Since proposition 8 passed there has been a LOT of talk about how black people are by and large opposed to Gay Rights. Further, far too many of these commentators have gone beyond simply stating the correlation between the greater black turnout in California and the passing of the amendment, to explicitly blaming the homophobic intolerant black community for repressing the rights of another minority. Some consider it a sad kind of “irony” whereas many others are more explicit in condemning black people for their participation in the atrocity of passing this amendment. They say it’s all our fault. We pushed it over the edge. Increased black voter turnout was to blame. Shame on us!
However, condemning the ignorant black masses for not being “enlightened” enough is more than a little disingenuous. It’s a convenient dialectic for those who want to prevent further development of gay rights, stressing the differences between these two minority communities. Turning them against each other is probably the best way to ensure that gay rights progress slowly for another twenty or thirty years or so. For that reason it behooves those of us who care both about civil rights with regards to race and sexual orientation to not jump the gun and start playing the blame game quite so quickly.
There are certain pertinent pieces of information that ought to be taken into consideration *before* we start to label black people as the premier anti-gay rights race in this country. First of all, do blacks vote for marriage definition amendments inordinately more so than whites and other racial categories?
There’s significant evidence AGAINST this from prior election turnouts. Consider the 2004 elections:
“…a funny thing happened on the way to the ballot box in the last presidential election. When constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage were on 11 state ballots in November 2004, blacks in Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio and Oklahoma were at least one percentage point
less likely than whites to vote for them, according to CNN exit polls. Only in Georgia were blacks slightly more likely to vote for the amendment. (The remaining four states had too few blacks to make a meaningful comparison.)”
linkyInteresting no?
It is also not hard to see that a vast majority of prominent black civil rights leaders and politicians are very much pro-gay rights. Black church leaders are more split, but most recognized names amongst them continue to support gay rights and oppose definition of marriage amendments… even as they condemn “the homosexual life style”.
That last seems to be the prevailing attitude amongst blacks altogether. By way of examining the results of 31 national surveys published between 1973 and 2000, Gregory B. Lewis concluded that “blacks appear to be more likely than whites both to see homosexuality as wrong and to favor gay-rights laws.”
Even were these statements were not the case, and even considering that 70% of black voters voted in favor of banning gay marriage, to accuse the black community of being at fault for the amendment passing represents a very poor understanding and use of statistics. “The state’s Black population is 6.2 percent, and it accounted for 10 percent of the overall vote. In other words, blaming African Americans for the referendum’s passage ignores 90 percent of the vote.” (link)
It’s even worse than that though. The idea that blacks accounted for 10% of the vote is in fact absurd. It, as well as the 70% Black vote in favor of proposition 8 are both based on a CNN Exit poll created using a questionable and possibly flawed methodology. Indeed its results seem virtually impossible.
“for African Americans to have been 10% of the California vote PERIOD they would have had to turnout in percentages not just dramatically disproportionate to their normal turnout – to the point of virtually 100% turnout; not just their percentage of the electorate, but nearly double it; and disproportionate to the actual turnouts everywhere we actually live in this state.” (link)
What was wrong with CNN’s methodology exactly? Well it’s rather straight forward to understand. They polled by randomly selecting precincts and some precincts have FAR larger black populations than others. This is different from other states where racial population is more spread out.
In California, virtually all of this state’s Black folks live in just 9 of the state’s 58 counties:<snip>The vast majority of the counties in this state have a percentage of Black residents of between 1 and 2% (and several have far have less than 1%). When you know that about California, you know that CNN’s “random selection of precinct” method doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense if what you’re trying to do is actually know what Black voters are doing at the polls. (link)
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that this precinct method might not only have inflated the quantity of black votes it might also have given a higher percentage of black votes in favor of of the proposition. The pole might well have hit precincts that were particularly religious and voted particularly highly in favor of proposition 8. That can’t be proven however. So we have to assume that the 70% number has some truth to it.
Even so, under reasonable assumptions you can show that even had blacks voted in exactly the same proportions as other demographics in favor of proposition 8, the proposition would still have passed.
On top of that we have to look at an examine what might be the reasons that blacks voted inordinately in favor of Proposition 8.
We might make note of several obvious and well known facts about the black community. One being that blacks are extremely religious by and large. They often register very high amongst regular church attendees in polls. And also economically and educationally blacks are largely more marginalized than other racial groups in US society. Surprise surprise, when you compare by education, economics, and or religious inclination you find homophobia in larger percentages amongst the poor, uneducated, and/or regular church attendees. So then is at all a surprise? Hispanics also voted largely in favor of proposition 8 for much the same reasons.
But we’ve already shown that although blacks are more likely to be homophobic according to most polls, they have, at least in the past, been more likely to support Civil Rights even with regards to the LGBT community. What’s different now? Two interesting points come up right away.
