For those of you who follow Rachel's show, you've probably seen Princeton Associate Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Aside from being a really good twitterer, Harris-Lacewell has the additional positive quality of being absolutely brilliant.
At about 8pm this evening, she weighed in on a popular topic around here, black people and GLBT rights -- specifically, the right to marry.
The piece is a home run.
[flip]
First let me say that there exists a handful of people about whom I am not completely rational. Over the years, they have so impressed me that I have come to expect greatness and I'm rarely disappointed. In this case, I happen to think that she hits this out of the park.
She starts with a solid comparison of the civil rights struggle to the struggle for the rights of GLBT to marry. This is something about which we at DKos tend to wrestle. Sometimes it is hard for some of us to accept that the struggles are essentially the same. Speaking for myself, some of this has to do with the notion that I am young enough that all I know of those struggles are black-and-white TV footage of Bull Connor and German Shepherds and fire hoses. And, my parents taught me to have a certain...reverence towards those images. Though I did not live through them they provoke a pride in our toughness, resiliency and shared struggle. But, I know the SCLC (and Professor H-L) knows more than I do about the topic. Probably more than my parents did. And, here's what an SCLC official now says:
During the 2008 election the SCLC officially took a neutral position with regards to California's Proposition 8, which stripped gay men and lesbians of the right to marry. With his national organization silent on the issue, Los Angeles SCLC chapter president Rev. Eric P. Lee worked hard to oppose the measure. In a display of political empathy Lee explained "it was clear to me that any time you deny one group of people the same right that other groups have that is a clear violation of civil rights and I have to speak up on that."
And, the good professor:
Simply put a national civil rights organization that takes a "neutral position" on an issue of basic civil rights does not deserve to exist. Whatever the personal beliefs and prejudices of individual leaders of the SCLC, the organization's mission as a "nonprofit, non-sectarian, inter-faith, advocacy organization that is committed to non-violent action to achieve social, economic, and political justice" requires that it stand forcefully against efforts to impose second class citizenship on an entire group simply because of identity.
Well, that part I knew. But even so, it's good to hear it from a prominent black voice.
I won't cut and paste more from the article, but it's a fantastic read. Melissa Harris-Lacewell makes many points that have been made here on DKos. And (to my thinking) she has the credibility of scholarship, knowledge and experience to substantiate her position.
OK, one more.
On religion's role in shaping homophobic views that plague the black community:
But black people rejected... chapter-and-verse Christian perspective and instead embraced a more holistic Christian narrative centered on a God who loved all God's children equally, even if the text sometimes suggested otherwise. There is no reason why a people with this libratory religious heritage must submit to reactionary, oppressive leadership on same sex marriage. Empathy should remind us that we know better.
Times continue to change. The religious conservatism associated with traditional black churches and generally ascribed to the black community is eroding away too. Quickly. Our (black) community leaders are speaking up. This is good news for all of us.