In the wake of the proposition 8 vote, a narrative is emerging in very different social locations that focuses on the key role played by black voters in passing the amendment to end gay marriage in California. I have not been eager to engage this argument, for a variety of reasons—chief among them, perhaps, is that I have grown weary of taking arrows from both the gay and the African-American community when I address these issues, given my own social location as the descendant of white slaveholders.The narrative of black voters’ responsibility for proposition 8’s victory is now becoming inescapable, however. I find it appearing on right-wing Christian and political websites, as well as gay ones. That means that we have to engage it, think about it, comment on it, correct or combat it, if necessary. We have to do so if we do not want it to carry the day.
In addition, this debate threatens to be fractious in the gay community—it already is fractious, with charges and countercharges—and to produce more heat than light. It demands careful analysis. It is important and inescapable because the narrative of black Obama supporters standing against gay rights is a wedge narrative that the religious and political right intend to exploit in coming months. They’re already doing so.
And if the gay community doesn’t find ways to engage it, this divide-and-conquer narrative will gain increasing power in the hands of those who want to use it to undermine the solidarity of those supporting the new president. It is being crafted to create unique misery for the new administration, largely on the backs of the LGBT community.
I’m crafting this posting as more a thinking-through essay than a research report. It won’t be replete with references to every article or blog posting I’ve been reading on these topics in the past two days. If readers have questions or want references, I’ll gladly provide them. Where I do offer documentation, please consider the citation representative of others similar to it.
For a glimpse at how the religious and political right are already spinning the black vote on proposition 8, take a look at George Conger’s blog posting today, “Barack In, Gay Marriage Out” (http://geoconger.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/barack-in-gay-marriage-out-cen-110508). This posting has gotten picked up today by the Clerical Whispers blog, which means it will be spread widely around the Catholic blogworld across the globe. It’s also linked to yesterday’s Religious Intelligence paper, an internationally circulated journal allied to the right-wing “traditionalist” movement in the Anglican Church (www.religiousintelligence.com/news/?NewsID=3240).
Conger, who is an Episcopal priest in the conservative Diocese of Central Florida, has ties, as well, to the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a lavishly funded right-wing activist group that actively seeks to exploit wedge issues in leading American churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian) to offset movements to emphasize the social justice teachings of those churches. During this year’s UMC General Conference, I blogged repeatedly about this group and its attempt to use the argument that Africans (and African-Americans) are anti-gay to divide the Methodist church and attack movements calling for inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church.*
Conger’s “Barack In, Gay Marriage Out” zeroes in on the claim that “. . . Black and Hispanic voters backed Proposition 8 by a 3 to 1 margin, and overwhelmingly backed Obama.” Re: Latino voters, Conger’s statistics are not borne out by exit polls, which show something over 50% of Latino voters supporting the proposition, while the percentage of African-American voters who did so was 69%.
Those statistics are the sticking point. They’re what is now provoking discussion about whether African Americans played a primary role in defeating proposition 8. And they’re undeniable: African Americans did vote in exceptionally high numbers for proposition 8 in California. They were predicted to do the same for amendment 2 in Florida. I have not seen breakdowns of that vote, but I have no reason to doubt that polls showing high black support for that homophobic amendment was equally high.
While I don’t think we can deny these statistics, and the homophobia within the African-American community to which they point, I also do not think they form the basis for a sweeping narrative about how black Americans are uniquely responsible for the rollback of gay marriage in California. There are many ways to slice data pies, and each way reveals a different aspect of the complex question of who votes for what and why.
The funding for the fight against gay marriage in California was provided disproportionately, for instance, by the LDS church—the largely white LDS church that for many years refused to admit black men into its priesthood. The Knights of Columbus dropped a bundle on the state to fight gay marriage. The Catholic bishops of California instructed pastors to read pastoral letters encouraging Catholics to vote for proposition 8.
If the gay community and its friends intend to address institutionalized homophobia effectively, we have to develop tools of analysis and counter narratives that recognize the complicity of many groups in enshrining discrimination in our institutions and legal documents. We have to avoid simplistic one-answer analysis and finger-pointing.
As Pam Spaulding, an African-American lesbian, has repeatedly noted at her Pam’s House Blend blog, racism runs deep in the white LGBT community, as homophobia does in the African-American community. Unless we find ways to talk across our cultural and religious boundary lines—openly, and with the pain that arises in honest conversation—we will remain prey to the malicious intent of right-wing groups to set us at each other’s throats.
Pam Spaulding states,
I've been blogging for years about the need to discuss race in regards to LGBT issues. I hope that this is now the wakeup call for our "professional gays" out there who represent us to come out of their comfort zones and help bridge this concrete education gap.
The belief that white=gay is big part of the problem, and as long as black LGBTs are invisible in their own communities and there is a dearth of color in the public face of LGBT leadership, the socially conservative black community can remain in denial that I exist as a black lesbian (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8013).
In my view, Pam Spaulding and her blog model the kind of boundary-crossing conversation that has to be built to engage the right-wing spin narrative about Barack being in and gay marriage being out. With equal measure, she reports evenhandedly on ugly manifestations of homophobia in the black community and heinous demonstrations of racism in the white community.
