Giving Compass' Take:
- Kelley Robinson, the first Black, queer woman to lead the Human Rights Campaign, speaks about the current fight for equality for LGBTQ+ rights and what might happen in the next year.
- How can donors support LGBTQ+ rights as a movement and not just organizations? How does that approach look different?
- Read more about LGBTQ+ rights in this guide for donors.
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The last year in our politics has seen an erosion of rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, who are facing an assault on their very existence, with bans on books that affirm their experience, to hundreds of bills in statehouses targeting the rights of transgender youth.
A year ahead of an election that again feels existential for millions of voters, Kelley Robinson — who marked her one-year anniversary this week as the first Black, queer woman to lead the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization — sees the moment as one in which she is uniquely positioned to lead.
I spoke to Robinson about how she sees the fight for equality now, the stakes for 2024 and how she is thinking about her role as one of several Black women and queer people currently leading legacy progressive organizations that were historically helmed by White people. One thing she told me: This is not the worst things have ever been.
“It took so many decades and really centuries of people that were never written into the Constitution, fighting for that to be real, for us to get involved in fights that affirmatively declared our humanity in a country that did not want it to be so,” Robinson said.
She pointed to the gains of the last several decades — including remarkable progress toward ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the legalization of marriage equality — and added that a new strategy is needed to achieve real change in the next half century and beyond.
“We can’t underscore enough that for us to be sitting here is actually the result of so much positive change the movement has driven,” she told me. “I think what’s also true is that we’ve been dealing with the symptoms and not the root causes of too many of these issues. What we have the opportunity to do in this moment is to not just deal with the symptoms, but to address the root causes of white supremacy and of racism that have resulted in a democracy that was not built for us.”
Robinson’s leadership doesn’t just look different; she’s also thinking differently about the role of the Human Rights Campaign, an approach that she said is like “turning a cruise ship into a battleship.”
“I’ve really been kind of embracing these concepts of disruption right now,” Robinson said. Four decades after the HRC’s founding, she said, assimilation should no longer be a requirement for acceptance, agency or allyship.
Read the full article about LGBTQ+ rights by Errin Haines at The19th.