Task Force a partner in White House policy briefing for black LGBT emerging leaders

The Task Force is partnering with the Obama administration, the National Black Justice Coalition and the Human Rights Campaign for today’s White House policy briefing for black LGBT emerging leaders.

At the Task Force we insist that systemic racism is an LGBT issue and that’s why our work every day of the year reflects our deep and central commitment to racial justice.

This includes our annual Racial Justice Institute at the National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, which strives to build an anti-racist LGBT movement and to train leaders from across the country on how to embed the fight for racial justice into our fight for LGBT equality; and our recently released analysis, Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Black Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, with the National Black Justice Coalition and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The report shows that anti-transgender bias coupled with structural racism means that transgender people of color experience particularly devastating levels of discrimination. Key findings of the analysis include:

• Black transgender people had an extremely high unemployment rate at 26 percent, two times the rate of the overall transgender sample and four times the rate of the general population.
• A startling 41 percent of respondents said they had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, more than five times the rate of the general U.S. population.
• Black transgender people lived in extreme poverty with 34 percent reporting a household income of less than $10,000 per year. This is more than twice the rate for transgender people of all races (15 percent), four times the general black population rate (9 percent), and eight times the general U.S. population rate (4 percent).
• Black transgender people were affected by HIV in devastating numbers. More than one-fifth of respondents were living with HIV (20.23 percent), compared to a rate of 2.64 percent for transgender respondents of all races, 2.4 percent for the general black population, and 0.60 percent of the general U.S. population.

Task Force Deputy Executive Director Darlene Nipper, who is attending today’s White House policy briefing, says:

Racial and economic justice is a cornerstone of our work. We know that LGBT equality and racial and economic justice are connected, and that we can’t fully achieve one without achieving the other. And it’s important to remember that many of us are black and LGBT people. We can’t subjugate our blackness for our sexual orientation and gender identity, or our sexual orientation and gender identity for our blackness.