In honor of Westminster College Pride Week, a Taboo Talk covered what it is like to navigate self love, relationships and spaces as a queer Black person Thursday in Malouf Hall, according to Daud Mumin, a senior justice studies major.
The Taboo Talk featured three members of the queer and Black community.
The discussion was moderated by Mumin and featured guest speakers Jared Winn-Taryor, a Westminster music studies alum, and En Canada, a 2017 organic chemistry graduate from Skidmore College in New York.
Winn-Taryor talked about the struggles they endured while growing up in a queerphobic culture.
“I’m 26 now, it’s taken me this long to feel actualized,” Winn-Tayror said. “It was not an easy path. There was a lot of darkness and turmoil and healing from trauma.”
LGBTQ people of color are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to say they’ve been discriminated against because they are LGBTQ in applying for jobs and interacting with police, according to a poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“I think it’s a shame that the world that I was brought into wasn’t able to accept the fullness of my being, […] what my brain can produce and what my perspective can illuminate. Not only about myself, but about the world,” Canada said.
The talk not only covered the difficulty of being Black and queer in 2021, but the importance of loving oneself as well.
“[Loving myself] is about dismantling those thoughts in my mind and then really trying to show up as me and not care what people think,” Canada said. “Let [people] sit in that discomfort while I continue to learn how to love myself. But I think [accepting Black and queer people] is an ever changing process as we get older and our bodies change and our brains develop.”
Winn-Taryor said they felt similarly on the topic of self-love.
“I think allowing yourself to be fully yourself [regardless] of the [people] that are around you and the situation you’re in is so important,” Winn-Taryor said.
Carla Arancibia, organizer of the Taboo Talk, ASW event coordinator and senior public health student, said self-love is extremely important when it comes to relationships.
“I really just wanted to have a discussion that I don’t think we’re having,” Arancibia said. “Especially when it comes to self care and self-love. My overall goal was to give voice to conversations that need to be happening here.”
