Homophobia, Religion, and Racism

• • homophobia

On June 17th 2015, nine beautiful Black individuals who were having Bible study at a church in Charleston, NC lost their lives to a White, racist gunman who revealed in his manifesto that he thought Blacks were “stupid and violent.” The killing demonstrated how prevalent racism is in the U.S. today, especially in the way it echoed the 16th street Baptist Church killing of four innocent black girls at the hands of White Supremacist in 1963. It was particularly painful because the church for many Black people represents liberation and comfort, and has been and is still the location for community organizing against racial oppression. It was in the Black church that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave many of his most powerful sermons on love and justice and if you know the Black church like I do, it is where the pastor always yells “Our God is an on-time God. Now let the church say ‘Amen’ ” and the congregation would repeat the Amen.

But the church has not always been a space for love and hope for everyone, especially for sexual minorities and gender queer people. Almost a year after the Charleston shooting, forty-nine queer Latino and Afro-Latino individuals lost their lives to another deranged gunmen, but unlike the White supremacist’s suggestions of us being “stupid and violent,” many church goers have said instead that we “reaped what we sowed” and in essence deserved our deaths for rejoicing in our sinful lifestyles. In fact, many of us might recall the painful video from 2009 of the dangerous ministries of Patricia and Kelvin Mckinney as they tried to exorcise a “gay Demon” from a young Black 16 year old boy. Not long after the Orlando slaughter of the 49, a Latino Christian pastor wished more of the “sodomites would have died.” These stories remind me of the pain I had to endure, Sunday after Sunday, as my pastor said “Hate the Sin but Love the Sinner” and posited that it wasn’t homophobia he was pedaling but the “truth of God, and the church says Amen.” The positions of the church made it difficult for my Latino mother and Black father to accept me as I am for years. Hell, it made it difficult for me to accept myself for years.

The social sciences were not any better for me as a queer person of color. Sociologist Mark Regnerous, a tenured University of Texas (Austin) faculty member and deeply religious Christian man, used the auspices of “science” to conduct a well-funded yet inherently homophobic study about the dangers of same sex parenting. Despite the study being widely debunked by the scientific community, it has been cited and used in countries in Africa and in Russia as justifications for legislation that jails and murders sexual minorities. The Black sociologist George Yancey, no doubt a hero to many Black Christian academics, defended Regnerous’s work and continues to describe homosexuality as a sinful “choice,” despite the overwhelming amount of research that suggests sexual minorities have no more control over their orientations than heterosexuals. In fact he states that being Black or a woman is not a sin, but homosexuality is, therefore suggesting that sexism and racism are somehow more oppressive than homophobia. This thinking is common in the church and among numerous Black and Latino scholars. And this same religious thinking–that we somehow are choosing to engage in our “deviant lifestyles”–is what leads religious extremists like the Orlando killer to do exactly what he did.

A Gallup poll conducted in 2012 found that the LGBT identity is highest among younger, non-white, and low income individuals. Similarly, a great number of hate crimes and attacks are on LGBT peoples including many transgender women of color. We are fighting racism in our gay communities, and homophobia and transphobia in the straight community. We are fighting for our sexual worth among sexual minorities and for the right to use the restroom among heterosexuals. No matter how much time passes, we are constantly fighting.

And so today I am again getting ready to fight, and the source of my anger and pain is the many people who use the church to hide their thinly veiled homophobia and hate. And I will take this fight to the couple that tells me I have a “gay demon” while they have demons of hate and misunderstanding, to the so called Black intellectual who claims to love the sinner and hate the sin, as if the two can be separate to me, to the Latino pastor who falsely associated my love for another gay man with pedophilia, to the many race scholars who stay silent because they think they can fight racism without fighting sexism and homophobia but do not understand that they cannot. I am here to tell all of them that the blood of the victims is on their hands too, that they contribute to this hate in varying ways and that they have done more to kill us slowly than the shooter did when he snuffed out lives in mere seconds. I am mad as hell and I am ready to fight to live, because too many of my brothers and sisters have died. And while I’m on the topic of choice, now is the time for you to make a choice, to abandon your homophobic ways and join me in this fight or continue to be the bullets that filled the killer’s gun. NOW let the church say “Amen.”

