notes on black homophobia II

Part II: Cutting it Down to Size, or Waking up From an Imperialist Hangover


After one more week of  hedge-clearing, I think I will be able to talk about black homophobia as I have experienced it from within black spaces rather than as it has been portrayed from the outside.

This week, I go into what appear to be the assumptions that allow whites and Westerners to find the mote of homophobia in black and brown communities while ignoring the plank in their own. After all, majority white states and municipalities have blocked gay marriage and adoption and refused to grant human rights protections. And the slender recognition and protection for queers in the US has come (as did racial integration before it) by judicial intervention rather than by groundswell of voters. Nevertheless, on this very unstable foundation of enlightenment on the question of sexuality, has been erected a tower from which to espy minority homophobia. 

On this one matter, I am tentatively aligned with the "dirty laundry" police--those minoritized people who don't want certain topics discussed in front of white folks. It does appear to me that we need to have a serious internal conversation about the damage that homophobia does to all its targets. In cases when the perpetrators and targets are primarily within racially oppressed communities, we need not have that conversation publicly and confirm pernicious stories that Africans, Latin Americans, Muslims, and the black and brown underclasses of the West are the backward folks responsible for holding back gay rights on a national or global scale. 


After looking through some evidence of premature self-congratulation on the part of those straight white liberals who wish to isolate homophobia in black and brown spaces, I end by arguing that there is nothing inherently homophobic about nonwhite communities or religious faith. The task in this case, as in all social struggle, is to reshape relationships. The most effective appeals, as legal scholar Patricia Williams once wrote, tend to be to already-existing ideals. That is, you convince someone that they were already for what seems to be a frightening change. You appeal, that is, to a conservative desire for precedent, continuity, and stability. There is more than enough room within both Christian and black nationalist ideology to argue in favor of equality, compassion, respect, and mutuality among all persons. It's not that such claims would not be opposed; it's that one need not dismiss these cultural starting points as irredeemably corrupted. 


What follows is looooooong, so I've just encapsulated the full argument above. Next week, I plan a post called "Black Homophobia, or Class Warfare by Other Means." There I'll be thinking about the strange way that homophobia has been positioned as a working-class phenomenon and homosexuality as the playground of luxurious decadents. I think this will take us away from religion as a single variable and toward nationalism, which always has reproduction of a race at its core. It may also tell us a bit more about why white gay organizations don't see race as a "gay" issue and it remains a hard sell getting gayness seen as a "black" issue, like economics, health care, or police brutality.
In the meantime, one final attempt to clear some ground and get some things committed to e-paper.



The belief in black culpability and white innocence on the matter of homophobia might best be described as the thinking of a person hung over from a cocktail of Enlightenment secularism and imperial arrogance. 

In vino veritas? Get many a liberal drunk, and beneath the tolerance, anti-racism, and atheism, you might hear something like this, if you'll forgive the stiffness of the monologue: 

DRUNKEN RAMBLINGS OF A LIBERAL/IMPERIALIST 

on THE MORNING-AFTER OF DECOLONIZATION: 

Secularism is the only engine of social and technological progress. Religious faith is incompatible with scientific knowledge and breeds social antagonism. Only abstract and dispassionate reason can lead to the equal treatment of citizens. Religion is just emotion and frenzy, part of the childhood of the species. Religion is what the West had before we had science, and now, Arabs, Muslims, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans--as well as our own undomesticated colored underclasses--exhibit those prejudices whites used to hold before we became enlightened. Ah, how we spent those halcyon days of the Victorian era, pouring white pepper seed into skulls, calculating facial angles, and fondl--eh-hemm, measuring genitalia [by which we determined both racial origins and who was a nasty sexual invert]. Yes, science always leads away from magical thinking and from ethnic and sectarian hierarchies and leaves in their place proper, scientific hierarchies. For example, the white man is most scientific, most scientific, indeed!** 

** For this conversation to work, the drunken former imperialist has to be looking across the Mediterranean or the Atlantic Ocean because, if he were looking at the Pacific, he would see those Asians who Marge Schott told us come here and "outdo our kids."

Examples of this unearned self-satisfaction abound. When the US helped draft an Iraqi Constitution in 2004, it mandated that one quarter of the Parliament be comprised of women. The United States has never had female representation that high and, in fact, recently experienced a drop in the percentage of women in Congress. Jasbir Puar observes that laws regarding homosexuality are similarly being used as "a barometer of civilisational aptitude," i.e., a pre-text for the US and the UK to (re-)establish colonial rule in the Muslim world--err, spread democracy. 

Certainly, Puar is not arguing that the stoning or incarceration of women or queers should pass without protest.  But there should be a certain level of suspicion when Republicans--never the prime proponents of women's rights on the domestic front--suddenly adopt this issue as part of their foreign policy mission... or when gay rights' activists in the West articulate support for military occupation of Islamic countries deemed rotten at their core because of their statutes criminalizing sodomy. 


Surely, it can't be too difficult to advocate for sovereignty for these countries and the protection of human rights for all of their citizens simultaneously.