One is the corrupt ad that aired on television which suggested that Obama was FOR proposition 8 by twisting his words and using them against him. Similarly phone messages were sent using Biden’s words to suggest he was in favor of Proposition 8. These statements are clearly false and a quick lookup on Obama’s website shows his position on Gay Marriage and Gay rights is very much the opposite of that suggested. Even so, there’s reasons to suspect that this would have had an impact the black vote. Based on personal experience, I can say that Obama’s words carry a LOT of weight amongst black people. Certainly one commercial can’t tilt the vote upwards to 70% but it undoubtedly had an impact.
The second and more interesting point continues to this day. There’s a great debate waging within the black community explicitly risen by proponents of Proposition 8 and Protection of Marriage agendas on the question of whether Gay Marriage really IS a Civil Rights movement. And the proponents of Proposition 8 made use of this debate significantly in their attempt to sway black voters. This is reflected in the very presentation of Proposition 8 to the people of California. The wording on the amendment was labeled: “Eliminates Right of Same-sex Couples to Marry” As opposed to using language about defining marriage.
This is an interesting use of words. And we can see it all the time. And when you hear black leaders even those in favor of gay marriage speak most are extremely hesitant to lable this question as a matter of “rights”. The equating of the Civil Rights movement to Gay Marriage many feel is a false comparison that they consider to be very insulting. Why? Well because the struggle for racial rights is seen as a much longer and more severe struggle and continues to be to this day. Make no mistake that even after 9/11 and even though we elected a black president, black people are still largely THE most victimized group in the nation. They suffer the most hate crimes of any other group and greater percentage of black people are incarcerated than any other minority group.
And that’s the present day. When we look at the history of the struggle for black rights and compare it to the largely clandestine until recent years struggle for gay rights we can at least see a significant scale difference. The worldwide pandemic of slavery targeted primarily at dark skinned peoples by light skinned is not an insignificant historical blip to be ignored. And even long after slavery was ended it has been until recent years significantly more dangerous to be black in America than it was to a member of the LGBT community even if the only reason that was true was that the latter group could more easily hide their differences from the norm.
Tactically then we can see that community organizers trynig to get Proposition 8 defeated made a mistake by stressing Civil Rights as far as appealing to the black voters goes. Many black people weren’t willing to accept the comparison.
However… I’d make the argument that the Civil Rights perspective is as far as long term strategy goes absolutely the right position to have with regards to Gay Marriage.
Those who scoff at the fight for Gay rights as being trivial compared to the struggle for racial equity are being intellectually dishonest with themselves. They should be called on it. The idea that persecution for gays has been any less significant or less serious a matter throughout history musts necessarily take a very narrow view of history.
It does not take much effort to find numerous horrendous stories of cruel and vicious hate crimes perpetrated against people merely on the suspicion of having an unapproved sexual orientation.
True their have been and are cultures that have been more open to homosexuality but it has not been the norm in recent history. Most cultures, often fueled by religious doctrine, have perceived homosexuality as a failing or an abnormality. Attitudes have varied by and large between treating homosexuality as a kind of joke to treating people who exhibit it as exercising some fundamental failing of will to being a signal of being dirty or corrupt.
While it’s true that being gay never caused anyone to have to sit at the back of the bus, the real measurable harm caused by having to live perpetuatlly in fear of revealing your nature and of often being taught from a very early age that being what you are is fundamentally dirty and wrong can never be measured. And add to that, the fact that most gays cannot find solidarity with their race, their country, their culture, their gender, or their religion and often find themselves outcast by virtue of their sexual orientation from all of the above and not uncommonly from their own family as well, and one wonders how anyone can really say the gay plight somehow is “not as bad” as other disenfranchised minority groups. If anything, one could easily argue that in a lot of ways, in terms of psychological harm, being a minority in terms of sexual orientation is significantly worse.
So this really IS a matter of Rights. More than that it is a matter of Justice and Morality. It’s a matter of giving people equal chance to happiness and an equal consideration not just under the law but in the minds of ALL citizens. In an ideal world, there would BE no debate over Gay Marriage. Nobody would have blinked an eye at the thought of a marriage between two gay or lesbian people. Because to even bring the thought up is to suggest that being Gay makes you different, makes you less, makes you worthy of designing different rules or different terms or being treated as *different* as the *other* in some way shape or form by the society at large. Just like having brown skin made you “different” in the past. But it doesn’t. We’re all the same. We always have been.
I believe that it behooves any of us who believe in this struggle to keep making that point. Not to shy away from it to try and placate and appease the black voter because of some flawed statistics about one election result. And when it comes to such issues it seems to me that if you can make the case, and show black people that this IS about Rights and it is as big and as serious a struggle for fairness and equity as any other we have undergone throughout history, you will find that LGBT community will find no more Stalwart allies than they will find amongst the black population who lived it and remember and will never forget.
We aren’t there yet. Black people may not be to blame for Proposition 8 but that doesn’t mean they are blameless. We are all culpable. Far far too many people of every race and creed don’t believe and don’t understand or dont’ accept the idea that Gay Rights are the same as everybody else’s rights and that damage done to one group’s freedom is damage done to ALL of our freedom. We have to learn, as a society, to open our minds and move beyond what we have been taught and what we are comfortable and embrace a future of true equality.
We’ll get there though. Slowly. At least I hope so.
