"When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1958)
Like many of you, I was utterly disheartened by the passage of Proposition 8. Also like many of you, I was utterly disheartened by the in-fighting which occurred as a result of that miscarriage of justice.
In this diary, Shanikka has intervened quite forcefully and with statistical analysis to demonstrate that the notion that it was "the black vote" in California that enabled the passage of Prop 8 is false.
I want to point out two things, however, that we should keep our eyes on so that we can continue the fight to insure that all American citizens are entitled to the right of marriage regardless of who their partner of choice is.
I think it is important for our coalition politics that we acknowledge black homophobia. This isn't to say black Californians are solely to blame (and I myself am African American and a former California resident; I went to graduate school there) but denying black homophobia isn't the way to build bridges.
It is also true that many white gay and lesbian people are racist and their sexuality doesn't necessarily help them become better coalition activists. The film Tongues Untied, by the late and great Marlon Riggs, analyzes and dramatizes just this problem. In fact, the only two demographics that Obama did NOT perform better with than John Kerry were voters of 65 years of age and gay and lesbian voters. Please see link to the demographic breakdown at 538.com. Kerry got 77 percent of the gay and lesbian vote while Obama only got 70%.
Denying tensions between straight blacks and white gays and lesbians is not going to get us anywhere. We need to acknowledge and understand the tensions and oppositions if we ever hope to see them dismantled.
On the black side of the issue, there is the church. Historically African Americans had to rely upon their churches as the state, more or less. Under segregation and Jim Crow, the black church was the center of black life. The civil rights movement started in the black church and it is no surprise or coincidence that Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of the cloth. His right hand man, Bayard Rustin, was gay and was horribly victimized by a southern, christian, and black leadership that could not deal with him as a gay man. It was Rustin who was largely responsible for the March on Washington. Black queer studies has been, for years, demonstrating the particularly difficult situation of being both black and gay and Rustin is a perfect case in point.
As I also pointed out in one of my comments, racism against blacks in this country has painted us as "perverse" and "other." The response to this, in many sectors of the black community, has been to veer as far into whatever is considered "normative" as possible. This has meant disavowing gay and lesbian identity and was in part what motivated the excommunication of Rustin from black civil rights history.
One of the ways an Obama administration will help mitigate homophobia in the black community is that the black church will no longer be the sole site of black activism in the United States. Now I must qualify what I just said here. Of course there are other sites of black activism, besides the church, in the black community. NOT TO MENTION OF COURSE, ACTIVISM IN THE BLACK GAY, LESBIAN, TRANSGENDER, AND BISEXUAL COMMUNITIES.
But for many mainstream blacks, the church is "the place" of belonging. And it has been so because American society as a whole has not at all felt welcoming or as if it was "for us."
My hope is that with Obama as President, many blacks will start to rethink their relationship to the nation. I know I certainly have. Most blacks folks though a black president was IMPOSSIBLE. Not just unlikely, but a NO WAY-NOT NEVER-HELL WILL FREEZE OVER FIRST kind of thing. Obama has completely rewritten the rulebook on what is possible in black America. If more black Americans take this to heart and understand that this can be our country too, then I think more African Americans will cling less tenaciously to the black church as their guide for how to think about the world.
A second, and perhaps more concrete, way an Obama administration will help usher in equal marriage rights for all Americans is perhaps through the Supreme Court. Let us remember that miscegenation only becomes legal in the US as a whole when the Loving v. Virginia court case was heard by the supreme court. While there were states in which people of different races could marry, the ultimate challenge to the anti-miscegenation law happened at the supreme court.
This should be our goal and strategy over the coming years. Just as the Yes on Prop 8 folks (the Catholic and LDS churches) have spent YEARS figuring out how to keep intolerance alive, we need to think long term. Perhaps by the time Obama's first term is over, he will have had the opportunity to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court. We should work to get a case into the Supreme Court docket on Equal Marriage. This will end the state-level propositions once and for all.
Just as in the Loving v. Virginia case, the ACLU has taken up Proposition 8 and will contest it in the courts. In the same way that civil rights advocates in the 1960's used the court system to get civil rights acts passed, we need to think similarly here. Let's not give up the fight. Let us not alienate one another in anger.
We can overturn all the laws in this country that violate our citizens rights. But we can only do that if we resist the media's desire to "divide and conquer us," to undermine our progressive majority that we have just shown exists and is here. Let's organize and fight. Together.