colonisation, systemic racism. We demand liberation, and fight for it!
Northern Territory Police should never be invited to associate with our flags, be they rainbow, trans, intersex, Aboriginal, anti-racist. These are the flags of our movements for liberation, why they were created. Not to be used to obscure the violence policing does to us and all our communities.
The pride we carry with us here is a pride in the long history of resistance to "rainbow washing" of the violence of policing. All across this continent, LGBTIQA+ people have protested collaborations with police. Rainbow flag raisings are consistently opposed by LGBTIQA+ people, and always protested against.
FabAlice should know of these realities, and the histories of our movements. FabAlice need to take a public and explicit stance to oppose the violence of policing and the dangers of collaboration.
No LGBTIQA+ event should be inviting police into our spaces, collaborating with police, or assisting in 'rainbow washing' the dirty image and violent actions of police.
Instead, we should be opposing the institution of policing and the colonial state. Not only for it's inherit homophobia and transphobia, but for it's racism, white supremacy and colonialism. White LGBTIQA+ people in particular need to understand and fight against the role of police in enacting ongoing colonisation and genocide.
So let's see this flag kept well away from NT Police, so it can be rallied under to fight for a better world, a world without the violence of policing.
Defund, disarm and demobilise police!
Move police funding into alternatives that work!
For a future that is supportive, caring and peaceful.
slumberkitty - 12/3/21
