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President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was the most inclusive speech a president has ever given. It was delivered on the 27th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and the President honored King’s legacy when he eloquently spoke of how the many U.S. liberation movements, both current and historic, are interconnected.
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
As an African American lesbian, whose identity is linked to all three movements, I felt affirmed. I applaud the president’s courageous pronouncement.
Some African Americans, however, felt “dissed” by the President’s speech. The linkage of their civil rights struggle to that of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Americans did nothing to quell their dislike of the comparison. The fact that it was spoken by this president made it sting more.
New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson picks up the tension where he wrote in his recent article “Speech Reveals an Evolved and Unapologetic President” that Obama “After spending much of his first term ‘evolving’ on the question of same-sex and doing too little in the eyes of many African-Americans to address poverty and civil rights, he invoked “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.”
For many African Americans, especially those male ministers who “professed” to have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., the reason they scoff at comparing the black civil right struggle to today’s LGBTQ civil rights struggle is because of the persistent nature of racism in the lives of black people and the little gains accomplished supposedly on behalf of racial and economic equality. They expected more gains under the first African American president.
Also, many African Americans contest that civil rights gains have come faster for LGBTQ Americans, from the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York City to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010.
The gains in the LGBGT movement, many African Americans both straight and LGBTQ will contend, is largely because of the structural and cultural exclusion of people of color.
The LGBTQ movement has no doubt made some tremendous gains into mainstream society, a reality that has not been afforded to African Americans as a disenfranchised group, leaving many of them asking, especially after hearing President Obama’s now second inaugural address the question, “What’s really in this American Dream for us?”
Many African Americans ministers try to answer that question by either coming out for or against Obama’s stance on marriage equality.
Civil rights struggles in this country have primarily been understood, reported on and advocated within the context of African American struggles—past and present—against both individual and systematic racism. Consequently, civil rights struggles of women, LGBTQ Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities in this country have been eclipsed, ignored and even trivialized while educating the American public of other forms of existing oppressions.
While it is also true that employing a narrow understanding that all oppressions are interconnected ignores the salient points about differences within oppressed groups, it is also true that ignoring how oppressed groups can work together truncated the possibility for full and equal rights for all Americans.
LGBTQ activists of African descent, like myself, have long pondered what would be the catalyst to rally those African American Christian ministers to support same-sex marriage and engage the black community in a nationwide discussion. Such a discussion would certainly assist them in seeing the link between Selma and Stonewall. The very link that President Obama so eloquently pointed out.
There were hopes that Obama’s expression in May 2012 of his support of marriage equality would begin talks—allowing those black ministers, who quietly professed to be an ally to LGBTQ community, to come out in favor of LGBT rights to their congregations. And, no doubt, for these African-American ministers, they saw the liability of Obama losing his 2012 re-election bid was far greater than being publicly outed for not being in lockstep with their homophobic brethren.
With the second and final term before him, Obama can be both unapologetically and unabashedly for marriage equality. I thank God with an enormous sigh of relief that Obama no longer has to do a delicate dance with a deeply divided black populace on the issue. He has momentum on his side whether black ministers and community activists side with him or not.
The momentum in support of same-sex marriage in the African American community is seen nowadays along generational lines. It is ironically divided between— the black civil rights era of MLK and post-black civil rights era of Obama.
25 Comments
I feel sympathy for those who feel stung by hearing advocacy for equality for all, and what negative life influences must have happened to make anyone think that way. I think Harvey Milk had it right in saying all ”us’s” have to band together.
As is often said, oppression olympics are a game no body can win.
I know in NC with our amendment fight, Rev Barber, head of the NC NAACP, was a major supporter for LGBT equality, and in turn the LGBT community showed up for HKonJ and other anti-voter suppression efforts that were primarily targeted at voters of color. It was a thing of beauty to see such cooperation and intersectional organizing. Even if we lost the amendment fight for now, those kinds of advances far out way any temporary change in the law.
i will restrain myself on this topic, having gone to divinity school and learned how to recognize my friends from my enemies. but i will say this: there are a lot of famous and/or popular African American ministers on the take. of republican money, even. an African American professor friend of mine did some of his doctoral work on this topic, and it’s much worse than people realize.
thank you for this post, Ma’am. as a black lesbian, i am so very tired of silly black people voting against my rights because of religion. it’s beyond ironic and more than a little selfish.
This from the Department of Redundancy Department.
My heart bleeds for those troubled by this equality. I’m sure that I can find some fine upstanding white folk similarly troubled by equality.
Bigots are bigots irrespective of race and color. Something about motes and beams comes to mind.
Well I’m a white gay male and can’t take any more of Obama’s “fierce advocacy”, defending DADT and DOMA for years was enough thank you.
