[lbo-talk] Gay marriage

[Dwayne Monroe]

shag posted:

<snip>

An excellent overview on the issue from a black nationalist lesbian is
E. Francis Wright"s _Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and
the politics of Respectability_. Wright takes black nationalists to
task for sexism and black feminists to task for hetero/sexism and the
silencing of the voices of black gays and lesbians in an attempt to
demonstrate their acceptability to the dominant society.

Another thought-provoking overview is Michael Eric Dyson's tracing of
a black middle class war on poor and working class blacks in _Is Bill
Cosby Right? Or has the black middle class lost its mind?_

Dyson teases out the history of the women's social uplift movement
(sometimes called the "club movement"
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2003/iht1020311.html  -- which does have a
counterpart among white middle class women who tended to target
_prostitutes_, which Laura Agustín has described as the "helping (save
prostitutes) professions" -- which white middle class women engaged as
professional employed women in social service agencies, private and
public:

 http://cleandraws.com/2008/09/21/laura-agustin-on-the-rise-of-the-helping-save-prostitutes-professions/)

The social uplift women's club movement targeted black women who
engaged in behavior that shamed their community. This wasn't a factor
among the white working class though it, too, was targeted by social
uplift movements too. However, you _do_ find it among Jewish middle
class women who worked in tenement projects to teach working class
recent Jewish immigrants proper middle class habits (cooking, dress,
social interaction, manners)

[...]

....

Thank you.  This is more like it.

Not just well meaning, confidently asserted but almost wholly
unsubstantiated statements about 'the south' or Baptists or analogs
with E. European peasants or the working class in general.  But a real
digging into the history of African American social movements and
ideological trends.

Since the topic is (ostensibly) African American attitudes about
sexuality and a conservatism which  apparently shocked the
uninitiated, isn't it best to do a little less speculation and a lot
more investigation into how we got here?

.d.