“I had to come out of the closet twice—once as gay, and once as black.”Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2016-03-02 23:28Z by Steven |
For Artur Santoro, 21, identifying as black is about being honest with himself—a process similar to coming out as gay.
“I had to come out of the closet twice—once as gay, and once as black,” Artur tells me. He says growing up with a white dad and a “light-skinned black” mom made it difficult to recognize his own blackness for most of his youth. But once Artur got involved in the LGBT community, it helped him identify other forms of discrimination in his life.
“I was suffering from situations of racism and didn’t realize it before,” he said. “If you’re black, you suffer racism—it’s not a choice; black is a consequence of what I live.”
Tim Rogers, “That moment you look in the mirror and realize you’re black,” Fusion, February 28, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/274184/that-moment-you-look-in-the-mirror-and-realize-youre-black/.