Jesus G. Smith is an advanced Ph.D. student in sociology at Texas A&M University

White Supremacy and White Patriarchy in Today’s Poland

• • white women

The fact that racism combines with sexism to deepen the oppression faced by Black women has been emphasized by many authors, including such seminal African American intellectuals as Angela Davis, bell hooks and Audre Lorde. One of the most important Black feminist texts, the 1977 statement of the Combahee River Collective, asserted the existence of

racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

A decade later, the Black scholar Kimberle Crenshaw coined the now very popular term ”intersectionality” as a way of underscoring the importance of the double burden of oppression weighing on Black women which is more than the sum of racism and sexism they have to face. And in 2010 yet another Black scholar, Moya Bailey, introduced the term ”misogynoir” to ”describe the particular brand of hatred directed at black women in American visual & popular culture.”

Unsurprisingly, the analyses of the toxic combination of racism and sexism usually focus on the interlocking oppressions affecting Black women and other women of colour. White women are now often portrayed as participants and beneficiaries of the system of white supremacy alongside white men; the Nigerian scholar Emeka Aniagolu has even coined the term ”co-whites” to emphasize the complicity of white women in the system of racial oppression in the United States.

It is very frequently overlooked that white women can be affected by a kind of misogyny which is inextricably linked both to racism and to efforts to control and contain female sexuality. Poland is an example of a society where this kind of misogyny takes a very overt, virulent and obsessive form, which makes it easier to observe and analyze its manifestations. This phenomenon found a recent and very characteristic illustration in the Facebook comments left by Pawel Kukiz, a white Polish politician and rock musician who leads the party Kukiz’15 (36 MPs in the Polish parliament) and gained more than 20 percent of votes in the first round of the 2015 presidential election.

When the activist Joanna Grabarczyk from the organization HejtStop which fights against online hate speech reported some Facebook posts written by Mariusz Pudzianowski, a well-known MMA (martial arts) fighter and owner of a transport company, to a District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw

(Pudzianowski had written, among others: I have no pity – this human trash!!! I should be there!! I’d gladly use a baseball bat, zero tolerance!!! Folks, what tolerance??? I no longer have tolerance for this human trash-and they dare to call themselves human beings!!!!!” — and he meant migrants who were trying to get on trucks in Calais in order to reach the British coast),

the outraged Pudzianowski described her in another Facebook post as a ”frustrated woman with low self-esteem who is causing harm to normal people.”

As to Kukiz, he sarcastically wrote on his Facebook wall: ”If I were her, I would also be dreaming about immigrants in the context of the New Year’s Eve.” When his post met with disapproval from, among others, the popular journalist Monika Olejnik and the TV presenter Tomasz Kammel, Kukiz mockingly stated:

I did not intend to offend Joanna Grabarczyk. I assumed that racial barriers did not exist for someone as open and tolerant as her.

It is clear that Kukiz exploited the powerful stereotypical image of the white woman rejected by white men and therefore seeking solace in real or fantasized encounters with non-white men: an image obviously based on the assumption that white men occupy the highest rank in the hierarchy of sexual attractiveness.

This idea, very often expressed in online comments, was reflected in an article published in 2010 in the newspaper Dziennik soon after a Nigerian street vendor, Maxwell Itoya, was shot dead by a police officer in Warsaw in still unexplained circumstances. The article, titled “The Nigerian Mafia. Ugly Wives and Drugs,” portrayed the Nigerian diaspora in Poland in an extremely negative light: as aggressive men who ”increasingly look like men in the video clips of the stars of gangsta rap,” sell drugs and are able to stay in Poland thanks to the fact that they are “expertly using marriage fraud.” The article quotes a Warsaw official who claims that Polish women who fall in love with Nigerians “are not attractive” and, moreover, ”not well-developed intellectually.” There is also a documented case of racist harassment where the harassers – a woman’s neighbors – claimed that she had decided to have a child with a Black man because she “did not have a Polish guy.”

Very importantly, in the case of Joanna Grabarczyk the stereotype of the unattractive white woman who turns to non-white men because of being rejected by white men has been used in order to cruelly ridicule a woman who is fighting against hate speech. Such attacks can be an effective form of silencing women who have opportunities to publicly denounce racism and speak in defence of non-European migrants and refugees. Women’s commitment to human rights, justice and equality can be thus portrayed as merely a hypocritical façade hiding their longings for love and sex. In this way, not only the idea that a woman can be sincerely committed to struggle against racism is cynically rejected, and the single (or supposedly single) female activist is depicted as a new incarnation of the despised figure of the old maid/spinster.

