Amid all the good news last week, there was the nasty bit about the passing of Cali's Prop. 8.
Anyone who doubts that we are living in times of great change should look not just to the beautiful symbol of a Black Man as the "leader of the Free World," but to the return of the repressed, the utter fear represented by anti-brown attacks like this one, the trope of women as lobotomized beings who need products wrapped in pink, and the meme blaming "homophobic" African Americans in California for the passage of Prop. 8.
Check Ernest Hardy's long post taking apart a Dan Savage screed against African-American voters. The post leans a lot on the basic numerical analysis Shanikka made of all the assumptions necessary for the "Blacks hate gays" theory to hold up. In short, even if every Black voter who went to the polls voted to pass Prop. 8, it wouldn't've.
Latinos, as always, were assigned a secondary role in the brown anti-gay narrative. No one has bothered to get numbers to either blame or exonerate Latino voters. However, Andrés Duque wrote a bit about the belated and tonally off "No on 8" campaigns directed at Hispanics. The pull quote is this:
Which brings us back to quote from The Advocate. Statements that the
campaign only sought to create a Spanish language campaign late in the
game (as they "revamped" the message) and assurances that it "seems" to
be touching people betray the fact that they should have known for a
long time that minority communities should have been included in the
game plan long before now.
For me, a big part of the problem is that people in charge -- policymakers, ad marketers, MSM reps -- are, for the most part, still uneducated in street-level relations between people and groups, in the nuances of how people see each other, relate to each other, and form families with each other. Why else would we still have to explain that some Latinos are Black or that not all gays are white?
As I talked about in one of my recent wee rants on the continued whitening of media, things are only getting worse. Note Daniel Hernández's comments on the massive bloodletting layoffs at the LA Times, which disproportionately affected writers and editors of color and people who were, not coincidentally, I think, trying to figure out the new social configurations of California.
And can I throw in the controversy over Time Out Magazine's New York 40, profiling city arts and culture "influentials," which included a grand total of two-and-half people of color and a handful of women? Even in their apology, the editors seemed peeved that they, of all people, should get called out as racist. It's the old "merit" argument, discounting the possibility that what matters in the cultural lifeblood of the city is not just the Met, but The Point.
Getting all ranty in here is not just about crapping on institutions, I promise. At a time when I think we all still feel an opening, a crack of the cosmic egg, I want us -- yes, dear reader, you and me -- to start thinking of ways to teach, to create, to raise up a people who are willing to speak to each other, be neighborly, work together to improve their communities for everyone who lives in them.
There's a protest at 6:30 pm today at the Mormon Temple at Columbus and 65th St.
[Photo of Miss Claudia at 2005 Queens Pride parade by Joel Cairo/Newsday via amny; pix of LA Prop. 8 protest via welt.de; image of "New York 40" via Time Out Magazine]
you make sure someone else voted?
