William J. Barber on Silencing of Coretta Scott King As Act of Systemic Racism: "We Will Cry Out. We Will Not Stand Down."

The very important testimony of Rev. William J. Barber II:

More End-of-Week News: Maciel and John Paul II, Bayard Rustin, and Crisis of Democracy

I apologize that I'm a bit pressed for blogging time today, as I prepare for a day trip to chase down some information for the book on which I've been working--specifically, to see if some distant cousins who grew up with close connections to the book's subject, the 19th-century Arkansas country doctor-cum-philosopher Wilson R. Bachelor, can help identify some old family pictures.  Since I'm preparing to be on the run, I thought I'd post briefly about several articles that interested me when I read them yesterday.

2922 Days (8 Years and 2 Days): When Will Coretta Scott King Be Heard?

And, today, I want to reissue this appeal once again. I am doing so now in light of continued discussion (here and here and here) of Mr. Obama's hesitancy to fulfill his promises to address injustice and denial of rights to gay citizens.

As African-American blogger Pam Spaulding has recently noted, Mr. Obama's silence on gay lives and gay issues following his election hurts the president's own attempts to address homophobia in the black community, even as polls indicate that, in New York, black voters are opposed to gay marriage 57% to 35%, while white voters favor gay marriage 47% to 45%. At the same time, African-American pastors in New York reject their African-American governor David Paterson's inistence that gay rights and African-American rights are linked, and reject the witness of African-American leaders including Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, and Mildred Loving that the movement for gay rights is an extension of the movement for African-American rights.

And so, once again, my appeal for action:

On 8 June 2001, Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued the following call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community:

Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for everyone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

On 20 January 2009, the United States inaugurated its first African-American president, Barack Obama. Immediately following his inauguration, our promising new leader activated a federal website outlining an agenda for important new programs in the area of civil rights, including LGBT rights.

It is now 119 days from the inauguration of President Obama. It is 2922 days (8 years and 2 days) after Coretta Scott King called for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

As a member of the gay community who has long supported and worked for the civil rights of my African-American brothers and sisters, I call on the African-American community to respond to the appeal of Dr. King’s widow.

As I have stated in a posting on this topic, “The need is great. And it is growing. Where is the intent to address that need, as Barack Obama becomes president?”

Who will hear Coretta Scott King’s words and respond to them? Problems within the African-American community should be addressed first and foremost from within the community. The African-American community does not need mentors from outside instructing people of color about how to carry on their business.

When will African-American leaders, in this historic moment in which our nation has an African-American president, take seriously Coretta Scott King’s call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community?

The need is great. It is now 119 days after the inauguration of President Obama. It is now 2922 days (8 years and 2 days) after Coretta Scott King issued her challenge to the black community.

I continue to commit myself to addressing and eradicating racism in the white community at large, and in the white gay community, as well.

When will African-American leaders respond to Coretta Scott King’s call to address black homophobia in a national campaign?

Obama and Gay Questions: The African-American Churched Context

For anyone trying to understand President Obama’s refusal to deal with gay issues—or even speak about gay lives and gay concerns—thus far in his presidency, a posting by Pam Spaulding at her House Blend blog yesterday is must reading. I’d like to offer some thoughts about this posting now, as background to my posting earlier today about Harry Knox and what I fear will be President Obama’s response to pressure from the Catholic far right acting in collusion with the political right to fire him.

Pam Spaulding entitles her posting, “Why President Obama Hurts His Own Case of Addressing Homophobia in the Black Community.” Pam builds her insightful analysis around an article by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post two days ago, which argues that, in ignoring gay issues now, the new president is necessarily playing pragmatic politics.

Fisher notes that historians will be puzzled by the fact that, on the one hand, Obama’s election appeared to usher in a new era of acceptance of the moral claims of gay human beings in our culture, and on the other hand, a strange turn in Obama’s attitudes, which represents a tempering or even a reversal of his approach to gay matters prior to his election. He notes that Obama’s approach now is “primarily political,” and is dominated by “electoral concerns,” particularly by his need to play to churched voters—a need evident in his selection of Rick Warren for a prominent role in the inauguration.

Pam Spaulding agrees with Fisher. She concludes that Obama is unwilling to challenge the anti-gay views of churched voters. She goes further, in fact, and argues that Obama has made a “decision to purposefully confuse the issue” of gay rights with his African-American churched supporters.

