The Roots of Black Homophobia -
Black folks are no more or less homophobic than the rest of the country, notwithstanding boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s bigoted rants. But like every other ethnic group, we're a complex lot. Parsing our biases takes nuance and understanding.
Now the title and subtitle seem to be misleading since it appears the article makes the opposite case
Now I think the term homophobic is way overused. Thinking that active same sex relationships that have a active sexual component are wrong or that gay marriage does not make one "homophobic" in my book .
Just a decade ago I was viewed as some liberal on the issue of gay rights. But because I refuse to think that such relationships are "right" or that I refuse to accept same sex marriage now I am homophobe for some reason. Though my personal relationships with people that have degrees of same sex attraction have never indicated that I was one.
Thankfully the article does not go there and does not seem to bash religion as a cause
First the author makes an interesting statement that if made by a white Republican there would be screaming but which has an element of truth :
In "the quarter of the Negroes," as Langston Hughes called it, information and opinion come along the way they always do in America: from the top to the bottom. Sometimes they vehemently rise from the absolute bottom to dominate the top. We can easily see what the wing nuts have done to the Republican Party, which now lamely dances to their tune.
Among Negroes, information and opinion come from three central forces: the literate, semiliterate and functionally illiterate. The last are formed among those at the bottom or those who dropped out of public school and now depend on the shortcomings of the oral part of a culture.
Hmm. Well there is some truth to that. Think of the enormous amount of blacks in NOLA that think the Feds blew up the Levees and how this spread nationwide partly exploited by leadership that knows better.
However then it jumps to make this claim
Black men who come from communities where far too many young males begin entering the penal system in their teens see things much differently from men of any color who do not. Those reared in communities where it is not at all common for young males to be incarcerated have only recently become aware of what actually can happen behind bars. Without The Shawshank Redemption or HBO's Oz, others with no penal experience and no backlog of gossip about the sexual horrors imposed behind bars might still be fully clueless.
On the other hand, lower-class black people who have been exposed to the penal system are fairly sure that they have all the clues. In most cases, they're not privy to statistics illustrating that sexual predators are usually heterosexual, not homosexual. But they know people whom the penal system did not protect from sexual assault. And more often than not, those experiences inform their prejudices.
Contrary to paranoid superstition, black men who were sexually molested in institutions very rarely become homosexuals. Even so, many are thought to have been "turned out" by the raw and brutal experience, almost as if rape has magical properties that can transform someone who isn't sexually attracted to men into one who is.
That is how it tends to go among all people. Intensely negative and unforgettable experience -- personal, witnessed, or heard about and believed -- is thought to be a threatening norm.
On the other hand, lower-class black people who have been exposed to the penal system are fairly sure that they have all the clues. In most cases, they're not privy to statistics illustrating that sexual predators are usually heterosexual, not homosexual. But they know people whom the penal system did not protect from sexual assault. And more often than not, those experiences inform their prejudices.
Contrary to paranoid superstition, black men who were sexually molested in institutions very rarely become homosexuals. Even so, many are thought to have been "turned out" by the raw and brutal experience, almost as if rape has magical properties that can transform someone who isn't sexually attracted to men into one who is.
That is how it tends to go among all people. Intensely negative and unforgettable experience -- personal, witnessed, or heard about and believed -- is thought to be a threatening norm.
Is that really true?
I am doubtful. I think most black men in the penal system , like their Hispanic and white counterparts, realize that most of this has nothing to do with varying degrees of sex same attraction. In the prison context homosexual acts is a wild combination of finding an outlet for sexual release, intimacy, power relationships, and just plain violence.
I am doubtful. I think most black men in the penal system , like their Hispanic and white counterparts, realize that most of this has nothing to do with varying degrees of sex same attraction. In the prison context homosexual acts is a wild combination of finding an outlet for sexual release, intimacy, power relationships, and just plain violence.
In other words I have never picked up as a white guy that African Americans think:
Prison makes men "gay" .
and/or
that people in the black community think prison has made black men "gay" and thus they rape people.
Now maybe I am wrong on this but I have never picked that up.
Though I am not so sure I buy that people that are raped in Prison do not go on to do sexual offenses later in some significant numbers though still a minority. Something has to explain for instance in the non penal aspect why so so many (not a majority) of kids that were sexually abused become sex abusers themselves.
The article goes on and gives some interesting stuff about anti homosexual talk in the history of the black political movement.
The article actually ends with an interesting point relating to the Catholic Church
I strongly doubt that some segments of black America will ever take homosexual rights as seriously as its advocates would like until that movement publicly makes one thing clear and present in its philosophy. While homosexual activists have never advocated rape, they have not taken a vocal-enough stand against pedophilia, which cannot be defended by any civilized person.
Earlier this year, in response to the spurious claim that pedophilia within the Catholic Church was its "gay problem," homosexual activist Abbie Kopf wrote an essay for Change.org, "Ending the Gay Pedophile Myth, Once and for All," which included the following:
All too often, we in the gay community mistakenly believe that no rational human being could possibly believe that because we have same-sex attraction it means that we want to enact them on children. Because we know how ridiculous it is, we often don't raise hell as often or as much as possible, believing that other people see the bad logic. Or, for many of us, being characterized as evil pedophiles curbs us from defending ourselves; the shame they've placed on us becomes a part of who we are as a culture, it silences us because in our darkest hour, we're terrified that those around us really believe on some level that we have the capacity to molest children. Once and for all, we need to proactively, rigorously and consistently dispel this rumor. If we wait to defend ourselves, we're only running on a treadmill, never able to get ahead of it. And worst of all, it isn't even the gay community who is hurt the worst -- it is the children who have been molested.
Well that is interesting but of course we see the usual problem of confusing true pedophilia with ephebophilia (sex with teenagers). Needless to say pedophilia is at it core much more a serious event. While ephebopbillia (while still not great at all) is much more a murky and complicated issue because it interacts with the relative recent legislative and social movement to move adulthood in all its forms to the age of 18. See the rapid movement the last 30 years as to age of consent laws.
The article also case, and their might be something to it, that perhaps the more wild anti gay comments we see is because it is viewed as a threat to the black male masculinity. Well there might be something to that.
Still an interesting article on the whole.
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