Stop Using Our Voices

I'm really glad to have been contacted for this article, since it's likely going to be bringing light to some things in the aro community that have gone mostly unnoticed by white people in the community.

My name is Jon-Michael, and I'm a Turtle Island — North American, specifically Canadian — native, specifically of the Mohawk tribe. On social media, I often am able to be found under the handle of Cipheral, though I also have an aromantic and indigenous focused tumblr blog under AroNdn. I've been spending the last while doing my best reconnecting to my culture, and identify as a two-spirit individual. I'm also a freelance graphic artist, and I specialize in character design. I also do traditional native beadwork, and hope to eventually make a living off of that. I picked up beading as a way to feel more connected to my heritage, and my culture. It’s a type of spiritual medicine that is something I’m really glad I can incorporate into my daily life.

Changing gears a bit, I’m going to just briefly touch on what being two-spirit means to me, and what it is, since I doubt that there’s a lot of people reading this that know. Two-spirit is an indigenous identity that is very spiritual. To each person who identifies as two-spirit it means something different. An important thing to be aware of is that being two-spirit doesn’t inherently make someone queer or trans. There are a lot of people who are cis and straight who identify as two-spirit. It’s an identity that means, at its core, that someone embodies both male and female spirits. It’s a very sacred role in many tribes, and not something that non-natives can identify with. However, despite the fact that there are two-spirit people who don’t identify as queer or trans, I do. And this, in part, is because of my aromanticism.

To me, being aromantic is a way for me to explore my connection to attraction in a way that's deeply freeing. I currently ID as demiromantic, and while I've rotated between a few different aro labels, it's been a consistent thing for the last several years. IDing as demiromantic has let me carefully tread the territory of romantic attraction again, after having dealt with several... rather bad romantic relationships.

The way that being aro interacts with my culture and racial identity is... interesting? Directly, I find there to be little impact on my culture. However, the inverse is something incredibly different. Being native while navigating aromantic spaces has felt largely hostile to me, and has made finding spaces that are welcoming has proven itself incredibly difficult. Without even realizing it, many people actively push natives out of spaces where we supposedly are welcomed, and the aromantic community is no different. 

I want to start this part off by saying I am disconnected/reconnecting to my culture; I cannot speak for natives who grew up on reservations and/or more steeped in the culture they belong to, and do not intend to. Growing up native, I never got to see myself or people like me portrayed in positive relationships due to racism, and a lot of other people of colour I know feel the same. Something the aromantic community does that really rubs me wrong, is writing off any and all romance at times. Saying it's all overrated, or that we don't need any more romance in media. While I do think we need more media that doesn't focus on romance, writing it off like this, even jokingly, is something that really hurts when you don't have much positive representation in general, let alone in romance. 

Native people like myself don't get shown as loving or as lovable. We grow up with most of the media that features us being negative portrayals, or putting us in abusive relationships. Being told to my face by white aromantics that we don't need any more romance in media directly erases these struggles, as well as the struggles of other queer people (especially QPOC) who still are starved for positive representation in romance media. 

This isn’t to say that it’s all bad, though. There’s a lot about being aromantic that I enjoy. Despite all the struggles, something that I like about being aromantic is the freedom it gives me to explore relationships and attraction that isn't romantic. I was introduced to the concept of relationship anarchy through the aro community, and since then I’ve really been able to break out of the cisheteronormative boxes that society pushed onto me. I’ve had the opportunity to explore the ideas of alterous, platonic, and even sensual attractions. Even though I haven’t personally chosen to label those types of attraction for myself, it's something that has given me a different outlook on attraction as a whole than my alloromantic peers.

I’m someone who is very open about my aromantic identity. I have a large aro pride flag hanging above my bed, a smaller one in a hole on my bedpost, and multiple pride pins on multiple jackets. Being loud and proud about my identity is something that has caused me to get some rather… prying questions from family and community about my future, though. My answer changes often, when asked what I plan on doing about my future. Most recently, my answer tends to be that I want to live either on my own or with one of my friends, working on my library science degree, and taking care of my three cats. It’s simple, and it’s not actually a future I thought I could have before learning that I didn’t have to get married or have a partner.

Learning that aromantic was something that I could be was something that just… changed my life. Something just clicked in my mind, and I haven’t turned back. I’ve been identifying as some form of arospec for the last four years or so, and I’ve gotten the chance to watch the aspec community grow and change from the inside. We’ve had a lot of hard times in the past, and while things have started to look up, there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s still going to be rough times ahead. Particularly, I can tell that as we start getting more mainstream attention, there’s going to be more cases like this, where groups reach out to otherwise marginalized arospec people for points of view. So, this is an open letter here to aspec (specifically arospec) organization members who may be reading, and to other white aros who may not have thought about what the organizations speaking for and about us are like to people of colour:

Going forward, I want to see aromantic organizations that actively recruit and staff people of colour on their boards. I am sick and tired of aromantic forums, newsletters, and websites being nearly EXCLUSIVELY staffed by white people. Even this is rather frustrating, I'll be honest here. White people shouldn't have to take our words and fit them into their pleasant little articles just for us to be listened to. Listen to us on our own blogs. On our own forum posts. Staff us on your boards. Don't just ask us to do things for free, for visibility and pats on the head with promises of doing better. Actually DO better and let us speak for ourselves. Aromantic people of colour are many, but none of you people seem to be willing to get us on your boards for some reason, at least not as permanent fixtures. I'm honestly furious with AUREA as an organization for only reaching out to people of colour for an article on this after being called out about their racism. I want them to do better. I'd love to actually support this organization, but until aromantic voices of colour are heard without white people regurgitating our words through their own lenses, it won't happen.

I agreed to do this interview for this article mostly as a call for white aromantics who are in positions to staff aros of colour to do better. So, hear me now: Listen to us. Stop using our voices for views on your websites and newsletters without actually staffing us and letting us write our OWN articles about being aromantics of colour. That would be the correct way to go about this, in the future, and I urge it to actually be done. That's the thing I want to say on this being "highlighting aromantics of colour". Don't highlight us. Let us speak for ourselves in the future, without filtering it through white article writers.