Pam notes the considerable backlash against gay rights now underway in some sectors of the African-American community—a backlash so powerful that it has caused D.C. mayor Marion Barry to do an about-face on gay issues that equals the one we seem to be seeing with the new president, such that Barry did a preposterous (and totally unconvincing, given his own personal history) grandstanding act when the D.C. city council recently passed a bill to recognize gay marriages performed outside D.C. In voting against the bill, Barry announced that he was defending morality! He also observed, “"All hell is going to break lose. We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."

The black community is just adamant against this: Barry is speaking the gospel truth here, though, of course, there are powerful and morally compelling spokespersons within the black community who reject homophobia and who argue that it is immoral, not moral, to demean gay persons and create second-class citizenship categories for gay persons. These powerful, morally compelling spokespersons include Leonard Pitts, to whose response to Barry I’ve just linked.

Still, it is important to note that, in dragging his feet on gay issues and playing games with gay lives, the new president is quite decidedly playing to one of the groups most strongly in his corner—the African-American community, and churched African Americans in particular. As Pam Spaulding notes, anyone following blog discussions of gay issues that center on African-American concerns can easily see this.

If the gay community wants to understand what it is up against in dealing with the silence of the Obama administration about gay lives and gay issues, it cannot afford to discount the African-American community—as it has all too often done in the past. It is important that gay citizens understand the significant, even determinative, role that black attitudes about gay people and gay rights have been playing in the new administration.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, I have my own personal experience with precisely the dynamic now underway with the new president. My partner and I accepted the invitation of an African-American friend several years ago to work in the administration of her college. On the strength of verbal promises she made to us, and never dreaming that she would betray us (because she is a strong, committed churchgoing Methodist), we uprooted ourselves, took on a second mortgage, and moved to a new state to assist this friend who had publicly stated that she supports gay rights and combats discrimination against gay people.

Only to find ourselves in one of the most hurtful situations of our lives: within weeks after our arrival at our new workplace, our friend began to hammer away at us as a gay couple, precisely because we were a gay couple. She informed us that, just as we arrived at the new jobs, the United Methodist church, which owns her school, had had its annual statewide meeting and had split down the middle about whether even to admit gay members, let alone disavow its homophobia. She told us that her United Methodist bishop had informed her he would not have approved our hire, had he known we were a couple. She told us not to come to work together, not to go to lunch together, not to take each other to the doctor: to closet ourselves, in other words.

It was an intolerable situation. We had walked into a trap, because we had believed that an African-American Christian who professed to deplore homophobia would not first betray and then savage us. We are now saddled with a second mortgage on a house we cannot sell, which drains us financially, and I am without a job or health insurance, after what this African-American Methodist friend did to us.

This experience, and my years of work in HBCUs, have taught me some critically important lessons about the attitude of some African Americans about gay lives and gay issues. What I learned through this experience of harsh discrimination has opened my eyes to some thought patterns within the black community that I now see amply represented on blogs discussing Obama’s behavior towards his gay supporters. My life lesson also helps me to understand why Obama is maintaining silence and even reneging on his campaign promises to the gay community.

We in the gay community need to know that many African Americans—particularly many churched African Americans—not only resent our comparison of our struggle for rights with the African-American struggle, but actively combat that struggle as an immoral struggle. This attitude is strong in some sectors of the black community despite the prophetic witness of African-American leaders like Bayard Rustin, Mildred Loving, or Coretta Scott King,* all of whom noted the parallels between the black struggle for civil rights and the gay struggle.

We in the gay community also need to understand that, for some African Americans—including many churched African Americans—a psychological dynamic born out of years of oppression remains very strong in the approach to gay people: this is the need to ridicule, resent, and subordinate someone who appears weaker and lower than oneself. Read the comments of many African Americans on blogs discussing the new president’s treatment of his gay supporters, and this attitude will leap out everywhere: gays are out of line, whining about their rights, demanding what they haven’t earned, undermining the president, behaving as they usually do, like petty, quarrelsome children.

Some African Americans resist and will continue to resist any analysis of the struggle of gay human beings for human rights as a moral struggle. Those who take this approach will continue to fight for the right to treat gay human beings as morally and psychologically defective persons whom one may ridicule and discriminate against with impunity. Many of those following this line of thought will taunt the gay community for not playing politics as adroitly as the black community does, for not recognizing that the pie of human rights is tiny and has slices enough only for a few—and certainly not for weak, immoral gays.

