Posts Tagged: racism

Queer Visions — No Comments
16
Aug 09

Supremacist Slurs and Reconciliation at a Gay Bar in Louisville, KY

Woody’s Tavern owner David Norton offers a public statement of apology to a group of University of Louisville students and faculty almost a year and a half after he chased the group out of his Old Louisville bar using racist and sexist slurs. Until this week, Mr. Norton denied the incident ever occurred. providing context for what follows.

In this video, bar owner David Norton apologizes for being ‘a fool’; the Director of the Fairness Campaign – a local LGBT civil rights organization – Chris Hartman speaks about dismantling racism; and University of Louisville Professor of Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies Karla Story – one of those on the receiving end of Mr. Norton’s denigrating remarks – speaks about the value of Mr. Norton’s apology to all minority communities who wish to feel safe in public spaces. Fairness Campaign board member Keith Brooks is seen at the beginning of the video briefly providing context for what follows.

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30
Jun 09

Everyday Evil Reborn

This commentary was originally posted on May 19th, 2005, but given a very disturbing video taken during LGBT Pride Month this year and given this video’s similarity to many scenes in the photos below, I’m reposting it with the new video at the beginning.

[CAPTION: My friend and I were leaving the Gay Pride Festival in Minneapolis, MN (6/27/09) and came across a group of Somalian kids who asked my friend if he was gay. When he answered "yes", they proceeded to harass him and me with verbal threats and even throwing rocks at my friend at one point.]

hate filled mob[CAPTION: Alex Wilson is kicked by a school integration protester after refusing to run from a mob near Little Rock Central High.]
+ ENLARGE PHOTO

Ignorance and fear are at the heart of evils of all kinds. Two of them are racism and homophobia. Others include sexism and anti-semitism.

First, no one speaks for god and the bible is not the literal truth. Anyone who claims otherwise in the first case is a liar and in the second is a hypocrite.

Third, think of the images of black children walking into a newly desegregated school with men and women protesters all around pointing to passages in the bible. Think of the preachers and leaders just a couple decades ago who denounced interracial marriage as unnatural, immoral and against God’s plan. The phrase some of them used was ‘purity of race’. I would imagine the KKK still use these supremacist ideologies though majorities have finally, finally decided to abandon them. The Supreme Court ruled that banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional only in 1967!

teenage supremacists[CAPTION: Teen-agers storm Baltimore's City Hall in protest against school integration, 1955.]
+ ENLARGE PHOTO

Fourth, majorities now are shamefully making the same mistakes of their ancestors when it comes to NOT evolving their treatment and understanding of a minority section of society. In this case it’s not a race but a sexuality which the majority is refusing to upgrade to full human status.

Look above in these posts and you will find phrases used by those who wish to keep homosexual people defined as subhuman. These phrases can be matched almost word for word to the phrases used by whites opposing full equality for blacks during the african-american civil rights movement. These phrases, just as in the case of racism, are based always on supremacist ideologies. We are superior; they are not. We have god on our side; they do not. We know what’s best for society and children; they do not.

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29
Nov 04

Shepherdsville, the KKK and Karma

KKK rallyThis morning found KKK hate fliers decrying racial mixing atop many of the cars of my little city of Shepherdsville, Kentucky. This is in Bullitt County where I grew up and although I’m not the least bit surpirsed, I am disgusted and angry. I can’t but think how these fliers might effect any of the minority groups now living in greater numbers here. At the minimum, it may ruin their morning. However, the hatred and violence this sort of free speech engenders is what truly worries me.

I took one of the fliers to the Shepherdsville Police Department and brought it to their attention. I didn’t know if the fliers had been widely dispersed or if it was just the cars in my driveway that were targeted. I live across from the Mayor and happen to have a large group of Latinos for neighbors.

The police told me they had already been informed of the fliers the night before and that they caught some people in the act of placing them. Although it is free speech and all I can really do is tell the KKK not to come onto my property in the future.