Are the US and Britain in a position to chastise for human rights violations the decolonized world they humanely colonized and purposely underdeveloped? These imperial powers have disregarded the human rights of all persons in the (former) colonies--it is safe to assume that gender-nonconforming people were among those who went to deaths in diamond mines and counted among those who were collateral damage of military operations. Western imperial powers also have only very recently done a very little to protect the human rights of women and queers in their own locales and of their own color. 


Quick. Name a US city besides New York City that recognizes domestic partnerships. Name a state or city with laws that treat sexual orientation as a protected category, alongside race, religion, or gender? I can name two that refused to add sexual orientation to the list just off the top of my head: Cincinnati and Colorado.

Yet, despite these spectacular failures and very miniscule accomplishments, the progressive elements in the West suggest that Western nations are, at least in comparison, already over this whole sexuality issue. (See comments)^


For example, The New York Times--which my friend Twunch called something like the daily paper of  liberal America's bubble--presents violence against gays in Africa as if it were a foreign occurrence or remote memory requiring translation for its already-enlightened audience: "The most outspoken gay rights advocate in Uganda, a country where homophobia is so severe that Parliament is considering a bill to execute gay people, [David] Kato had received a stream of death threats, his friends said." 

The reader of this article is imagined to be so unfamiliar with homophobia as to require explanation. Perhaps her grandfather knew about "severe" homophobia, involuntary outing, and punitive legislation, but she doesn't. 

It would appear the 24-hour news cycle has damaged memory even more than I initially feared.

One need not look as far back as the famous murder of Matthew Shepherd to see the effects of homophobia in the States. The Rutgers suicide happened but five months ago--and in the Times' own back yard. Nor is this to even mention the kinds of sexual abuse dished out to arrested persons and prisoners. But most of these things happen to invisible people who don't have a sitcom. Unfortunately, sitcoms--absent legal protection and other fundamental social changes--are nearly the sole evidence of the US's supposed progress on the gay issue.

But the Times' most frustrating tendency is its presumption of homophobia as a default mode of blacks and Latinos who are put in the strange position of answering an old question, reworked: When did you stop beating your wife? becomes When did you stop being religious conservatives who hate gays? This premise was on full display in an article from 2004--an incredulous take on black deacons and ministers who blocked the passage of an amendment banning gay marriage in Georgia. By the end of the piece, the author seemed to understand and to convey that black legislators' opposition to this amendment sprung from both electoral strategy and an ethical commitment as black people to oppose de jure discrimination. 

However, the lesson seems not to have taken, as subsequent articles have continued to trot out the same tired storyline. Despite the fact that it was black legislators who cast the decisive votes to block the amendment in Georgia, it was assumed even before the vote on Prop 8 that African-Americans, so staunchly religious, would wash away gay rights as they flooded the polls to vote in their Messiah, candidate Obama.

I mentioned the disputed exit poll data regarding California's 2008 Proposition 8 vote. The early figures got quite a bit of play, but my friend Sarah pointed me to better estimates that became available months later. These calculations estimated that roughly 58% of African-Americans voted to ban gay marriage in the state -- as compared to 52% of the state as a whole. This figure no longer seems cause for special alarm--not when black voters comprised only 7% of the state's voters. 


One of the more intriguing factors is that, among those who reported attending church weekly, black support for the ban was lower than that of any other ethnic group. (Ta-Nehisi Coates excerpts these conclusions and a link to the entire report.)


After last week's column, commenter David asked me if the influence of evangelicalism produces different attitudes toward sexuality and different expressions of homophobia among black people. I suspected that this question was a kind way of saying that black people are more homophobic because more are evangelicals. My sense -- having not conducted a study myself -- is that the link between envangelicalism and black homophobia is not an easy one to make. Some black preachers, propelled by conviction and/or spurred by Bush administration dollars, began pushing traditional marriage with increasing fervor in the last decade. The sermons, marches, and petitions of such pastors may have received significant publicity, but they don't tell us much about what the members of the congregation believe or how they behave. This evidence tells us, at best, the content of sermons in churches whose pastors may have received incentives to emphasize a particular aspect of doctrine in their ministry (We certainly know President Bush didn't encourage them to preach the passage that decrees it is more difficult for a wealthy man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle! Those tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans wouldn't have gone down so well with the base).



The impact of this funding and preaching on black voters is still in dispute. One leftist analyst argues that black evangelicals remain more committed to the social gospel than their white counterparts, who emphasize opposition to gay rights and abortion and support of school prayer as paramount issues. Yet, at the same time, he points to what he hyperbolically describes as the black community's "relentless" hostility to gays. 