And as this goes on, many black churches will—just as many white churches do—not only not seek to curb the savagery, but will actively promote it. There is a clear, undeniable correlation between church membership and homophobia in the black community, as there is in the white community—with notable exceptions in both communities, within some church communions.

What makes Mr. Obama’s decision to stand with these churched supporters promoting bigotry is his own recognition that, in taking this stand, he is betraying moral principles. As the article by Marc Fisher I cite above notes, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama wrote,

It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided . . . and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history.

I would submit that, to be capable of writing such a sentence, one must already have arrived at the moral insight that one is on “the wrong side of history” in opposing gay marriage, and in remaining silent about the lives and struggles of one’s gay friends and supporters. I read this as an admission on the part of the new president that he chooses to place pragmatic political expediency over doing what is right, when it comes to questions of gay people and gay rights.

Why? Because he can do so. There is not a sufficient price to be paid, when someone who knows in his or heart that he is doing wrong betrays gay friends and supporters today. In fact, the price to be paid is considerably on the side of those who make, not break, solidarity with gay persons.

I have sought long and hard to understand why my purportedly gay-affirming African-American friend betrayed my partner and me. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that it simply does not matter to her—not very much—that she has done so. She will, after all, walk away from her current position with money galore. With all the money she will have earned, why should she worry about the fact that she has placed us in a situation of financial need and personal grief?

As President Bush said, why worry about history, anyway, when you won't be around to read it? He, too, walked away with lots of money . . . . We are a culture that lives frankly and unapologetically by the power of the dollar, even when we pay lip-service to other values. And where one's treasure is, there will one's heart be.

I can’t, of course, speak for what people have to live with in their own souls, when they behave treacherously towards others. And I believe that as our culture shifts regarding gay lives and gay issues, we will soon see a new moral consensus which, once and for all, reveals those who attack and betray gay persons as anything but morally admirable people.

But we are not yet there. And there is a price to be paid, at this tipping point moment in our history, by leaders who move towards the future, who help shape that new moral consensus. When that price means engaging the powerful, malicious forces of the religious right, which has worked very hard to fan the flames of homophobia in black churches as well as white ones, what's a leader to do?

*For my reflections on the contribution of these thinkers, follow links to Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin. Information about Mildred Loving may be found by entering her name in the search engine at the top of the blog.

2787 Days (7 Years and 232 Days): When Will Coretta Scott King Be Heard?

On 8 June 2001, Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued the following call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community:

Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for ever yone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

On 20 January 2009, the United States inaugurated its first African-American president, Barack Obama. Immediately following his inauguration, our promising new leader activated a federal website outlining an agenda for important new programs in the area of civil rights, including LGBT rights (www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/civil_rights).

It is now 4 days from the inauguration of President Obama. It is 2787 days (7 years and 232 days) after Coretta Scott King called for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

As a member of the gay community who has long supported and worked for the civil rights of my African-American brothers and sisters, I call on the African-American community to respond to the appeal of Dr. King’s widow.

As I have stated in a posting on this topic, “The need is great. And it is growing. Where is the intent to address that need, as Barack Obama becomes president?” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/african-americans-prop-8-and-homophobia_16.html).

Who will hear Coretta Scott King’s words and respond to them? Problems within the African-American community should be addressed first and foremost from within the community. The African-American community does not need mentors from outside instructing people of color about how to carry on their business.

When will African-American leaders, in this historic moment in which our nation has an African-American president, take seriously Coretta Scott King’s call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community?

The need is great. It is now 4 days after the inauguration of President Obama. It is now 2787 days (7 years and 232 days) after Coretta Scott King issued her challenge to the black community.

I continue to commit myself to addressing and eradicating racism in the white community at large, and in the white gay community, as well.

When will African-American leaders respond to Coretta Scott King’s call to address black homophobia in a national campaign?

2784 Days (7 Years and 229 Days): When Will Coretta Scott King Be Heard?

On 8 June 2001, Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued the following call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community:

Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for ever yone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

On 20 January 2009, the United States inaugurated its first African-American president, Barack Obama. Immediately following his inauguration, our promising new leader activated a federal website outlining an agenda for important new programs in the area of civil rights, including LGBT rights (www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/civil_rights).