I wanted the police to be aware that these sorts of groups were active in Shepherdsville. Of course, the police, I’m sure, don’t need me to inform them of the KKK’s presence. It has a long history here in Bullitt County. In fact, I’ve been told that the Grand Dragon of the Kentucky faction lived up in the hills of Bullitt County near my family. I seem to recall a close relative dating a practicing member during my youth. It’s all quite sick, sad and demented.

Remembering, during my childhood, the ease with which racial slurs rolled off the tongues of some of my cousins and their children shocks me still today as it did even then. The absurd aspect of this racism, I specifically remember thinking, is that most of the children happily repeating racist jokes they had obviously heard from their parents had probably never even met anyone of another race. They just were taught it was funny and okay to denigrate others who are different.

And of course, without exception, what justification do the KKK and their fliers use to support their promotion of racial purity through segregation? You got it. The Bible. ‘Here a quote, there a quote, everywhere a quote quote’ proving – at least in their minds – that God is behind them 100% because, they point out, it says so in the Bible!

Now of course many ‘believers’ will lambast the KKK’s notion that the Bible or God supports racism in any form. Thank Goodness. Hopefully more ‘believers’ will also come to recognize the insanity and immorality of promoting this sort of ‘Bible Abuse’ towards gays and lesbians. How many times must some hate-filled, minsinformed xenophobe be called out for misusing the power of belief and faith to promote an agenda of segregation, racism and human denigration in ‘the name of God’ before the greater society will see the insanity of these lines of argument?
For instance, the phrase ‘Sanctity of Marriage’ used by the President, churches and many other ‘believing folk’ to promote the segregation of gays and lesbians from equality under the law is in essence no less morally inept than the KKK’s phrase ‘Purity of Race’. Both appeal to fear of the other and make it sound as if one is protecting the common good. These messages of intolerance are cleverly smothered in the scent of righteousness, thus obfuscating the underlying manure of which they’re comprised.

The Bible and its over abundance of words has often been enlisted in the cause of hate. When powerful charismatics (preachers, priests, gurus, etc.) highlight certain spiritual texts and manipulate them to give authority to their own contemporary prejudices and opinions, evil is surely afoot. Unfortunately, it may take greater forces than goodwill and education to enlighten the white supremacists and their kind to the basic fundamental ignorance of their world view.

In a century or so, when latinos greatly outnumber those of european ancestry here in the United States, the tables likely will be turned. The majority will become the minority not only in number but in power as well. When and if this happens, the ancestors of today’s white supremacists surely will learn the meaning of the word karma.

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7
Dec 03

Pious Irrelevancies

Homophobic Hate Filled Posters

It appears hatred and the pulpit are long-time friends. Preachers, ministers, priests, bishops and the like aren’t enlightened folk simply because they have a title. They’re imperfect human beings just like the rest of us. Some may be wiser than others, but in general, I wouldn’t trust their leadership nor their proclamations regarding current events any more than I would the nonsensical ramblings of a mentally ill homeless person on the streets of NYC.

Catholic and white Protestant church leadership was conspicuously absent during most of the civil-rights struggle with its marches, bus boycotts, voter-registration drives, state-university enrollment, and housing protests.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” in response to a public statement by eight prominent local church leaders (including the bishops of the Catholic, Episcopal, and Methodist churches), who had denounced him as an “extremist” and “outsider.”

In the letter, King expressed his deep disappointment with the white church and its leadership. He accused it of being content “to stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

During the weekend, Massachusetts’ four Catholic bishops condemned a ruling by the state high court in favor of gay marriage, calling it a “national tragedy” — language gay Catholics said amounts to “preaching hate” from the pulpit. The letter, read at liturgies this past weekend, said the court’s decision on gay civil marriage is a “sure formula for chaos” that could “erode even further the institution of marriage.”

Now consider the following passage…

…One wastes time and money in ministering to blacks … What reason can there be that you are so solicitous for the Negro? — a priest, cited in The Miserable Condition of Black Catholics in America, 1903…

As I said, hatred and the pulpit are long-time friends. For a closer look at the power of the pulpit, ignorance, fear, and the role church leaders played, see Racism and religion: partners in crime?