Beyond Black vs Gay

I’m not quite sure when the mainstream gay rights advocates adopted George W. Bush's ''you are either with us or against us'' mantra, became obsessed about exit polls, and started to believe that it's OK to marginalize people of color, but here we are.

In the past few weeks, a tremendous backlash fueled by mainstream media outlets across California has come from public same sex marriage advocates against people of color, based on several (discredited) exit polls that blame these supposed voting blocs for the passage of Proposition 8 and the banning of same sex marriage in California.

Always couched with a ''of course I'm happy an African American got elected, but I'm so mad…'' this highly public racism is cleaving an even deeper trench between the mainstream gay sphere and many straight and LGBTQ people of color and is doing much more damage than Proposition 8 could do on its own.

Taking cues from the mainstream media, including California's most prominent newspapers, a large number of anti Proposition 8 activists have decided that, because exit polls say black people voted 7 out of 10 for the same sex marriage ban, then African Americans (and other people of color, including Latinos and Asian) are wholly responsible for the passage of Proposition 8.

At a purely factual level, blaming black Californians based on the exit polls is inaccurate: several reports were released indicating that the exit poll sampling was small, incomplete, and skewed. Even if taken as 100% reliable and blacks did vote 7 out of 10 for Proposition 8, that's only 10% of the California electorate. That majority of the California electorate white Californians voted roughly half for Proposition 8. One calculation estimates then that 3.3 million whites voted for Proposition 8, compared to 760,000 or so African Americans. So as a simple matter of numbers, black people as well as Latinos and Asians are not the tidal wave that said ''No.''

Linked to this is the idea that all these new, young people of color voting for Obama are the ones who upset the anti Proposition 8 efforts, i.e. we'd all be better off if Obama had not energized a new, more representative generation of voters. Merging the racial and age data available, more than the majority of young people of color (almost 60% of Latinos age 18 to 29, for example) voted against the same sex marriage ban, meaning the '' Obama generation'' bears little responsibility for Proposition 8.

What do the polls show, then?

If we want to talk about voting blocs and exit polls, the following groups also voted in more than 60% for Proposition 8: the elderly (65+), people who decided for whom to vote in October (but not within the week before the election), people who were contacted by the McCain campaign, Protestants, Catholics, White Protestants, those who attend church weekly, married people, people with children under 18, people who thought their family finances were better now than 4 years ago, supporters of the war against Iraq, people who are from the '' Inland/Valley'' region of California, and so forth. Basically it mostly comes down to religious beliefs and age.

So why didn’t the campaign against Proposition 8 attack older voters, religious people, conservatives, and the people of the Central Valley (except for those darn Mormons)? Why did they eat up the rhetoric of the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury, and the Associated Press? Why has there been even documented, racist slurs and hate thrown on LGBTQ black people attending the anti Proposition 8 rallies these last weeks?

One argument floating around is that black people as opposed to white conservatives or the white elderly should have somehow innately connected the gay marriage struggle to the civil rights struggle and thus voted down the amendment. Perhaps this is simplistic, but why should black people accept this as a tacit reality if the anti Proposition 8 campaign or mainstream gay activists in the past three decades have done little to reach out and make this connection plausible?

Let's consider for a minute the inverse of this idea. if it is the case oppressed people should recognize the oppression of others inherently, why didn't white gay activists groups openly advocate against the other critical issues on the ballot that predominately hurt people of color like Proposition 6, targeting kids as young as 14 for incarceration with adults? Progressive/left leaning organizations representing communities of color and I speak from experience actively opposed Proposition 8 in their agendas, while I never saw any '' No on Proposition 8'' campaigners speak about Propositions 4 (parental notification for abortion), 6 (incarceration), or other issues. Even after the elections, why was there no similar outrage from gay communities that Proposition 9 also passed, which will delay parole hearings an additional 15 years and continue to feed our corrupt prison system?

Part of this is an interesting dichotomy which exists in mainstream (white) liberal politics, the tacit acceptance of the idea of ''socially liberal, fiscally conservative.'' Better phrased, this means ''I care about homosexuality but I really could care less about the poor (predominately people of color) getting poorer.'' Queer politics has effectively de politicized itself over the last thirty years, and in doing so, disconnected itself from fundamental questions of oppression. In doing so, it has really stopped answering to the real issues wrapped in homophobia.

