LGBTQ Group "Werking" For Justice

Dance, dance, revolution! This LGBTQ+ group is putting their bodies to "werk" for social justice.

Transcript

00:00We are here, we are queer, we are trans, and we will dance.

00:11Amidst a government shutdown over Trump's obsession with building a wall to the death

00:17of an eight-year-old boy and seven-year-old Jacqueline, both Guatemalan children in U.S.

00:22custody, to a recent autopsy of Roxana Hernandez, a trans woman who also died in U.S.

00:29custody, which showed that she experienced brutal maltreatment at the hands of U.S. Customs and

00:34Border Patrol officials, we're demanding work, not walls from the Trump administration and the

00:40U.S. government. As a first-generation individual, having grown up in an environment that has

00:54demonized Arabs and specifically Muslims, it's been really important for me to show up

01:01for other people, even though they might not share our identity.

01:15The Pulse nightclub shooting happened on a dance floor, and so taking that dance floor into the

01:21streets felt like a natural movement of occupying space, asserting that we are here in all of our

01:29existence and that we expect respect for our existence. It's very important to be clear

01:36that my intentions were by no means to appropriate twerking, but rather to honor its roots as a

01:42celebratory dance, to honor its history. It came out of the New Orleans bounce scene, which is such

01:49a quintessentially queer and trans music scene. To really honor that and how it has been a

01:57celebratory movement in cultures and societies that were oppressed. To honor that and to

02:04use that as a means of celebrating our resilience and our resistance, to me, is really to appreciate

02:13its history and to utilize it as a means of creating the world that we want to see.

02:20As a part of our Work Not Walls campaign, we celebrated migrants and refugees in front of

02:35Stephen Miller's house, the pioneer of the Muslim ban, of family separation, of slashing the number

02:42of refugees allowed into the country. We will not tolerate the bigotry and hate and the xenophobia

02:50that is coming from the Trump administration and from the U.S. government as a whole.

02:55We are here to work and not create walls.