AMERICAblog: Coretta Scott King: Racism and Homophobia are the same thing
PeteWa
· 7 months ago
Coretta Scott King was such an amazing person.
Pope Buck I
· 7 months ago
Well, see, that's another thing the two struggles have in common.
People like the CWA were against that other civil rights struggle, too.
Gridlock
· 7 months ago
SING IT, sister!
Blueflash
· 7 months ago
The anti-gay haters love nothing more than depicting gays as a bunch of privileged whites in order to foment black resentment against us- the same kind of people who were once just as opposed to African American civil rights as they now are to ours. It's easy to do in a homophobic society where by and large the highly educated are the only people with the sense of security to live openly as gay men and lesbians. We tend to look especially well heeled because the environment the haters have created makes it perilous for working class gays without difficult to replace professional skills to come out of the closet.
Lynn Dee
· 7 months ago
I would like to make a comment about the discomfort some (many? most?) of the anti-gay marriage folk feel at the sight of gay PDA's (public displays of affection). This is sometimes recounted as one way that gays impose their "lifestyle choices" on straights.
And I would like to separate that discomfort from what some of these people apparently regard as a reasonable solution. The discomfort itself is fine. If the whole concept of gay sex is new to you, then it is perhaps similar to being a kid and first discovering what's involved in straight sex. ("The man puts his what where??!!") So I get that. What I don't get is why this discomfort should translate into: "And so, to protect me from these uncomfortable feelings, I don't want have to see any gay PDA's, and I certainly don't want to have to consider what's involved in gay marriage."
These people need to come up with another solution.
BTW, it occurred to me as I was writing this that it was another place where the analogy to racists against interracial marriage could easily be made. That is, sometimes in life, we have to own our uncomfortable feelings and find solutions to them that don't involve externalizing them and demanding that others not trigger those feelings. Nowhere is that more true than where the solution these racists, bigots and homophobes would prefer involves putting the burden on others to curtail the exercise of their own human rights.
Astro
· 7 months ago
While I agree with Coretta Scott King's statements 100%, ill play devils advocate for a minute.
I think the biggest difference between the gay and black civil rights movements is (theoretically) you can hide that your gay, but (unless your fair skinned or biracial) you can never hide your skin color.
And lets be honest the face of the gay civil rights movement in the United States IS white. And I believe many African Americans feel the gay community has done little outreach towards the African American community, and they feel the civil rights language of the 60s is co-opted when its convenient.
Blueflash
· 7 months ago
Are we co-opting the language of the black civil rights movement simply by speaking of civil rights? I've been involved in the gay civil rights movement for two decades now and we focus on rational arguments, not quoting MLK or any other black civil rights leader. Furthermore, the gay civil rights movement has a history that actually extends back to 1840's Germany. We're not exactly babes at this, sitting at the feet of African Americans. As for being invisible being an advantage that's the biggest laugh of all. If all gay people were born with a pink triangle on our foreheads there'd never have been any need for a gay rights movement.
John Aravosis
· 7 months ago
Well, Jews can hide too. Hasn't done them a lot of good historically. Also, read Coretta's quotes about how gays were central to the black civil rights movement in the 60s. And finally, honestly, I don't care what another class of people thinks about the merits of my struggle. Fortunately, we didn't judge the merits of the African-American civil rights struggle by asking other races what they thought of it. I'm not criticizing you, just stating my take on this.
Mike_in_the_Tundra
· 7 months ago
Perhaps I could hide being gay by claiming the man I live with is my roommate, but it will be a lot more difficult to explain why our children call both of us dad. If one of us were taken to an emergency room, the other one could pretend that he doesn't want to go back and see the other.
Jeffrey
· 7 months ago
But there are many gays and lesbians (and, of course, transexuals) who really can't hide the fact that they are gay. And why should that be any kind of answer? To hide who you are is to be ashamed of who you are and that is psychologically devastating. And isn't it more isolating and lonely to be gay and not be able to identify your brothers on sight whereas black people can at least recognize someone from their own community at a glance? The implication of your statement is that it is somehow less difficult to be gay than to be black. That might be true, I guess, but why do people keep insisting on making it some sort of victim contest? What Coretta Scott King says is true. There are so many similarities in our struggles that comparisons have to be made. If you really agree with her, as you said, then why would feel the need to play devil's advocate? What purpose does that serve?
Astro
· 7 months ago
just for people to think about both sides of the argument for a moment.
And even if you are gay, you still can enjoy many of the items in that "invisible knapsack of white privilege"
Our oppression, by and large, is nowhere near as extreme as blacks’, and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. Gay people have more resources than blacks had in the 1960s. We are embedded in the power structures of every institution of this society. While it is illegal in this country to fire an African-American without cause and in most places it’s still legal to fire a gay person for being gay, we are more likely to have informal means of recourse than black people have. Almost all gay people have the choice of passing. Very few black people have that option. Of course, we shouldn’t have to make that choice, and our civil rights struggle is about making sure that we don’t have to.
On a deeper level, though, the gay civil rights struggle is about preventing discrimination based on our proclivity to love, as distinct from the messier foundation of racial discrimination, which primarily has to do with protecting white privilege and wealth. No one would deny that fear of mixed marriages significantly inhibited the progress of the black civil rights movement. (Blacks won employment and voting rights a full three years before the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967.) But love and sex were not, as is the case with gay civil rights, unambiguously the heart of the matter. This is the reason our progress has been slow: Love cannot be understood in the abstract. You cannot understand it until it touches you or you find your way into its orbit.