It is now 1 day from the inauguration of President Obama. It is 2784 days (7 years and 229 days) after Coretta Scott King called for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

As a member of the gay community who has long supported and worked for the civil rights of my African-American brothers and sisters, I call on the African-American community to respond to the appeal of Dr. King’s widow.

As I have stated in a posting on this topic, “The need is great. And it is growing. Where is the intent to address that need, as Barack Obama becomes president?” (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/african-americans-prop-8-and-homophobia_16.html).

Who will hear Coretta Scott King’s words and respond to them? Problems within the African-American community should be addressed first and foremost from within the community. The African-American community does not need mentors from outside instructing people of color about how to carry on their business.

When will African-American leaders, in this historic moment in which our nation has an African-American president, take seriously Coretta Scott King’s call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community?

The need is great. It is now 1 day after the inauguration of President Obama. It is now 2784 days (7 years and 229 days) after Coretta Scott King issued her challenge to the black community.

I continue to commit myself to addressing and eradicating racism in the white community at large, and in the white gay community, as well.

When will African-American leaders respond to Coretta Scott King’s call to address black homophobia in a national campaign?

African Americans, Prop 8, and Homophobia: Ongoing Discussion at Box Turtle (3)

As I noted yesterday when I posted my reflections about Jim Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin article “The NGLTF Study On Race and Prop 8: The Problem of Margins of Error” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/12/7953), Burroway’s statement was followed by a number of others at Box Turtle, carrying on the dialogue about the black and gay communities in the wake of prop 8. As I also noted, to assure that my treatment of Jim Burroway’s article is balanced, I want to note the other articles that appeared after his—some in direct response to his.

Following Burroway, Gabriel Arana posted a statement at Box Turtle entitled “Why Can’t We Talk about Black Homophobia?” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/14/8062). This is a thoughtful consideration of the damage we do to the gay community, the African-American community, and our democratic society in general, when we suppress honest, open dialogue about issues that divide us.

Arana recognizes that the defensive response to those raising questions about black homophobia arises out of the history of ugly oppression people of color have endured in the United States. Defensiveness and closing rank are understandable responses when oppression has been so longstanding and so systemic.

“However,” as he notes, “turning a blind eye to broader cultural issues for the sake of comity is intellectually dishonest.” This intellectual dishonesty is also, Arana proposes, injurious to the many LGBT African Americans who report tremendous pressure to hide their identities.

Arana maintains that, “Among scholars, it is a well-reported and established fact that homophobia is more prevalent in the African-American community than in the general public . . . .” As he notes, Coretta Scott King acknowledged the prevalence of homophobia in the African-American community in comments she made to the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS calling for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community:

Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for ever yone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

Arana rightly notes that addressing the problem of homophobia within communities of color is first and foremost the task of African Americans themselves. As he observes, non-African Americans insisting that the black community deal with questions about sexual orientation are often perceived as intruders in a discussion that needs to take place intramurally—and privileged intruders, at that. Arana concludes, “I think it would be best for LGBT folk who are African-American to lead the discussion, no less so because they speak from a position of greater understanding.”

Gabriel Arana’s piece was followed by a posting by Jim Burroway entitled “Prop 8 and Race: A Rejoinder” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/14/8059). Burroway notes that he is transcribing a comment of Jaime Grant regarding Burroway’s statement about prop 8 and race.

Jaime Grant is director of the NGLTF Policy Institute, which published the analysis of polling data re: prop 8 to which Kincaid and Burroway were responding with their two essays on prop 8 and race. Grant notes the strong religious correlation suggested by the prop 8 polling data: African Americans voted at a higher rate for prop 8 than did the general population in part (and perhaps in large part) because African Americans are more religiously affiliated and more prone to church attendance than the population at large.

Clayton Critcher adds to the discussion of race and religion vis-à-vis prop 8 with a statement entitled “Prop 8 and Race: More Complex Than First Reported” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/15/8078). Critcher does a close reading of the statistical data to conclude, “Being religious was associated with increased support for Prop 8, but among those who were not religious, being African American or Latino was associated with support for Prop 8.”