She dares to say what many on both sides of the fence want to make unsayable. And in the process, she creates a rare space in both LBGT and African-American culture for productive conversation across lines of race and sexual orientation.
And that conversation has to take place, for the reasons I have already outlined and for another reason as well. It has to take place because there is considerable pain among many gay Americans regarding what happened in California, and trying to clamp down on conversation about the root causes of what happened won’t staunch the flow of that pain.
Karen Ocamb’s on-the-scene report in Alternet today does a good job of describing the pain (www.alternet.org/sex/106161). She notes that gay supporters at the Music Box in Hollywood on election night were jubilant when the news of Obama’s election broke, and the cheers were even louder when he the president-elect mentioned us in his acceptance speech.
And then the reports began to filter in: rising numbers against proposition 8. The mood at the watch party she was attending grew more somber. “By morning, while the world rejoiced at the prospect of a new beginning, lesbian and gay couples cried in despair at the profound loss of equality.”
There’s the pain as well of African-American members of the LGBT community, who now feel the pain of what happened in California in double measure—at the very moment an African American captures the presidency. As Terrance Heath writes,
It's funny, In twenty-four hours I gained new faith in America. And quickly lost it.
In twenty-four hours, everything changed - and nothing changed.
Last night I went to bed feeling like a "real American." This morning, it turned out nothing had changed.
Last night I went to bed proud to be an American. When I woke up this morning, I wasn't.
Last night I went to bed ready to take on all the problems that face American, even if they don't specifically relate to me or that one concern of mine.
This morning I woke up and though, "Why bother? Nothing changed" (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=FCAB48DC2828C092A44EE345660009A6?diaryId=8034).
This is a particular kind of pain. It’s a particular kind of pain that deserves analysis if it’s going to be addressed adequately. At a symbolic level, the victory of the Barack Obama represents a significant breakthrough for the African-American community. Many, though not all, LGBT Americans rejoice at that breakthrough. Many of us (but not all of us, to our discredit) have worked for that breakthrough.
We would like to celebrate this historic event with undivided hearts. We cannot do so now. And to many of us, it feels as if we have been betrayed by some of the very brothers and sisters beside whom we toiled for the victory of the first African-American president.
There is then, that very particular pain of betrayal, of feeling stabbed in the back, of feeling turned on by those one had considered friends and allies. Such pain runs deep. And it has to be talked about. It has to be talked about even as the LGBT community challenges itself to transcend one-issue analysis of homophobia that lays blame for all homophobia at the feet of the black community.
After all, 27% of our own LGBT brothers and sisters voted for McCain-Palin in this election. And something tells me that 27% included very few white gays and lesbians. Talk about betrayal and back-stabbing . . . .
Perhaps in reaction to the one-issue analysis of what happened with proposition 8 and the unacknowledged racism of many members of the LGBT community, some gay political commentators are moving to the opposite extreme in recent days. I am seeing suggestions—sometimes, but not always, from gay people of color—that the gay community needs to drop the rhetoric of the black civil rights movement and develop a story of its own.
In one sense, that’s obviously correct: every marginalized community needs to tell its own story. Every kind of marginalization is different, and no single narrative can speak for all kinds of marginalization.
I think, however, that there is considerable danger in this attempt to slap at what some commentators think is hidden racism in the analysis of members of the gay community alarmed at the statistics re: proposition 8. To undercut the connections of the gay struggle for civil rights with the African-American struggle for civil rights plays directly into the hands of those who want to put the two communities at each others’ throats.
One of the most insidious achievements of right-wing political operatives has been to convince the African-American community (and Africans, as well) that all gays are privileged white people who feel nothing but disdain for black people. To drive the knife deeper, the right-wing narrative has also sought to convince African Americans that African-American discrimination is a unique form of discrimination that LGBT Americans do not and cannot ever share, since we choose our orientation, while skin color is inescapable.
To be sure, some African Americans have been eager to accept this analysis, and many black ministers have shored the analysis up with fiery sermons about the chosen sin of homosexuality and the appeal for illicit “special rights” by those engaged in this sin. And the obtuseness of many white LGBT persons to the deep, abiding scars of racism for generations, and the unique experience of enslavement endured by black Americans, has not made things any better.
If we allow the religious and political right to treat gay rights as a separate category of civil rights, and if we use a misplaced rhetoric of political correctness in the gay community to justify that separation of the LGBT civil rights struggle from the ongoing struggle for civil rights of all marginalized groups in American society, we do the work of our enemies for them. Separating the gay struggle from the African-American struggle plays into the hands of those who want to convince mainstream society and the African-American community that the struggle for gay rights is somehow apart from, cut off from, that powerful current of freedom and justice that flows through our foundational documents and the rhetoric of our faith communities from the beginnings of the nation.
We have to find ways around this impasse. We have to do better. We can do better. If we do not do so, we will allow the religious and political right to make the miracle of the election we have just undergone a pyrrhic victory with bitterness spread all around.
*For anyone interested in reading those postings, I suggest searching for IRD in the search engine for this blog.