This brings us back to the flipside: it is very hard for straight people of color (especially disenfranchised, low income communities) to sympathize with homosexuals when there doesn't seem to be the same questions of oppression bound up or at least those questions are not brought into the public eye. The media with tacit approval by the mainstream homosexual community has crafted an image of gays as white, vapid, consumerist, and bourgeois. The campaign against Proposition 8 with its massive $37.6 million in funding didn't spend a penny to change that image.

The most we saw during the course of the campaign that could vaguely qualify as outreach or even representation of people of color was one commercial that, in an obviously African American voice over, compared the ''discrimination'' in Proposition 8 to the prohibition of Armenians from owning land in the Central Valley, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the ban on interracial marriage targeting Latinos and African Americans.

The ad never speaks directly to homophobia or gay marriage; it just says ''discrimination'' over and over again and hopes that the ''hey, we're all minorities'' connection is obvious. It was not. And speaking as a non white homosexual, I can tell you that the rest of the ads, which featured all white gay couples, celebrity white homosexuals or the notoriously anti immigrant, long entrenched Senator Dianne Feinstein spoke absolutely nothing to me. In fact, they just duplicated the sentiment of exclusion that many people of color straight or gay feel in the highly consumerist, upwardly mobile visible gay community.

The Real Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

Instead of taking a $37.6 million dollar opportunity to reframe highly public queer politics into a question of oppression, power and disenfranchisement a strategy that would benefit queer people in all forms (not just those in line to get married) the people running the ''No on Proposition 8'' campaign opted for a strategy aiming to slip same sex marriage by and avoid serious political discourse and complex community organizing. With all the money and attention from Hollywood and Silicon Valley donors (actually more than Proposition 8 supporters), with the force of the Supreme Court, with that reliance on the liberal urban poles of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the campaigners took the easy way out. Religious bias not race was the greatest challenge, and it was wholly ignored, but for deriding Bill Maher style, ''those crazy fundamentalists'' commentary.

The ''No on Proposition 8'' strategy was that of focus group politics and public relations, the ''let's not offend'' politics that cost Gore and Kerry the presidency and that have been part and parcel of the Democratic party since Clinton. Instead of building up a real base to be mobilized, instead of countering the lies being put out that same sex marriage put church funds at risk or that every child would get a gay sex textbook, campaign commercials used the word homosexual and gay as little as possible, focusing on neutral rhetoric on discrimination; mailers provided smiling happy white male couples; lawn signs were produced en masse that ended up only in hyper progressive enclaves of California.

What won the Obama campaign, what won civil rights, and what will ultimately win gay marriage and expansive queer rights is real organizing. Organizing is knocking on doors where there are people sitting on the fence or may be uninformed on the issue, talking face to face and having uncomfortable conversations to explain that LGBTQ people are as deserving of full rights. Organizing is targeting the community institutions where the people you want to listen are churches, community centers, and so forth. Organizing means challenging churches directly instead of through passive mocking. Organizing is education combined with action.

Such calls for grassroots organizing are often rebuffed with a fear of homophobic violence. Never mind the problematic assumption that when you go to where there are more poor people or people of color you are going to get beat or shot for being gay, as if it's the first time people ''in the ghetto'' have seen a homosexual. The actual existing risks when you confront fear and mistrust are also part and partial of community organizing and are sadly, part of the price for social change.

Young people of color I personally know went into some of the most racist areas of the South, such as North Carolina, taking of course adequate safety precautions, and stood in the face of racial slurs and in your face hatred to campaign for Obama. The march to Selma took campaigners into the most racist city in the South. Thus far, the marches post election have been through the gay enclaves of West Hollywood and Silverlake in Los Angeles and the Castro in San Francisco.

If the anti-Proposition 8 campaigners are going to align themselves with the heritage of the civil rights movement, then they must also recognize the realities of building a movement for change: there are risks involved, there are many uncomfortable situations and moments, and there is a deep seated social battle that must ensue. Lawsuits from celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred and legislation cannot do it alone unless the movement seeks to remain one of privilege and exclusion and never challenge the underlying powers that repress not only sexual minorities, but people of color, poor people, immigrants, disabled peoples and others our system disenfranchises daily.

Robert Chlala is Director of Development and a special correspondent for The Public Record. For nearly a decade, he has worked in policy and communications with non governmental organizations dealing with the Middle East, international law, immigration and other pressing issues. He can be reached at robert@pubrecord.org