“The black and brown stripes are an inclusionary way to highlight black and brown LGBTQIA members within our community,” said one source involved with the flag-raising event who asked not to be named. G Philly’s Ernest Owens reported on the new flag before the city officially made its announcement. Tierney, a Philadelphia-based advertising agency, approached the Office of LGBT Affairs with the new design. But together we can make big strides toward a truly inclusive community. To fuel this important conversation, we’ve expanded the colors of the flag to include black and brown. Especially when it comes to recognizing people of color in the LGBTQ+ community. A lot of good, but there’s more we can do. In 1978, artist Gilbert Baker designed the original rainbow flag. The website for the “More Color More Pride” campaign reads: The city has a launched a new campaign, “More Color More Pride,” adding one black and one brown stripe to the traditional six colored rainbow. The new design will be, from top to bottom: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. "This is one of the symbolic measures to represent the substantive measures that will be following.Philadelphia is redefining the LGBT pride flag as we know it. "My office will be producing symbolic and substantive measures," Hikes said. The flag, Hikes said, is not an end-all-be-all, but rather a symbolic promise that substantive measures addressing racism in Philadelphia will be coming out of her office. "Conversation is essential to our growth as a community." "During the HIV/AIDs crisis, we said that silence is death, and not having these conversations will not get us anywhere," she said. Though Hikes did not expect the local conversation to become national, she is happy that people are discussing racism in the LGBTQ community. "This is real, this is lived and this is felt by us on a daily basis."
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"The fact that two stripes have triggered the online and offline responses that it has, it just proves that there is entrenched racism and anti-blackness ," Muhammad said. "I'm inspired by a symbol, while stable and static, that is able to change with its community," she said.Īccording to Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, co-founder of Philadelphia's Black and Brown Workers Collective, the flag is proof that the racism that "entrenched racism and anti-blackness" persists in LGBTQ spaces, a point activists in Philadelphia have been trying to make in the last two years.
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She specifically mentioned the bisexual, transgender, bear and leather pride flags. Hikes pointed to the litany of flags that exist to celebrate parts of the community rather than subsume Baker's original design.
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"But having additional flags in our community don't make the original flag null and void." "I love the rainbow flag, it's a beautiful flag," Hikes said. In January, the city released a report about racism among the neighborhood's bars and nonprofits, the result of more than a year of protests over discriminatory dress codes and a video in which a local gay bar owner used racial slurs to disparage black patrons.Īnd as for accusations that Philadelphia's local flag competes with Gilbert Baker's, Hikes made it clear this flag "is not instead of, it’s in addition to." That local context involves two years of intense controversy around allegations of racism in the city's Gayborhood. "We did not anticipate this becoming a national conversation." "This is a local initiative it’s a local response," Hikes said in a phone interview.