He can keep his meaningless speeches to himself.
devil’s advocate here: “the little gains accomplished supposedly on behalf of racial and economic equality. They expected more gains under the first African American president.”
Then why, pray tell, does the black community still enable Obama’s half-stepping instead of slapping him silly with a cold fish? (Except of course for Smiley and West, who are dismissed by many as grumpy old men)
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and what sonofloud said at #4: re LGBT, Obama has been mostly empty words.
I recognize the lesser of evils argument. But it’s just being beaten with a smaller hammer, not caressed with a feather.
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finally, there has always been a love/hate tension between the black community and other minorities (e.g., jews). I can understand it. why should blacks always be expected to show their better natures?
LGBTQ? Queer? For years, gay people denounced the use of that word to describe them as offensive. I’m confused.
I know what L, G, B, and T mean. I don’t know what you mean by Q. Please elucidate.
Coretta Scott King spoke out in favor of gay marriage. In 2004. Though at first Dr. King wasn’t a supporter of gay rights, his position made it harder for him to do so, even if he evolved on the issue. Two quick reads…
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-03-24-king-marriage_x.htm
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/16/what-did-mlk-think-about-gay-people/
q can stand for two words, it’s often used twice in the alphabet soup. Queer and/or Questioning. And yes, I too am offended at the use of Queer. Seems that it’s acceptable to offend a large amjority of gays by insisting on using the word many of us abhor, yet other portions of the community demand we respect their “terms” but insist on still calling some of us Queers.
you mean the DADT that is no longer in existence? Or do you mean the DOMA that his Administration no longer defends, and hasn’t for over a year? Yeah, that’s not progress. I’m personally tired of people who can’t recognize that this is what change looks like. When was the last time you heard a sitting President call for our inclussion in his Anaugural Address? Oh, that’s right, NEVER.
I see this attitude in the black community: “Our superhero Obama is wonderful! …but he wants gays to have equal rights while he’s making life more miserable for us, and God doesn’t approve of gays.” The cognitive dissonance, consensual delusion, and self-centered entitlement are all obvious. That type of abhorrent fundamentalist Christianity (especially Baptist) is mainly to blame. In the Hispanic community, it’s again God’s disapproval of gays “sins” for which they deserve to be punished. Slowly but inexorably these backward ideas based on religious dogma will be purged from our laws and our society. All for one and one for all, not letting them divide and conquer.
Maybe ‘Q’ is becoming the equivalent of blacks’ use of ‘N’ — just OK for “them” to say? I think it’s the word “Fag” that is especially not cool.
I worked with some Australians once, and the used they word Fag to mean Cigarette.
They would say with relish, “I’m going outside for a Fag”.
Politically correct they were not.
Douglass Blackmon won a Pulitzer in History in 2009 for
Slavery by another name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
It’s an account of lethal institutional brutality.
Comparing the levels of persecution is always a circular firing squad, but imho no one has had it tougher than the descendants of the U.S. slaves. Their gender and orientation didn’t lessen the impact of legalized white supremacy.
GLBT who were 100% European-American, and who chose not to publicly “come out,” still had access to education and all the advantages of affluence that were denied to all the U.S. descendants of the slaves.
Descendants of the slaves never had a choice.
But, in terms of the staggering challenges facing U.S. descendants of the slaves in 2013, I think Obama’s “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,” was shrewd. IMHO he calibrated his comment against Santorum calling him being a “government n-word.”
Apologies if I offended anyone.
As the son of a gay man who was a civil rights worker and the father of a brown child, I have to say that I share the deep ambivalence of people who wondered what the President’s speech really meant. Half of Black America has fallen into poverty during the current down period beginning in 2008, and Mr. Obama hasn’t lifted a finger for them, or for the poor in general. Championing gay rights–after being all but forced to–seems a safe, and even electorally expedient move in comparison. You take what you can get from this guy, but he has proved that color is only skin deep. And much of the rest of the well-off Black community has proved the same thing with their silence. The ranks of well-off Black people swelled during the late Reagan and Clinton boom, but much of the political cohesion of the Black community was also lost as those who made it shed many of their convictions and embraced consumerism along with the rest of America. Something important and powerful has been irretrievably lost. Mr. Obama, with his fake Black oratory–doffed and donned like a clip-on bowtie–lecturing Black fathers with whom he has, in the end, little or nothing in common, proves it. Irrefutably, in my view. It’s been just ducky that skin-deep wealthy white liberals have been able to embrace him all the way to the bank. He has challenged nothing; in fact, he has reinforced many of the most racist elements of the American system, starting with the patriarchy, moving through religion, and including the military. If he were bombing white babies with his drones, things might look a little different.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/24164/a-list-of-children-killed-by-drone-strikes-in-pakistan-and-yemen
Well said Matthew Detroit.