This is a strange example of refusing to let facts get in the way of a good hypothesis. His own data cannot be held to support this portrait. The voting patterns that he cites--decreased support among black evangelicals for 2004 candidate Kerry in relation to candidate Gore--may have indicated not that black people are more homophobic as some permanent (i.e., "relentless") state of affairs but that both funding and rhetoric of the Christian right were encouraging a shift in attitudes and priorities. It is possible that encouragement from Bush administration-funded pastors to speak out against homosexuality increased willingness to answer pollers' questions forthrightly. Even this poll data does not necessarily prove a comparatively greater homophobia among African-Americans. For, if the infamous "Bradley effect" names a real phenomenon, we have evidence that white voters have been capable of adopting socially enlightened views when on the pollster's hot-seat but discarding them when in the isolation of the voting booth. Could the same not be true for reported attitudes toward sexual difference?


Of course, the narrative of increasing conservative seizure of the black evangelical vote came to naught with the overwhelming black vote in favor of President Obama--despite his holding positions fairly typical of contemporary Democrats on key evangelical issues. This vote as well as the disputed "Bradley effect" suggest that polls and election results are not infallible ways of accessing beliefs, much less behaviors (which very often contradict stated beliefs, anyway).


Individual positions and social norms change over time. Politics is about attempting to direct that change. The problem with the conventional wisdom about black homophobia is in the way it posits both blackness and evangelical Christianity as inherently homophobic, rather than as internally fraught--and therefore capable of being mobilized in any political direction.



These kinds of characterizations are maddening because they malign black identity and Christian faith as antithetical to compassion and social justice when, I dare say, those two cultures have as much to celebrate and as much to account for as any other. Certainly, too many people of faith malign and attack GLBT persons in the name of religion, while too many ethnic groups attack them in the name of racial purity or nationalism. However, science, psychology, sociology and programs launched in the name of whiteness/civilization have, at best, a spotty track record of recent conversions on these matters. (I hear, though, that recent converts are the most impatient with those who still hold the views they just discarded.)

But I have been surprised enough by people of faith and those living in minority communities who oppose homophobia to learn the lesson that residents of the 'liberal bubble' have been unable to retain, it would seem, because their heads are full of an idea that secular science and Western nations are intrinsically oriented toward defending the rights of all people. 


Science gave us the homosexual as invert, deviant, and head case requiring electroshock. Scientific homophobia does not strike me as any more appealing than state homophobia was (and is), with its solution of criminalization. And the clearest alignment of homophobia with white identity actually comes from white supremacist nationalists, who are as homophobic as they are xenophobic and racist... after all, if white men don't propagate the race in hetero sex, the niggers, the Chinese, or the Mexicans will take over.

I am well aware of the problem of black homophobia, and I will address it in some detail later. But I am also concerned about an overestimation of its prominence and its hold on black thought. An example of the complexity of black responses to sexuality is exemplified in the black ministers who blocked passage of the amendment banning gay marriage in Georgia (although they had previously helped to defeat passage of a bill recognizing it). It would seem that, for them, black Christian identity both propelled and restrained homophobic tendencies. The question then, for those of us who want to blunt the power of homophobia to waste human lives (through slow or quick violence) is not "why are black people so/more homophobic" but, rather, How can we take hold of the elements in Christianity or black communal thought that already oppose homophobia, enhance them, and make them part of the ideal of black consciousness toward which people aspire?

Some white gays have argued that they resent having to beg or persuade in order to get what are basic human rights. While I appreciate the indignation, I must say this is based on a profound amnesia about civil rights. Even using only the most famous of figures--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King--one can see that an immense amount of lobbying, consciousness-raising, and campaigning was necessary for the constitutional amendments outlawing slavery and giving black men revocable voting rights...and then giving the franchise to all women. Despite the so-called "self-evidence" of natural rights, excluded groups have never achieved them without engaging in coalition-building and compromise--in short, the persuasions and concessions of politics. It may be insulting to have to argue for one's rights, but it's also a necessity--and one which a certain segment of white gays appear to have been spared, standing, as they do, on a whole heap of automatically granted white privileges.
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My aim of seizing upon non-homophobic elements in black or Christian culture does open me up to certain charges of elitism or condescension. It might be argued that a middle-class, over-educated person, steeped in white institutions should not be permitted to mount a campaign to root out homophobia among working-class black people. Certainly, if one viewed this task as a missionary's sojourn, ministering to benighted, under-educated, religious zealots, it would be elitist and condescending. But I don't consider this a mission trip. I consider it a political engagement with one of my communities. 


These are the negotiations of a society: I get to put forward my vision of blackness--my interpretation of its history, meaning, and potential--in the hopes of persuading others to adopt it. Certainly, I came to understand the ethics and responsibilities of being black through confronting a competing array of programs--black arguments in favor of radicalism, capitalism, conservatism, nationalism, integration, Afrocentrism, feminism, futurism, and more. Since 1) I am part of the black community--a birthright that I have neither renounced nor forfeited because of my time on the white side of things--and 2) I am a potential target of black homophobia (in a way that few white people  ever are), I will exercise the right to campaign for my particular way of mobilizing blackness: call it Huxtablean,  radicalized by a quasi-black nationalism, reconstructed through James Baldwin, Hortense Spillers, and Phillip Brian Harper. Call it that for a start...