this is what privilege looks like

Dan Savage wrote:

…I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.

One of the problems with this statement is that it assumes that the racism within white queer communities is mostly a matter of individual bigots who do racism through individual acts. The far more prevalent and more destructive aspect of white queer racism is institutional.

Naamen Gobert Tilahun has an excellent summary of institutional racism in (predominantly) white queer organizations:

In so many ways the big GLBT organizations – HRC, GLAAD seem to ignore POC as much as possible you just have to look at the amount of praise that shows like The L Word & Queer As Folk receive as opposed the silence that shows that feature queer POC like Noah’s Arc are greeted with. They would like to ignore the fact that there are in fact queer POC. Communities of Color, our issues and problems are completely ignored and a lot of that has to do with the fact that rich gay white men, the focus and funding of GLAAD and HRC profit off of not remembering that – especially in regards to gentrification and the way that POC get treated in our own neighborhoods when gentrification begins.

As Naamen says, the point is not that two wrongs make a right. While it would be easy to get caught up in blaming and attacking each other, I think it’s vital that we remember that systems of domination have long pitted oppressed groups against each other in order to maintain the status quo. The only way to create real change is to build alliances and coalitions, to break down the distances and barriers that have been erected within and between us, to see again or for the first time that the liberation of people of color necessarily involves the liberation of queer people and the liberation of queer people necessarily involves the liberation of people of color, because these categories overlap and intersect. This is what the assimilationists have forgotten or denied. Whether they intend it or not, their message, “We’re just normal, upstanding, patriotic, middle-class (White) Americans, just like you” hurts all those who don’t fit into this sanitized image, hurts immigrants and people of color, hurts working-class and poor people, hurts radicals and activists critical of American imperialism, hurts people struggling with disabilities and mental illnesses and all those labeled as “abnormal”, as “other”.

Tags: assimilation, institutional racism, liberation, privilege, queer, racism