Sarah
· 7 months ago
I have absolutely no idea why whether or not you can hide your minority status makes any difference in a civil rights movement. As far as the criticism that the gay community hasn't done enough to reach out toward the African American community --- isn't that exactly what this post is trying to do? The civil rights language of the 60's was itself co-opted from the civil rights language of Jesus and Gandhi. Not because it was convenient, but because it was the truth.
tlsintx
· 7 months ago
helluva post, John.
the fundies are on the brink of losing another major battle here and they know it...hence the latest stream of hysterical bullshit coming from CWA...since when is bisexuality a "perversion" ??
good lord, these people would be laughable if they weren't so insane.
cole3244
· 7 months ago
thanks csk, everyone has a dream, homosexualitty isn't a perversion but hatred and bigotry are.
Laur
· 7 months ago
It kills me that there are those who think it's okay to deny rights to a certain class of citizen, in this case, GLBT. They should be ashamed of themselves for fomenting this hatred & intolerance. MLK was right when he said that injustice toward one group leads to the danger of injustice against anyone.
There's no justification for keeping a legal double standard based on sexual orientation. Plessy v Ferguson was overturned in 1954, when the Brown case persuaded that there was no such thing as "separate but equal".
Ewastud
· 7 months ago
The prejudice against gay people is as absurd and unjustified as the prejudice against left-handed people, "south paws", a couple generations ago. When my grandfather was a child and started to show a predilection for left-handedness, his father forcibly tied his left arm behind his back to prevent his "perverse" deviance from the "correct" and "true" path of righteousness and right-handedness. Some day, the prejudices of the anti-gay bigots of today will seem as preposterous as the belief of one of my great grandfather's about one century ago.
Sarah
· 7 months ago
It seems like the latest anti-equality argument is that they aren't bigoted, they just don't want to change the "definition" of marriage. Of course, that "definition" was created when homosexuality was considered a sin, a crime and a disease, so how on earth can it not be bigoted?
satori
· 7 months ago
A long time civil rights agitator and the organizer of the March on Washington, said in a 1987 interview:
"Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.
We are all one. And if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way."
Bayard Rustin was an openly gay man in the 1930s. This is why you haven't heard of him; he was kept a behind the scenes organizer. He played a large part in laying the groundwork of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s and strongly influenced King who saw him as father-like advisor.
Rustin also said: "There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers. . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won't accept fa_gs. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights."
All Comments
People like the CWA were against that other civil rights struggle, too.
And I would like to separate that discomfort from what some of these people apparently regard as a reasonable solution. The discomfort itself is fine. If the whole concept of gay sex is new to you, then it is perhaps similar to being a kid and first discovering what's involved in straight sex. ("The man puts his what where??!!") So I get that. What I don't get is why this discomfort should translate into: "And so, to protect me from these uncomfortable feelings, I don't want have to see any gay PDA's, and I certainly don't want to have to consider what's involved in gay marriage."
These people need to come up with another solution.
BTW, it occurred to me as I was writing this that it was another place where the analogy to racists against interracial marriage could easily be made. That is, sometimes in life, we have to own our uncomfortable feelings and find solutions to them that don't involve externalizing them and demanding that others not trigger those feelings. Nowhere is that more true than where the solution these racists, bigots and homophobes would prefer involves putting the burden on others to curtail the exercise of their own human rights.
I think the biggest difference between the gay and black civil rights movements is (theoretically) you can hide that your gay, but (unless your fair skinned or biracial) you can never hide your skin color.
And lets be honest the face of the gay civil rights movement in the United States IS white. And I believe many African Americans feel the gay community has done little outreach towards the African American community, and they feel the civil rights language of the 60s is co-opted when its convenient.
The implication of your statement is that it is somehow less difficult to be gay than to be black. That might be true, I guess, but why do people keep insisting on making it some sort of victim contest? What Coretta Scott King says is true.
There are so many similarities in our struggles that comparisons have to be made. If you really agree with her, as you said, then why would feel the need to play devil's advocate? What purpose does that serve?
And even if you are gay, you still can enjoy many of the items in that "invisible knapsack of white privilege"
http://womenscreativecollective.org/blog/2009/0...
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid6...
Our oppression, by and large, is nowhere near as extreme as blacks’, and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. Gay people have more resources than blacks had in the 1960s. We are embedded in the power structures of every institution of this society. While it is illegal in this country to fire an African-American without cause and in most places it’s still legal to fire a gay person for being gay, we are more likely to have informal means of recourse than black people have. Almost all gay people have the choice of passing. Very few black people have that option. Of course, we shouldn’t have to make that choice, and our civil rights struggle is about making sure that we don’t have to.
On a deeper level, though, the gay civil rights struggle is about preventing discrimination based on our proclivity to love, as distinct from the messier foundation of racial discrimination, which primarily has to do with protecting white privilege and wealth. No one would deny that fear of mixed marriages significantly inhibited the progress of the black civil rights movement. (Blacks won employment and voting rights a full three years before the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws in 1967.) But love and sex were not, as is the case with gay civil rights, unambiguously the heart of the matter. This is the reason our progress has been slow: Love cannot be understood in the abstract. You cannot understand it until it touches you or you find your way into its orbit.
the fundies are on the brink of losing another major battle here and they know it...hence the latest stream of hysterical bullshit coming from CWA...since when is bisexuality a "perversion" ??
good lord, these people would be laughable if they weren't so insane.
There's no justification for keeping a legal double standard based on sexual orientation. Plessy v Ferguson was overturned in 1954, when the Brown case persuaded that there was no such thing as "separate but equal".
"Twenty-five, thirty years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.
We are all one. And if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way."
Bayard Rustin was an openly gay man in the 1930s. This is why you haven't heard of him; he was kept a behind the scenes organizer. He played a large part in laying the groundwork of the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s and strongly influenced King who saw him as father-like advisor.
Rustin also said:
"There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers. . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won't accept fa_gs. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights."