``I don't even understand why there was uncertainty surrounding this issue...I mean I'm not saying that every black guy is a homophobe, but it does seem to permeate the culture...''
[...]
C Grimes replied:
This is an example of what I don't get about some special extra something about black homophobia.
It sounds exactly like what went on everywhere I ever went to school starting about fifth grade with queer this and queer that. It took me awhile to figure beyond, sissy or chicken. (LA 50s).
But, it was the same in the mostly white schools later on in the Valley. It was annoying. We had queer's day, which was Thursday, which meant you were supposed to slug somebody you knew in the arm, aiming for where the bone is, so it really hurt. In fact it was so all pervasive, I started to wonder what's with these guys? It was what I would call now a morbid fascination.
I mean this is exactly why there is a gay and lesbian civil rights issue.
So, if we are going to discuss this, we really need a tighter breakdown on age, gender, income, education, etc, before we get to an extra black thang. Cultural impressions don't work too well. The way I read whatever I would label white, all I see is a profound homophobia. It's mostly a more coded form is all.
[...]
...
Which is precisely what Dennis Claxton, Shag and yours truly have been trying to bring to the discussion from the start.
Shag even went so far as to find and post texts investigating the relevant history and sociology. You know, to provide context within the overall American scene. But it's all been routinely ignored in favor of flimflammery (Mr. Pilkington offers hiphop lyrics and a dusty tv show as evidence of some special black fixation on homophobic ideas and themes -- as if the rest of the culture is a rainbow flag waving 'Green zone').
All of which proves again and yet again the point Adolph Reed made while being interviewed by Doug a month or so back: white people -- liberals in particular, it seems -- are way too eager to describe just about anything blacks do, even if it's the same shit everyone else does, as being the result of an imaginary separate world we supposedly inhabit ('whites use the phone like this...blacks use the phone like THIS!').
Stripped of its shenanigans, this 'debate' hasn't been about Prop 8 or styles of black homophobia at all. It's really been about whether or not easy on the assumptions, just so tales are acceptable as part of even quasi-serious political discourse.
My vote? No.
.d.