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Common decency in common spaces

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Staff

Caitlin Breedlove

When my girlfriend and I went to Cameron Village Mall in Raleigh recently, we were expecting to have lunch. What we got instead was an instruction to leave for being out as lesbians, holding hands and kissing each other on the cheek.

Were we surprised? Yes. Shocked? No.

We were not shocked, because there seems to be a general culture of bullying in this country these days. Bullying is just another word for violence against marginalized people. It is hard to say we live in a fair and open society when so much hate is directed towards certain communities. Many – including the security guard who ejected us from Cameron Village – seem to believe that we are not owed basic decency, dignity and respect simply because of who we are.

When this happened to us, we realized that bullying and violence is about so much more than one security guard, one incident or the two of us as people. This happens every day, and not just to gay people.

We need to reclaim the common spaces and public areas of this country as our own, and say that as long as we are not harming anyone else, we have the right to be who we are, where we are, all the time.

When we were asked to leave the mall, we were told we were on “private property,” and therefore could be ejected for any reason at all. This made us wonder: Are there any standards for how we treat each other in public, even if we are on private property?

The vast majority of this country is private property, and we believe that does not mean that everyone forfeits the right to common decency, dignity, respect and safety in public. We need a common code of conduct in this country around how we treat each other on public or private property: an agreement that regardless of who owns land we are standing on, we can count on having our basic human rights upheld in common space.

Some of the responses my girlfriend and I have received have been hateful. One oft-repeated sentiment is that we should “move to more liberal towns in North Carolina” or move “back” up North – particularly ironic, as we are not Northerners.

We really wonder about this idea that certain kinds of people should be corralled or contained in certain parts of this country – whether that means gay or transgender people to “liberal” towns, immigrants to fields, people with disabilities to institutions or African-Americans to certain poor neighborhoods in urban centers. If, God forbid, you are a person who holds more than one of these identities, the message is that you are supposed to be out virtually nowhere in public.

This idea of containment draws our minds to the ugliest times in recent and past U.S. history, and we must fight hard against this rhetoric everywhere we see it.

One good thing did come out of all this. Because of thousands of phone calls and emails that our supporters made and sent, we met with the company that owns that mall.

They apologized and promised new policies and anti-discrimination training. They also told us that their business was being affected by this situation at many levels: their leasing deals, their work with current tenants and their public relations. That, to be honest, blew us away.

We think this speaks to the power that we had when we walked into that room to talk with those executives: power that is not about having a lot of money or property.

Rather, it is power that comes directly from our communities when we work together to make change – that was the power we knew we had when we talked with them, and the power that made them give us everything we asked for.

Caitlin Breedlove is co-director of Southerners on New Ground.

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