Not less importantly, the idea that some Polish women turn to non-white men out of desperation can be seen as an expression of the deep anxieties, fears and insecurities of Polish men faced with the multifarious consequences of late neoliberal capitalism – greatly increased job insecurity, the very limited social safety net in Poland, mass-scale economic emigration to Western Europe and a greatly facilitated access to holiday tourism in the countries of the global South – as well as with the increasing emancipation of women and easy access to various kinds of pornography (with its racialized codes of representation). In this context, the image of the unattractive and frustrated single white woman drawn to non-white men may be interpreted as one of the devices used by deeply insecure white men in order to cope with their own feelings of inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation and anger.

An analysis of the lyrics of two virulently racist Polish songs can provide insights into the psychological mechanisms leading to extreme racism and misogyny; it is necessary to emphasize here that the racism of white supremacists is merely an extreme form of mainstream white racism. Symptomatically, Polish women bear the brunt of the hatred expressed in both texts. In one of the songs of the neo-Nazi music band Nordica (formerly known as Agressiva 88), titled “The N…r’s White Whore,” a beautiful Polish girl gets involved in a relationship with a Black man; the lyrics assume that she is ”doing it only for money.” The song contains a direct threat of deadly violence against Polish women who are in relationships with Black men, as indicated by such lines as “You will hang, whore, such is your fate” and “When I get you, you will be among Blacks in heaven”). The lyrics make it clear that one of the most potent sources of the insecurities of many Polish men is the fact that their economic status decreases their attractiveness in the eyes of current or potential partners.

“I Don’t Have Enough Words,” one of the songs by the musician Kelthuz (his real name is Tomasz Czapla), directly alludes to the previous one: the refrain contains the words ”Die, you n…s’s white whore”, so there is a deliberate continuity between the two songs. In the first part of “I Don’t Have Enough Words” Kelthuz describes the hypocrisy of young Polish women who are seasonal economic migrants in the United States: “each one of them hangs a picture of her boyfriend over her bed/And calls him in the evening when possible,” but later “goes to a downtown disco to f..k n…s in the toilet” because every Polish woman allegedly ”gets crazy when she sees a black guy”.

In the second part “mature” Polish businesswomen “on the lookout for a man” indulge in sexual adventures with local men in Egypt. Finally, the song reveals “the truth” on female nature and on Polish women: “every woman is in two-thirds a whore” and ”there are three black cocks in every Polish woman.” The second image evokes the pornographic representations of “interracial” heterosexual encounters: representations which hyper-masculinize Black men and can reinforce both the sexual insecurities and the racist prejudice of many white men.

The song not only portrays female sexuality as uncontrollable and dangerous – the lyrics even claim that young Polish women are infected with HIV by Black men in America and later transmit the virus to the unsuspecting Polish boyfriends – but also suggests that the only way to contain female sexual desires is through physical violence and sexual degradation; that Polish women have to be literally terrorized into suppressing their attraction to Black men:

If you don’t beat your woman, her liver will rot,
So she’ll look for cock in African forests,
The hamster in her head is getting crazy,
Shut up, whore, and suck me slowly!

In these lines Polish patriarchal tradition, reflected in the proverb justifying domestic violence against women (”If you don’t beat your woman, her liver will rot”), fluidly intermingles with the very recent and Western-derived metaphor of the “rationalization hamster”: this metaphor, visualised in many Internet memes, is based on the idea that women find it easy to rationalize and justify their decisions and behaviour, no matter how unreasonable and unacceptable they can be.

As in the case of the first song, the unhidden contempt for women seems to derive from deep male insecurities and fears. The thought that Polish women can be attracted to dark-skinned and supposedly inferior men, and that they now have access to spaces of erotic freedom – whether as economic migrants in the West, or as tourists in the countries of the global South – is plainly terrifying to many Polish men. The latter’s anxieties are inseparably connected to the myth of the sexual superiority of Black men (a myth clearly believed even by some Polish artists and intellectuals, as proven by the words of the well-known artist Zbigniew Libera who has claimed in an interview that during a visit in Liège he

saw vividly that the civilization of the white man was nearing its end, and that he will be replaced by a black guy with an ‘enormous cock’, of whom the white man is afraid.)

The visceral connection between the sexual insecurities of many white men, sexual myths on Black men and racism was revealed with unequaled frankness, brilliance and poignancy in James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man.” Baldwin’s masterpiece, just like Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks or Eldridge Cleaver’s highly controversial book Soul on Ice, indicate that issues related to sexuality, masculinity and femininity are not less important than, say, economic or political issues when it comes to an analysis of the genesis and mechanisms of racism. It is also necessary to emphasize that one of the ways in which global white supremacy is upheld is through the shaming and ridiculing of white women who openly disobey its rules. It is noteworthy that white patriarchy’s efforts to discourage white women – and especially middle- and upper-class women – from transgressing the “color line” in the sexual sense, or to force them to hide such transgressions or view them as merely insignificant adventures, have not yet attracted much attention of feminist/womanist scholars, activists and movements.

