Americablog.com has reposted this rather inelegant reader comment regarding the failure of Prop 8:
This was a very bad thing that Prop. 9 passed. And from the exit polling data I read alst night via Andrew Sullivan, it looks like African Americans were instrumental in passing Prop. 8 with 70% saying they voted for it. When is someone going to address the bigotry in the black community towards gay people? Gay people need to openly point the finger and say it's not okay to be bigots just because you are black and have suffered yourself! Please talk about Prop. 8 very few blogs are.
I'm glad Obama won, but how come it's expected of me to rise above the anti-black bigotry I was raised with, and go vote for a black man, but then black people can go vote to enshrine bigotry into law and no one challenges that?
While I disagree both with the tone and with the logic of the reader comment, I think race is the elephant in the room with respect to Prop 8.
To give you a little background on my perspective on these issues, I am a mixed race woman who grew up in a largely white community but worked for several years after college as a community organizer in the black communities in Atlanta. I am an unmarried heterosexual woman, and I am appalled by the passage of Proposition 8.
Here's a hard truth: the black community is not gay friendly. Is that an overgeneralization? Yes. Does it contain enough truth that it provides information worth talking about? Yes. Part of the problem is social. Disproportionate numbers of blacks in the United States identify strongly with the Christian religious faith, and the Christian faith (obviously, with some exceptions) had not generally been a friend to the gay rights movement.
But a lot of the problem is economic. Gay rights, like women's rights before it, tends to be a middle class and upper-middle class issue. Not that poor people aren't gay. Or that poor people weren't women. But activism can seem like a luxury good. And people who worry about where their next meal is going to come from or how much longer they're going to be able to survive working 18 hour days with 4 hours of sleep each night often feel they have needs more pressing than having their identities validated by a mainstream society that they may feel relatively distant from in the first place. It's not uncommon in poor communities to find men and women who have been in same-sex sexual relationships for years who will tell you straight up that they aren't gay. "Gay" is sometimes seen as a political identity. And them? They're just trying to get by. The down-low really exists out there, folks.
Bottom line? Most black people in this country live in communities where they don't feel a particular sense of personal connection to gay rights. And most black people think being gay is wrong.
But here's another truth: Black people know what it's like to be shit on by society. And you what? You don't have think it's "okay" to be gay to support gay rights. In fact, my experience has been that most of the leaders in the black church--the educated folks and the community activists, people like Al Sharpton--support gay rights. They understand that even if their personal religious beliefs tell them that being gay is wrong, that a whole lot of bad shit has befallen people in this country (lots of them black) because some people thought their own ideas of right and wrong gave them the right to make those decisions for other people.
I firmly believe that no matter what their personal beliefs regarding homosexuality, that black people are open to persuasion on the political issue. A lot of good work is being done by people like Al Sharpton in reaching out to black communities and talking about the dangers of homophobia. But it isn't enough.
If the black community has ignored the gay community, it's no less true that the black community has themselves been ignored by the marriage equality movement. Obviously, the No on 8 organization was deficient in a bunch of ways many of which had nothing to do with the black community. But if black people voted by 70/30 margins against the right of gay people to marry, it wasn't because black people don't want gays to have rights--it's because no one has ever asked them to vote any other way.
If the cause of marriage equality is to succeed in California, the black community needs to be brought on board. Organizers need to walk the streets of black neighborhoods (you know the Mormon church isn't going to!). They need to go to their local black churches and find out who the leaders are and ask how they can reach out to the community so that we (racial and sexual minorities) can work together to overcome our common goals of equality under the law. Organizers also need to explain to people that a vote for marriage equality isn't the same as a vote that homosexuality is okay. They need to explain that no one is asking anyone else to give up a religious belief about the morality of homosexuality--they're just asking voters to get behind the idea that the law shouldn't in the business of turning personal moral decisions into laws that take rights away from people.
The exit polls showed that the only group to vote in higher numbers for proposition 8 than blacks were self-identified Republicans. Blacks are among the largest and most concentrated points of resistance to marriage equality. However, they're also among the most willing of the resisters to listen and be persuaded.
As we proponents of marriage equality start to regroup and think about our next steps, we need to consider the role of race. As liberals, we don't want to start pointing fingers and pitting various constituencies against one another. At the same time, we can't not talk about this. And as we supporters of gay rights think about strategies for going forward, we ignore the role of race at our peril. And I promise you that unless we start this dialogue NOW, we'll be delaying the progress of the gay rights movement possibly for decades to come.