Marriage Equality & White Gay Hegemony

It may come as a surprise to many of you, but I do not support marriage equality. I do not believe that entering into a heteronormative economic institution should afford some people more benefits and rights that others. I should not have to be married to receive cheaper healthcare, to get tax breaks or to adopt children.

I also have a HUGE problem with the Human Rights Campaign. They have an incredibly shitty track record. The HRC has a long history of ignoring trans* issues, outlined in Monica Robert's article "Why The Transgender Community Hates HRC".

On top of this the HRC began to compare marriage equality to that of civil rights, which became very popular during the 2008 presidential election, even garnering this cover article in the Advocate. Not only is this highly problematic, it denigrates the experience of Black Americans & other communities of color. LAGAI writes in their article "Marriage and Racism and Queers", They equated the history of slavery and the fight for civil rights for African Americans, the internment of Japanese residents and citizens, and the struggle for justice for Latino workers with the struggle for legal recognition of gay marriage. White Europeans exterminated millions of Native Americans, and killed at least two million Africans who were abducted and thrown in the holds of ships to be sold as slaves. Slavery was legally maintained for over 200 years. White supremacy was maintained through terrorism (including lynching), as well as law. Legally enforced segregation persisted until the 1960's. Although nominally able to vote after the Civil War, African Americans were effectively disenfranchised everywhere in the u.s., and legally disenfrancised in much of the south. The Civil Rights movement was about overturning this systematic legal oppression of African Americans, and thousands of people were injured and hundreds of people lost their lives in that struggle. It is absurd to casually equate this experience with the experience of not getting state recognition for a marriage. (2008, LAGAI.)

To this end, the HRC really sticks their fist in their mouth by ignoring the plight of queer people of color, trans* folk, poor & rural queer folk and homeless queer youth. Despite the beginnings of the gay rights movement steeped in justice for the homeless, the transgender community and spearheaded by queer people of color, the new gay rights movement is upwardly middle class, heteronormative & White. This needs to change. We cannot truly liberate ourselves this way.

The HRC is also responsible for many campaigns that try to paint marriage as being about love (NOH8 etc), when really what we need to realize is that marriage has existed for thousands of years as an economic institution that reduces women's value basically to chattel. Marriage was economic before it was ever religious or about love. Marriage is about money. Activist Neila McLeod sums the institution of marriage up best: The institution of marriage represents a legacy of brutal sexism, based on control of women's bodies and lives by men. For most of the history of the concept, wives were essentially (if not literally) slaves to their husbands. Marriage is an agent of the dominant cultural narrative that says women are social extensions of men whose sole purpose in life is to serve men and produce (male) children. This is slowly changing but this change necessarily represents movement away from the narrative created and propagated by marriage. Marriage is necessarily anti-woman. I believe the cause of liberation for all people (not just "equality" for some) depends on dismantling all systems of institutional power that serve to divide and oppress us. Queerness is (or should be) a direct challenge to these systems. I refuse to be for the privileges afforded the ruling class. A movement for inclusion in a definitionally oppressive system is not a movement for justice, it is a movement for assimilation. (McLeod, 2013).

The HRC does not have my support. Nor do I support marriage equality. I support equality for all human beings, and that is how we will truly be liberated.

What is greatness (in the USA)?

I've been back from Eire for almost two weeks now and with graduate school starting I have definitely had a combined culture shock. I am going to write some more about being away later on, with parts of my journal from the trip but right now I just want to repost something from my tumblr account that I've been mulling over since returning Stateside:

So, what exactly happened to the Civil Rights Movement? After the 1960s and 70s.
I mean, yeah we have come forward quite a bit...but it seems like things have just puttered out especially in the last decade or so. One step forward and three steps backward? Maybe I have an idealized view on the 90s and what I remember of the 80s, but things seemed to have degraded a lot since then.

Here are some points: We had one of the nastiest elections in the last four years with politicians and citizens being super disrespectful to each other and even now to our first non-White president, Barack Obama. We have politicians and regular folk calling other human beings "illegal", we got schools being shut down while military spending still hasn't been curbed nor have the armed forces withdrawn from multiple occupied countries. Women still don't make as much money as men do, check the data. Folks are still being killed in this country for being queer, or brown and poor (or all three).

This is not the vision. This is not the United States.
The melting pot isn't supposed to be cultural genocide.

What happend to the vision?

How are we all equal?

How can folks say this country is great?

Decolonization

I’m reflecting on last night, where again I have found myself the only non-White person at a party. Something in me urges to write about this experience, I’m trying to be nonplussed about it, but it’s hard. It’s always hard.  I realized today that I’m sick of letting myself be co-opted for whiteboyworld’s entertainment. I know I live in Portland, where it’s 85% Caucasian, but I’m still breathing, still a part of that other percentage that all the White activists ignore when they rail about classism.

Back to the party…I remember when me and two other of my companions sneak our way back up the stairs on a mission masquerading as a smoke break to really clear our heads. Some of the partygoers leak out after us and strike a conversation in the driveway. We all introduce ourselves. Predictably there is an audible silence after me and the quintessential nicewhitegirl says how she likes my name, how it’s a cool name. Oh yay, the tokenism has begun. At least they didn’t ask me where I was from. I just smile awkwardly and that’s the last time I speak directly to anyone I don’t previously know at this shindig. I realize it’s time to go when some newcomers have a side conversation about what’s the PC term for a Native American while one of them is wearing some Urban Outfitters shit with a “Navajo” design fluttering above her tiny midriff.

I can’t stand this world. I feel like more analogously Caucasian faces and thought-patterns are slowly blotting me out.  I’m tired of being the only coloured person at the party, the only Latino in the “Hispanic” food section of Fred Meyers, the only guy on my block who rocks a skullcap. I’m not a token, I’m not going to be colonized for someone else’s mental well being because they have a friend that is queer/of colour/Jewish etc. I’m not going to teach you a pithy lesson from my homeland; I’m not going to teach you Spanish.

Yes, I am going to be offended by your racist good intentions. I’m going to talk back; I’m going to correct your perceptions. I’m going to make you mad, I’m going to dismantle your co-options, and I’m going to throw your world for a loop. I’m not going to sit here and let you blot me out for this anti-septic, White, bourgeois vision of what you think your community should be. Fuck that noise.

I’m decolonizing that shit.

Gay is NOT the "New Black"

Although the hubbub has died down around the catchphrase that so-called GLBTQ activists coined, “Gay is the new Black”, I feel like now I can coherently address the issues around it from my perspective as a queer-identified person of colour. 

The problem with this phrase, other than the obvious denigration of the Black experience, centres on choice. No, not the choice that the rabid Christian right is always squawking about…I am not talking about the choice to be GLBTQ, because as any educated person would know…it’s biological. I am talking about the choice to come out and identify oneself in the public sphere as GLBTQ.  This is key.

People of colour do not choose to identify as people of colour, we don’t “come out of the closet” so to speak about being Black, Latino, Asian etc. It is easily identifiable by our skin, our hair or our speech patterns among other things. It is written upon us for all to see. This is the difference between being a person of colour and being GLBTQ. Arguably you cannot “see” GLBTQ.

Identity politics aside, being identified as person of colour is not a choice. (White) GLBTQ people have a choice and the privilege to come out and be identified as GLBTQ. Those of us who are not White, and regardless of our sexuality, do not have that privilege. Therein lies the difference and should point out the issue in claiming that “gay is the new Black.” Black is still Black and the last time I checked, the civil rights struggle for racial equality was far from over.