Joanna Tegnerowicz, a sociologist and historian of ideas, is an
Assistant Professor at the University of Wroclaw in Poland.

Hillary Clinton’s Nomination: A Victory for White Feminism

• • political parties

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States. This achievement is being heralded as a victory because she has broken the glass ceiling for all women. But her victory is really a win for white feminism.

Hillary on NYDaily News(The June 08, 2016 cover of the New York Daily News)

Clinton’s campaign is a boon to white feminists who want to see themselves represented in the highest office in the US and want to read into that a symbol of progress for all women, but what has gone mostly unacknowledged is that the group who benefits most from her candidacy is white women. It is white women who will benefit most from a Clinton presidency.

Indeed, if her inner circle of 2016 campaign advisors is any indication of who she will appoint once in office, it is mostly white men, a few white women, and one or two women of color that she will bring with her.

Some people on the left have critiqued her corporate-themed version of feminism, including just some of this run-down on Clinton’s résumé to date (which I mentioned when she announced):

  • Despite trumpeting her work on behalf of “mothers and children,” she and her husband worked to reduce federal assistance to women and children living in poverty. In her book,Living History, Clinton touts her role: “By the time Bill and I left the White House, welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent.”  This 60% drop was not due to a 60% decrease in poverty. Instead, it was a reduction in federal benefits to those living in poverty, many of them working poor, like those employed at Wal-Mart.
  • Clinton sat on the board of Wal-Mart between 1986 and 1992, where she says she learned a lot from Sam Walton, and she remained silent while the corporation fought the unionization of its workers.
  • In Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she notes that it was Hillary Clinton who lobbied Congress to expand the drug war and mass incarceration in ways that we continue to live with today, and that have a significantly more harmful impact on black and brown people than white people. According to The Drug Policy Alliance, people of color are much more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced and saddled with a lifelong criminal record due to being unfairly targeted for drug law violations. Even though white people and people of color use drugs at about the same rates, it is black and brown people’s bodies that continue to fuel the machine of mass incarceration.
  • As Secretary of State, Clinton left a legacy that included both a hawkish inclination to recommend the use of military force coupled with  “turning the state department into a machine for promoting U.S. business.”  This does not bode well for black and brown people in other parts of the world, since the US is not likely to attack Western Europe under a (second) Clinton presidency, but some region of the world with people who do not have light-colored skin tones.

As author Naomi Klein noted last night on Twitter, Hillary Clinton is a plutocrat and there’s little joy in her victory for those who are critical of the damaging elite interests she represents.

 


 

Now, before the “but-she’s-better-than-Trump” crowd comes through, let me explain something. This is the cover that the NY Daily News was going to run today, instead of the one above:

I'm with Racist cover NY Daily News

And, indeed, the presumptive nominee for the Republican party is an overt, vulgar racist who is appealing to disturblingly wide swaths of the American populace. But note how whiteness operates here: the overt racism of Trump is upstaged by the white feminism of Hillary, in NY Daily News covers and in headlines throughout the news cycle, and we’re all expected to cheer. In large measure, it’s Trump’s style that so many on the right are drawn to and so many on the left are put off by. When was the last time you heard “vulgar” as a term discussed by the mainstream press?)

Here in the US, we prefer our racism to be less vulgar, hidden in the passive voice of public policy, and administered politely by a white woman.

Hillary Clinton’s form of feminism is the latest iteration in a long history of similarly situated white women here in the US and within colonialism, as I’ve chronicled in the trouble with white feminism series. Her presidency may, in fact, be better for the US than a Trump presidency. It’s hard to argue otherwise. But make no mistake: Hillary Clinton’s presidency will not decenter whiteness any more than a Trump presidency would.

Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the democratic party candidate represents is a victory for white women and a particular kind of white feminism that universalizes white women’s experience. If that’s what you’re celebrating, then have the clarity to acknowledge that. If you’re voting for Hillary, then acknowledge that you’re voting for her hawkish war record, her Wal-Mart board membership, her dumping people off of welfare rolls, her fondness for incarceration as a solution to social problems she helped create, her war on drugs. Just don’t ask me to celebrate – or vote – with you. This is the worst of all possible worlds, and the choice between Trump’s vulgar, overt racism and Clinton’s polite, public policy racism is no choice at all.