Rev. Monroe,
I share your concern that some African American ministers might feel slighted by nods to gay activists but I don’t personally know anyone who has spoken out to that effect. Can you cite anyone’s public comments on the matter? I just want to make sure we’re not stuffing ourselves a strawman here.
Excellent comments.
My own observation and experience, admittedly a bit time dated, is wrt to the influence of the church and the hierarchy in black communities. The observation is that the “black community” is as uncomfortable with homosexuality as the white, perhaps more. And the rock bottom of the black community, traditionally, is the church women. They represent the power in the community. The preachers, not so much. Am I way off base here?
What Obama did, as much as the people who hate Obama reflexively and are thus siding with the homophobic and on-the-take ministers because of it, may have been the most singularly powerful blow for good in his presidency.
The mere fact of his getting off the fence and backing marriage equality immediately led to a huge rise in the support among African Americans for marriage equality. He led, they followed — much to the disgust of those on-the-take preachers and their paymasters.
Now, he has followed that heavy blow to homophobia with an even bigger one — and the on-the-takers are screaming like they’ve been mortally wounded. They haven’t been, but their meal ticket, the promotion of homophobia among African Americans, has been dealt what looks to be a mortal blow. Which means that unless they can stir up some serious division, and soon, the conservatives paying them to prop up institutionalized homophobia will be slamming shut their checkbooks.
Start by not giving those “ministers” any undue respect. Most of them are just hucksters and conmen who are only interested in money and power. They think they deserve respect because they give themselves self-aggrandizing titles like “minister” and “reverend” and people play right into it.
It’s all a matter of degree surely, we can’t be too harsh on Obama when compared to the past old white fat rich guys who didn’t even broach some of these subjects.
Obama I think is patient and has quickly learned Washington politics, he is also brilliant in his timing and for me has earned a place in history with his healthcare reform.
Listening to NRP a few years ago, the interviewer had illegal immigrant farm workers describing their injuries due to local Long Island boys beating up on them, one guy with a horrific head injury came on and the interviewer asked the regular question, ‘what happened to your head’, the illegal immigrants response was ‘I was also beaten up’…. but it turns out not by the local guys but by the other undocumented who could not tolerate a gay man within them.
A group of oppressed and victimized individuals who can in the blink of an eye forget their predicament and inflict on another exactly the same horror that they are experiencing.
Hate is hate I thought, it’s in us, the black community needs to shake loose their learned hatred and not forget how not so long ago we were all very similarly treated.
I can tell how the conversation misses a beat when the subject is brought up, black men especially have to remember to switch gear into political correctness, it does not come automatically, there’s a little pause until the new cog engages!
Disappointed that Ms. Monroe posts here but does not feel inclined to respond to replies. That happened to me here once before, and left a bad taste.
What tends to get lost, perhaps, in latter-day social justice/human rights struggles is what MLK eventually became very clear about: that it’s about the system, and economic justice, and class–that’s why he went down fighting for sanitation workers. If it’s only about who you have a right to sleep with, or pass your benefits on to, then it ain’t about much.
UH… are these people “dissed” by being linked to the — I presume entirely lily white — women of the “Seneca Falls Convention” of 1848? Are they to be shunned and disassociated as well? For anyone to separate themselves from the Greater Human Family is both deplorable and I would venture quite anti-Dr. King.
Ain’t right.
People have hated women, LGBT folks, Jews, blacks, 1st Americans, the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese (remember the internment camps of WW2?) and so many other groups. It’s oppression, period. Likewise, people have resisted with wars, with peace, with emigration, with patience, with marches and pride parades, with solidarity, and with education.
The only thing I see as a fitting response to oppression is resisting. But if you push someone down, you are an oppressor, regardless of whether you yourself resisted oppression or not. Period. I don’t care if you were at Selma, or at Stonewall, or Mila 18 for that matter. If you are pushing someone down, you are pushing hate, and thus doing evil. Don’t do it.
I agree Karen, how quickly we forget and yes, we should practice your ‘no push’ in our everyday lives. I remember MLK and part of his ‘dream’ speech mentioned this country as the ‘greatest perpetrator of death the planet has ever known’ or something to that effect, hate is in us and aggression is in this nation (guns statistically record this). We need to realize the constitution is not a religious text and get busy amending it to reflect modern day life and then start building a society and culture of compassion and peace. It is hilarious when courts/lawyers try to determine what ‘the framers intended’!…you gotta be ….ing joking, please tell me it aint so.