Critcher notes that the use of religion as an explanatory factor to divert attention from race in the prop 8 discussion is perhaps misleading. As he observes, “If that factor [i.e., the cultural factor that is primarily predictive for homophobic attitudes] is religion, the question simply becomes, ‘Why do some racial groups show more interest in homophobic religious institutions than others?’, and I do not see why this would be any less troubling to those who seek to shift this discussion away from race.”

And, finally, Timothy Kincaid has weighed in to this discussion again today with a posting entitled “Racism in the Gay Community” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/15/8081). Kincaid notes that any attempt to address homophobia in the black community effectively has to proceed hand in hand with efforts to address and combat racism in the gay community. He concludes, “And perhaps it’s time to start the conversation and then sit back, listen, and learn.”

And that’s where I’d like to go, as well: conversation. Listening and learning. The discussion of these important but difficult issues of race, religion, homophobia, and racism has been too frequently a non-discussion, a shouting match across ideological lines in which those most directly affected by the issues never sit down at the table together and talk. And listen.

There are all kinds of reasons we might offer for the lack of conversation. There is the blinding effect of white privilege that makes white faces and white concerns iconic for “the” gay community, with the ultimate effect of invisibilizing LGBT African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities of color. There is the adamant refusal of many African Americans to entertain any discussion at all of these issues, either discussion urged on the black community from outside or generated from within its own boundaries.

Somehow, somewhere, somebody needs to move all of us beyond those refusals and blindnesses. But I do not see that happening. Coretta Scott King issued her call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community in 2001. This was an African American issuing a call to the African-American community, and a distinguished civil rights leader.

I have seen little response to this call within the African-American community, even as homophobia has risen perceptibly within that same community in the period following Mrs. King's appeal. I have witnessed continuing silence among vast numbers of African Americans, including African-American leaders, following this call—silence coupled with punishment of those who seek to break silence.

I very much agree with both Jim Burroway and Gabriel Arana that the primary responsibility for addressing black homophobia lies with the black community itself. But I am also aware, in part due to my two decades of work within HBCUs, that the leadership for such an initiative is almost non-existent within the black community, and that there remains a strong intent to preserve silence and punish those who call for this discussion in the black community.

It is time to break silence. But who will do so, from within the African-American community?

I agree with Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid, as well, when they insist that dialogue and not “education” needs to be the primary frame for this difficult cross-cultural conversation. No group has a privileged perspective. None should enter the conversation as the teacher, in a way that places other conversation members only in the listening position.

It is also important, it seems to me, that neither the gay community nor the black community retreat into closed, intramural conversation about these issues. Even if it is imperative that the gay community lead its own discussion of racism within its community, and that African Americans spur the dialogue about black homophobia within the black community, it is still important for these two marginalized groups to remain in conversation.

And to find ways to foster conversation—if truth be told, to begin a conversation that has not yet happened.

It’s clear to me what needs to happen. What is not clear is how to make happen what needs to happen. I have spent years within HBCUs working quietly to foster this important crosscultural dialogue. I have had a conspicuous lack of success in that regard, and I eventually found myself expelled from the HBCU world precisely because I could not in conscience remain silent about the lack of dialogue around issues of race and homophobia. Nor could I do the job I was charged to do as an academic leader, and keep silence about these issues . . . .

Since my expulsion from the HBCU world, I have called on HBCU leaders and the leaders of the churches that sponsor them to encourage dialogue about these issues in the HBCU context. My appeals to HBCU leaders and to leaders of churches that own these institutions have, to date, been met with deafening silence.

The need is great. And it is growing. Where is the intent to address that need, as Barack Obama becomes president?

The Gay and African-American Communities: Witness of Coretta Scott King and Barack Obama

From John Aravosis at America Blog, a reminder of the new president’s courageous challenge to the African-American community to overcome homophobia; Barack Obama made the following statement a year ago on Martin Luther King day at Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta:

For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity (www.americablog.com/2009/01/debate-continues-over-homophobia-in.html).

In making these prophetic statements, Barack Obama was walking in a trail blazed by Dr. King’s widow Coretta Scott King, who made the following statements (on various occasions) about the connection between the black and the gay communities:

Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood.

We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny . . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be. I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy.

Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.

John Aravosis’s question, as he excerpts Obama’s Martin Luther King speech last year: “Why is it so anathema to discuss homophobia in the black community? Especially after Obama himself has acknowledged it?”