A Letter to our Community
We recently learned some invaluable lessons from the members of our Queenscapes community.
A couple of weeks ago, in an Instagram post on the Queenscapes page promoting the sale of the “At Home In Queens” 2020 calendars distributed by the Queens Economic Development Corporation, we shared a photo of the former home of Malcolm X, one of the historic Queens houses featured in the calendar. The only photos we could find of Malcolm X in his East Elmhurst home on 97th Street were those taken either in the days leading up to, or immediately after the house was firebombed in 1965.
Beneath that post, someone left a racist comment about the assassination of Malcolm X. We won’t repeat the comment here (it has since been removed and the account has been blocked from our community for their flagrant disregard and antagonization of the space we want to build here.)
Our response to this racist comment was to inquire further. For that misstep and for all those missteps that followed we want to apologize to our community, and more specifically, to the women who called us out and held us to the very standard we’ve always promised to uphold. We hope to continue to strive forward in this way: always accountable, always teachable.
Our team is invested in this platform and embedded in this community. We are the product of the very cultures we hope to expose and further enrichen. After a series of long, impassioned conversations followed by a bit of meditation on what it is we want to be building towards, we came away with two important lessons:
We must always be accountable for whatever harm is willfully induced upon our community on this platform. We decide which voices have space here. We are responsible for the space we create here.
We represent a wide, intersecting swath of communities, but our team is a small group of folks. We run Queenscapes collectively, and our voice should be unified, always.
We won’t go into any further details here about the event that precipitated this post. This space is meant to hold an apology to our community and a reassertion of their trust in us.
And we are grateful and fortunate for the women who held us accountable. They’ve accepted personal apologies from us, and for that we are further grateful. We promise to do better.
Lastly, this is Queenscapes. On this platform, we are dedicated to actively combatting racism, sexism, classism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and any and all other forms of oppression. We are committed to doing the work that is sorely needed in our varied communities throughout our cherished borough.
Welcome to Queens.
Words by the Queenscapes team