I delivered this speech to a crowd in front of the Ohio Statehouse.
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for coming to this rally. My name is Ko, I use all pronouns, I am 19 years old, and I am the founder of the Queer Teen Activist Collective (QTAC) 614. We are gathered here today to oppose HB 616, the Ohio Republican’s attempt to frankenstein an anti-critical race theory bill with a “don’t say gay” bill. This bill is outwardly racist, colonial, anti-Black, homophobic, transphobic, heterosexist, and adultist. It is a very daunting task to write about this bill, because I just do not know where to start with its many, many problems. Because I am at such a loss, I guess I’ll start with my old friend, the land.
You want to know something kind of sad? I’ve been at protests here at the statehouse, including environment and climate protests, time and time again over the past two years, and I have never once heard a speech acknowledging the context of this specific space and this specific land at any level beyond the proverbial land acknowledgement. So if people will bear with me for a moment, I promise this is relevant to HB 616, I want to ask you all a few questions. Who has walked on this land before us? Who will walk on it after us? Who has died here? How many lives have begun here? What did this land once look like? Why does it look the way it does now? What will it look like in the future? What do we want it to look like in the future? Lastly, I want you to imagine what this land looked like before the arrival of European colonizers, including my ancestors. *pause*
What did you imagine? In the settler mythos, we tend to think of pre-columbian America as essentially uninhabited woodland. I want to push back against this. It’s possible that this was woodland, but it’s also possible that it was prairie, or agricultural land. This land was definitely not uninhabited, but rather it was permanently settled, including by non-nomadic communities. The nature of this land was not sparsely populated, virgin, and wooded, it was rendered that way by settler colonial genocide of its indigenous peoples. This then depopulated land then made way for this *gestures around*.
When I look around, I see several land analytics coming together, intersecting and interlinking. The statehouse behind me essentially functions as an ornament. It is designed in a neoclassical greco-roman style based on the myth that our settler-state is a revival of those cultures. Surrounding it are the capital grounds, designed in an American garden tradition which itself descends from an English garden tradition which itself was trying to intimidate rome. These grounds consist primarily of monocultural ‘fields’ of sedges, particularly Kentucky bluegrass, as well as mostly non-native ornamental trees and shrubs and various folleys, including the McKinley monument, which should be torn down.
Beyond these grounds we find multi-lane roads, which also can be traced to England (although switching the side we drive on) and Rome. Beyond that, we are surrounded by skyscrapers and other buildings that are designed in modernist, brutalist, neoclassical, and high modernist styles, all of which can be traced back to, you guessed it, England, France, Rome, and greece. The visible landscape surrounding us is very European and, by extension, very white.
But what about the invisible landscape? The vast majority of the people whose labor this landscape was built on do not look like me. This land, as I already mentioned, is built on top of the genocide of indigenous people. It is also built on the exploited labor of african slaves and their descendents. It is today built on the exploited labor of those in the global south and the global south’s immigrant diaspora here in Columbus. We don’t see that though, and we don’t speak of it.
I am drawn to think of this in the context of theories of knowledge, also known as epistemologies. With this broad framing we can think of the euro-american stylings of architecture as epistemologies, as well as the many invisibilized theories of knowledge of Black and brown people on this land. HB 616 is the first curriculum ban in Ohio to specifically call out critical race theory and intersectional theory as theories. Just as the labor, knowledge, and stylings of Black and brown people are invisibilized in this landscape, so too is it invisibilized in the state run educational-industrial complex. This bill just formalized that invisibility into law.
I have been speaking so far focusing on racism and racialization, and that choice was intentional because I think that aspect of HB 616 has been significantly downplayed, but we can also see this invisibilization happening to the queer (including in HB 616), the feminine, the disabled, the impoverished, and the infantilized.
So what now? What do we do with landscapes and educational institutions that are built upon invisibilizing certain existences in favor of euro-american mythologies? Well I can tell you at least one thing we shouldn’t do: pass HB 616. I could go off right now about anarchism or abolishing the democratic party or abolishing the cops or restorative justice or whatever but if I’m being honest I’m just tired and I don’t feel like doing that right now. Instead, I’ll take a note from my speech at the last QTAC action on queer utopia and liberation and finish this speech by reading a narrative piece I wrote, about education, land, and liberation...
...I then proceeded to read my essay Land is Pedagogy. Halfway through reading that work I was interupted by an organizer with OSU college democrats, who wanted a politician to speak. I took my sweet time with the rest of the speech. :)
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