The Jena 6 case - in which Southern white law
enforcement in Jena, Louisiana, unabashedly doled out biased
treatment against six African-American high school students
- harkens backs to this country’s era of Jim Crow. And
it is a no-brainer as to why there was a mass protest.
What boggles my mind, however, is the protest
from many in the gay and lesbian community toward the gay and
lesbian individuals and organizations that showed up in solidarity.
For example, Chris Crain, the former editor of the Washington
Blade and the man behind the popular blog and syndicated column
“Citizen Crain,” balked at HRC’s president,
Joe Solmonese, for appearing at the rally.
“Why pick this case? It doesn't involve
discrimination of the type suffered historically by gay Americans.
I would agree completely that there is racial discrimination
in this country, and that the criminal justice system suffers
from prosecutorial abuse, biased jury verdicts and lopsided
sentences based on race,” Crain wrote. “But ...
why pick the Jena 6, … a case of six bullies who beat,
kicked and stomped a defenseless teen unconscious in a schoolyard,
as the one for the GLBT movement to take a stand?”
When your identity, like mine, is the intersection
of these two marginalized groups, the question is moot. Crain’s
question is similar to the mindset of Alveda King, the niece
of Martin Luther King, who said gays never had to sit in the
back of the bus.
Alexander Robinson of the National Black Justice
Coalition (NBJC), the only national African-American gay organization
in the country, showed his solidarity in a statement: “Earlier
this summer, NBJC joined the NAACP in its effort to right the
wrongs against the Jena 6. We cannot allow the injustice in
Jena, La., or anywhere else in the country to go unnoticed or
unchallenged and we need your support to do it!!”
Crain’s question, however, cannot be summarily
dismissed, because it is an important one. But his question
should be hurled at the Goliaths leading the Jena 6 protest
and not at the Davids who followed African-American leadership.
For a different reason than Crain’s, I
too, ask a question: “Why a rally in support of these
six black boys but not the seven black lesbians who defended
themselves against an anti-gay attack and were charged with
beating and stabbing a white filmmaker? The filmmaker instigated
the violence by threatening them and actually trying to choke
one of them in the Greenwich Village in August 2006?”
Because of poor legal representation, three of
the women pleaded guilty to attempted assault, and were sentenced
to six months in jail and five years probation. Again, Jim Crow,
noted for its residency “down South,” also shows
its face here “up North.” So why not a similar outrage
coming from the African-American leadership? But is this also
a no-brainer?
Cornel West, an African-American scholar and
professor at Princeton University, wrote in Black Leadership
and the Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning that present-day black
leadership fails African Americans because it's exclusive of
women and needs a gender analysis. “What most disturbed
me [is] the low level of political discussion in black America
– [its] crude discourse about race and gender that bespeaks
a failure of nerve of black leadership.”
But the “failure of nerve of black leadership”
is in its very own civil rights model, a paradigm historically
unabashed about its exclusion of its women and gay and lesbian
people. And this model of leadership refuses to change from
our revered Martin Luther King to our noted opportunist Al Sharpton.
Bayard Rustin, the gay man who was chief organizer
and strategist for the 1963 March on Washington that further
catapulted Martin Luther King onto the world stage, was not
the beneficiary of King’s dream. And in a spring 1987
interview with Rustin in Open Hands, a resource for
ministries affirming the diversity of human sexuality, Rustin
stated that he pushed King to speak up on his behalf, but King
refused.
In John D’Emilo’s book Lost Prophet:
The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, D’Emilo wrote:
“Rustin offered to resign in the hope that he would force
the issue. Much to his chagrin, King did not reject the offer.
At the time, King was also involved in a major challenge to
the conservative leadership of the National Baptist Convention,
and one of his ministerial lieutenants in the fight was also
gay. Basically, King said, ‘I can’t take on two
queers at one time.’”
And while Jesse Jackson adamantly feels that
gay and lesbian people deserve equal protection under the law
and that the Constitution should not be amended to ban same-sex
marriage, he does, however, think the comparison between gay
rights and the black civil rights struggle is "a stretch,"
as he mentioned at a talk in March 1998 at Harvard Law School.
"Gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution,"
Jackson told his audience.
And Sharpton knows both personally and politically
how the civil rights model excludes a member of his own family
- his sister. In the October 2005 issue of The Advocate,
Sharpton stated, "I understood the pain of having to lead
a double life in the system [since] we grew up in the church."
And at the National Black Justice Coalition's Black Church Summit
on Gay Rights in January 2006, Sharpton made reference to his
sister: "Black, gay, and female. Imagine the social schizophrenia."
Sharpton had promised to take his message of queer justice on
the road. But instead, as one of NBJC’s and HRC’s
paid speakers at the event, Sharpton abandoned the message but
took the money.
Those gay and lesbian individuals and organizations
at the Jena 6 protest were joining a broad collation of national
and local civil rights organizations.
While many in the gay and lesbian community may
think these individuals and organizations engaged in the wrong
act for gay justice and for the wrong reason, they are the ones
who are wrong. These individuals and organizations were doing
the right thing but working within a flawed model of African
American leadership.
BlackCommentator.com columnist,
the Rev. Irene Monroe is a religion columnist, theologian, and
public speaker. She is a Ford Fellow and doctoral candidate
at Harvard Divinity School. As an African American feminist
theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently
invisible. Her website is www.irenemonroe.com.
Click
here to contact the Rev. Monroe.