Tim Wise's provocatively titled rec list diary, With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal Left, is not without some value. After all, the Left can sometimes be guilty of promoting "colorblindness" as a solution to racial disparities in this country. But Tim Wise's endorsement of homophobic stereotypes, and his deliberate or negligent misrepresentations of the gay community, require a response.
Let's dissect his discussion of LGBT issues.
Or consider the struggle for LGBT rights and equality. Historically, the role of people of color in the movement and LGBT community has been largely ignored, and the struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered liberation has been considerably whitewashed.
In support of this, Wise cites an article on two LGBT Latino/a pioneers, one who was the first openly gay candidate for public office, Jose Sarria and another, Sylvia Rivera, a trans activist critical of the mainstream gay rights movement. From a single, critical academic article, Wise concludes that "the role of people of color...has been largely ignored, and the struggle...has been considerably whitewashed." That conclusion, one would hope, requires more than a citation to a 2007 article published in a CUNY journal. I
From the whitening of the Stonewall Riots -- considered the first salvo in the gay lib movement, in which Puerto Rican drag queens like Sylvia Rivera played a central role, although mainstream white liberal remembrances of the event often obscure this fact -- to the current focus on marriage equality, activists within the LGBT community have presented a largely white face for the movement. The celebrities who front the movement are white, the publications and media that are used to define the community to the larger society are white and affluent in orientation, and the desire of much of the LGBT activist community to present an image of normalcy (as in, "we're just like straight folks") is based on a white middle class understanding of what constitutes normal.
In this way, the LGBT community reflects the wider, larger culture. Wise is forgiving of black and Hispanic voter support for Prop 8 on this score, but no similar sympathy extends to LGBTs...at least, not white LGBTs. Because at the end of the day, Wise is left with the fact that whites still constitute a demographic majority, and so most LGBTs in this country are...well, white.
A note on "normalcy," though: It is unclear if Wise is saying that "the current focus on marriage equality" is the result of white activist demand, or if the activists are just presenting a white face. If the former, this has been largely debunked by studies showing that many of the couples who need marriage the most (couples with children) are black and Hispanic:
Same-sex parents are more likely than different-sex parents to be black and Hispanic. The children of same-sex couples are similarly diverse: over 46% are children-of color.
If the latter, there's no doubt that's the case. But again, the LGBT community is disproportionately white. It is also disproportionately Democratic and liberal, but Wise doesn't seem to be concerned that those perspectives are diminished within the gay community.
While lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered folks of color have long spoken out against their marginalization within the larger movement for queer liberation, the conflict between whites and people of color in the movement has been elevated even more so during the fight for marriage equality. After the passage of Proposition 8 in California -- which banned gay marriage -- many within the white LGBT community blamed blacks for the outcome. Although black support for the measure was higher than that for whites, early reports of 70 percent approval in the African American community were dramatically inflated and based on a small number of precincts. And since blacks only comprise a small share of the electorate in California, to blame the black community for the outcome is to ignore the much larger overall role played by whites in the election.
Again, Wise has weasel words: many white LGBTs "blamed blacks for the outcome." In support of that, he cites no figures at all of course, but relies on his readers to supply anecdotal support in their minds as they read along. He is quick to point out that "early reports of 70 percent approval in the African American community were dramatically inflated and based on a small number of precincts." The only figure I am aware of is the oft-cited CNN exit poll, which as far as I know was not based on precinct returns, but at any rate I agree that blaming black voters is wrong-headed. I'm curious as to what evidentiary support Wise is willing to offer for the proposition that "many" white LGBTs blamed blacks. I am also curious to know how Wise limits this criticism to white LGBTs; for surely, a Latino LGBT person, or an Asian LGBT person, might also blame black voters without basis?
But despite these facts, liberal LGBT activists and writers like Dan Savage, and the leading gay publication, The Advocate, played upon blatant racial imagery in their post-Prop 8 discussions. The Advocate actually ran a cover story announcing that "Gay Is the New Black," and Savage, for his part, launched into a thinly veiled racist tirade, in which he insisted that black homophobia was a far greater threat to gays and lesbians (presumably white ones, since he showed no recognition of the double-bind identity of queer folks of color), than white LGBT racism was to the black and brown. That the Advocate would float such an idea signaled the inherent whiteness of the publication's perspective. To suggest that gay might be the "new black" ignored the fact that for millions of LGBT black folks, black had never stopped being an oppressed identity, and there was nothing at all "new" about their marginalization. As Maurice Tracy explained in his comprehensive takedown of the "Gay is the New Black" meme:
I don't read the Advocate, and apparently neither does Tim Wise. Because the article he cites was in agreement with his thesis:
Our oppression, by and large, is nowhere near as extreme as blacks’, and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. Gay people have more resources than blacks had in the 1960s. We are embedded in the power structures of every institution of this society. While it is illegal in this country to fire an African-American without cause and in most places it’s still legal to fire a gay person for being gay, we are more likely to have informal means of recourse than black people have. Almost all gay people have the choice of passing. Very few black people have that option. Of course, we shouldn’t have to make that choice, and our civil rights struggle is about making sure that we don’t have to.
Gay is the New Black?
And then there is this:
Given the almost non-existent outreach to the black community by the "No H8" campaign -- and the way in which the campaign relied on white celebrities and entertainers to make the public case for them -- it is hardly surprising that African Americans may have come to see the LGBT struggle in California as a white one, divorced from their day-to-day concerns. But that is not the fault of people of color. Rather, the responsibility for this unhappy outcome rests almost entirely with the white-dominated LGBT movement, whose principal organizations (like the Human Rights Campaign) have only nominal people of color involvement at the top levels of policy and decision making.
In other words, people of color cannot be held responsible for their homophobia, it is a failure to engage voters properly. Strangely, I doubt that Tim Wise believes that the successful passage of anti-affirmative action state constitutional amendments in California and Michigan can be attributed to a failure of outreach, or that he believes white voters can be excused for their personal responsibility for supporting those measures simply because opponents didn't reach them successfully.
Even the way in which mainstream male "gayness" has been constructed in the mass media (with the open collaboration of persons within the gay community), as a compendium of "fabulousness," materialism, fashion, and a unique ability to design one's home interior (or get favorable coverage and shout-outs on the Bravo Network), alienates those who for reasons of race (and class status) have been left out of the reigning imagery of what constitutes 'gay chic.'
In other words, gay people are privileged economically, and they do not merit legal protections. Or at least, this stereotype is used by anti-gay politicians all the time. You would hope Wise would be more careful, but instead, he suggests gays are to blame for this stereotype: The blame for the construction of this stereotype, because it was done "with the open collaboration of persons within the gay community," is the fault of the LGBT community. Collective responsibility for thee, but never for me.
Is there a problem with racism in the LGBT community? Yes, just as there is a problem with homophobia in the black community, one that will not disappear by ignoring it any more than racism among white LGBT people will disappear by ignoring it. It would be helpful if we could have honest discussions about these matters, though, instead of disingenuous and poorly supported rants.