David J. Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), an organization dedicated to securing the rights of the Black LGBTQ community, says his work requires him to be a “disruptor in chief.”
He said the NBJC has been “hyper-consumed” with pushing for federal nondiscrimination protections, tackling the mental health crisis that disproportionately affects the Black community, and helping Black LGBTQ children who have been cast out of their homes in acts of intolerance.
“We are obligated to reclaim and remember African ways of being that haven’t been tainted by white supremacy,” said Johns, the former executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under President Obama. “As long as we’ve existed, we’ve been beautifully and incredibly diverse and our fates are linked.”
Over the last few years, the proliferation of what Johns calls anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ legislation has led to the NBJC partnering with Black trans, queer and gender-expansive leaders to counter these laws.
He told The Hill being intersectional in his work is deliberate.
“It is sometimes frustrating … that I have colleagues in progressive white LGBTQ spaces who can put on blinders at times and ignore related issues like anti-Blackness, and then conversely, I have colleagues who are in legacy, traditional civil rights spaces who don’t have to concern themselves with the quote-unquote gay s—,” Johns said.
“I know that unless and until we are able to appreciate not only how all of these things have come into being but how they work interdependently that we’re going to continue to be on this hamster wheel of trying to address one thing after the other.”
“It’s important for those of us who can be disruptive to report like James Baldwin, reimagine and organize like Bayard Rustin, and argue and advocate and organize like [Marsha] P. Johnson such that we can all be free,” Johns said.
“The fact that we, Black folks, have been able to endure a system that was designed to break us — and not only endure it, but find ways to innovate and create — is evidence of the fact that we are continuing to win.”