Israel is one thing, but holy shit, bringing up the blacks and the gays, now we’re getting somewhere, or getting ready to go somewhere. Fastening our seatbelts, if you will, in preparation for the bumpy ride to Reactionville.
I do have a bias or two when it comes to this topic: I am just a little bit terrified of black people, particularly black males. Whether or not it’s justified or whether or not it makes me a bigot is debatable. What is not debatable to me is this: My grade school, junior high school and high school experience was defined by verbal and physical torture and abuse delivered via the mouths and fists of black students.
With the passing years, my perspective has shifted a bit. I grew up in what was and remains a plantation town. Most of Webster Groves, Missouri is white as can be, although, as the town demonstrates to this day, white comes in more than one shade: A road called Lockwood divides the Catholic part of town, known as Webster Park, from the Protestant enclave, which is called Sherwood Forest. It is indeed churchy, the entire town. Jutting across the northwest corner of the town is a road called Kirkham – which happens to have a railroad track running parallel to it – and beyond that street, shitty little houses on shitty little streets are crammed onto a gently sloping suburban povertyscape and it’s there, of course, that the black people live. If you look at the town on one of those satellite maps, it is not hard to interpret the discrepancies as the homes of the masters and the homes of the slaves. It’s pretty clear.
So it is not hard for me to empathize with a black child in the first grade, say, who finds himself surrounded by white youngsters from quietly wealthy families and there, tucked in among them, is the swishy little sissy with curly blonde hair who, when the class is asked to name the woman who sewed the first U.S. flag, raises his hand quick as lightening and shouts, “Diana Ross!” What a prize I must have been.
I get the inherent inequity that was and is the foundation upon which my life has been built. At the same time, the instruments of my memory play a drastically different tune. My instinct when a black male is within my line of sight or hearing is self defense. On the one hand, I know that my experience does not define all black people, and on the other hand, I have not undergone a lobotomy yet, so the residuals are still there and probably always will be.
Which brings me, unfortunately, to Tracy Morgan. Number one, this guy is funny? Like many who are called entertainers, his primary talent seems to be to dumb things down, to hack every element of experience he can get his mouth around free of any and all nuance, and for that he earns millions of dollars. And we laugh.
Number two, beyond the unfortunate subject of the statement, does anyone honestly give a shit what he would say if his son came home and told him he was gay?
And number three, for me, is this: Why is this story a headline? We have another black male lashing out at the gay folk. Oh, wow. Like the never-ending onslaught of female celebrities going after each other, I’m a tad bit suspicious of the amount of coverage given to Tracy Morgan. My suspicion, though, is hardly clean cut. In fact, it’s kind of sloppy.
First, can we all agree to retire the word “homophobia”? Who’s afraid of gay people? Gay people are loathed and despised, of course, but feared? That’s a hefty dose of self-aggrandizement, I think. We are, after all, one of the very few groups whose basic liberties can be put on a ballot. I don’t think anyone is afraid of gay people. Some may be afraid of getting caught hating gay people, but that’s about as far as any fear factor goes. Tracy Morgan either loathes the fags, or he recognizes the degradation of fags as a great way to sell tickets, or both. But afraid?
My second strand of sloppy thinking is that the frequency with which these stories – the blacks vs. the gays – are propelled into the large type of headlines seems suspect to me. I cannot help but wonder about the general character of someone who believes that a member of one minority group attacking members of another minority group is so worthy of headlines. It’s in the same tactical neighborhood as tossing a couple of blood-crazed dogs into the pen and dividing the cash based on which one dies first. Personally, I’m so used to being one of the dogs that I cannot honestly say I’m even tired of it.
What I do not wonder about is the work ethic – the productivity, if you will – of the headline writers, because the headlines, the emblems of their handiwork, it seems to me, are endless. A retired black football player in New York made a statement against gay marriage. So did William Clinton. Black preachers routinely and automatically denounce the queers every time the opportunity presents itself. So do the Mormons. And the Catholics. And the Evangelical Baptists. A black woman led the Oregon charge against homo-on-homo marriage a few years ago, forgetting, apparently, that had she had her moment at the microphone 50 years earlier, she not only would not have been allowed to legally marry outside of her race but would not have had the right to own property in this state either. I happen to know a number of white folks who are on the verge of losing everything they ever believed or imagined they owned whose number one concern is the looming queer takeover. A person who is considered a comedian spews forth some violent talk about the fags. Well, in a commercial that aired not that many years ago, one white man threatened to kill another white man over some sort of sissy talk. I cannot recall the company, unfortunately, but the jist of it has stayed with me.
As do my recollections of the black youngsters I grew up with. Were they, and are they, more anti-gay than the white kids who grew up to be more churchy and conservative and hostile toward any ‘ism that does not mirror them than their parents ever dreamed of being? My answer is this. No, they were not. They were simply more vocal, and more prone to violent aggression, which, in a weird way, strikes me as a step in the right direction.
