Proposition 8 and Single Issue Politics: Intersections of Sexual Orientation, Race and Religion
April 13, 2009
The discussions around the passage of Proposition 8 in the State of California sparked a number of conversations that sought to place blame onto certain populations for their homophobic reaction to lesbian and gay bids for equal marriage rights. A number of assumptions were made in these reactions, including:
· Passing Proposition 8 was inherently homophobic
· That African Americans, Latinos and Others were disproportionately responsible for the passage
· That churches fomented homophobia and pro-Prop 8 sentiment
· That White voters were on the right side of Prop 8
Embedded in these assumptions were further claims:
· That gay politics are represented by equal marriage rights movements
· That Af-Ams and other ethnic groups are homogenous and agree amongst themselves on most issues
· That white voters are homogenous and progressively-minded
· That churches share one line on LGBT people
· That the passage of any proposition can be reduced to simple explanations
These are difficult claims to discuss without raising many concerns and causing offense, and certainly much offense was generated, many divisions were engendered and much silencing was enacted.
I want to propose a framework for thinking about the relationship between sexuality and race in our society as a way to go beyond Prop 8 debates that seek to lay blame or find single causes for its passage, and in doing so, to offer some analytical tools for addressing controversies that allow us to develop coalition-building political strategies.
I’m a theorist, mainly, so I’m going to talk about theory to help with the analysis. This framework comes from the work that I do on sexuality and race in an imperial Western context, through colonial history and current imperial politics enacted by the US and its allies. When we think beyond the US context and put the US into a longer colonial history of alliances with like-minded states, we start to see the US as part of a global strategy of assuring that whiteness is ascendant, (see eds. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line), where whiteness refers to those who are properly heterosexual, Christian, male, propertied, able-bodied, and of European descent. We can call it whiteness, or Occidentalism, the Western world or the US empire – the values and philosophies and indeed, the very notion that race, sexuality and gender have something to do with our social worthiness, emanates from this very large framework and structure of liberalism that was forged in a Euro-colonial context. We not only have inherited those ideas; our society actively promotes and institutionalizes these ideas in the current context. In part, this is what it means to think structurally; to see individualized expressions of various bigotries as micro-embodiments of the larger social context in which we come to know ourselves and others. In other words, structural power creates our ways of knowing, our consciousness, our subjectivities, our identities and our sense of self. As such, our own subjectivities are the sites of consciousness-raising, activism, and social transformation.
We live in a society that is structurally racist, meaning that racism is not the work of bad-minded individuals alone, but is embedded throughout the institutions of our society in ways which are normalized, taken-for-granted, and disappeared through the rhetoric of equal rights and liberal democracy. Our society is structurally sexist, granting to men and masculine values higher value than to women and feminine values, a hierarchy that is also disappeared from public conversation. It is also heterosexist, and that too is a structural condition of the society in which we live, meaning that in every single institution is embedded the idea that heterosexuality is normal, healthy, appropriate, necessary, a superior way of being and a mark of being properly Human.
These structures of race, sexuality and gender are trajectories of power, meaning that it is along these axes that power is wielded and exercised, and they are part of a larger system of domination and exclusion that aims to eliminate or segregate or put in its rightful place all those who are deemed abnormal and inappropriate for the proper functioning of the state, nation and empire. These complicated categorizations of people were created for the purpose of wielding power and establishing a hierarchy of humanity; they are inherently about wielding power. In the US, there is a big emphasis on identity as an element of our individuality and claim on the state/community/nation, and this is a way that ‘minority’ populations wield power, or are compelled to wield power. But this doesn’t tell us the whole story of why our society has created categories of populations in the first place, and it misses the fact that it is about power and domination. When we think more globally and more philosophically about the big ideas that animate our existence, there’s a context to understand race, gender and sexuality in more expansive ways.
Our concepts of race, gender and sexuality were created as philosophical, scientific, psychological, medical and cultural ideas about the meaning of being Human, and in colonial discourses, anyone who did not fulfill the criteria of whiteness was simply not human. They were a different species, closer to animals. Children were considered primitive and savage and of a lower order of creature; women were considered natural, half-formed, deformed and lower order; black and brown people in different ways occupied the lower order of creature, a sub-species of human, or the missing link between humans and apes. There are many many studies created that aimed to classify and categorize all the beings on the planet, with Human at the top of the hierarchy, where only the few could fit into the category. These were thought to be biological categories that are passed through lineage and paternity, and visual markers of race indicated a hidden truth about the inner person, whether that is skin color or genitalia or the size of skulls.
The designated populations change, the order of the hierarchy shifts from time to time depending on the political needs of the moment – though there’s a pretty steady White/Black hierarchy, and that’s a feature of structural power too. The details can keep shifting and changing, but the idea that categorizing the social worth of populations based on ascriptive and physical characteristics doesn’t change, so one day it is the Irish, the Polish, the Italians, the next it is the Chinese, once it was the Japanese, often it is the Jews, regularly it is Black people, Indigenous peoples, Muslims, workers, women, or the Other of the day.
So, if these are understood as biological categories of peoples, then it starts to make sense that sexuality, of the proper sort, becomes important, and it starts to make sense that the right kinds of women need to be put in their proper place, and men need to be proper men, and procreation needs to be granted the central reason for sex. Sexuality comes to matter at a certain point in Western traditions of liberalism, as Michel Foucault has amply documented, for European nation-building, empire-building, the need for workers, the need for soldiers, imperial rivalries, and the need to establish a national culture or race that spoke well of the nation by their exemplar characteristics. Sexuality – reduced to its biological and reproductive senses, to heterosexuality as animal function– is crucial for the creation of the population, and in many many ways, population, or, the right kind of population, is power.
· If a nation needs more workers to fuel the economy, why not open borders?
We have eugenicist policies and philosophies and daily impulses that prevail – think about when teenagers are dating outside of their racial group and how serious it all becomes if they want to get married –
· What about the children??
In this story, sexuality and the emphasis our society places upon it acts as an indicator of our social worthiness and relative Humanness –
· What next? Are we going to let people marry their dogs?
The presumptions that something inside of our biology translates into our social worth is crucial to racial thinking, heterosexist thinking and sexist thinking. They cannot be separated out as a different order of political claim altogether, and they cannot be understood in the fullness of its meaning if we don’t account for the way race shapes sexuality, the way sexuality shapes race, and the way gender shapes and is shaped by both – simultaneously; and that these come to be created in tandem and from the shared needs of establishing Whiteness as the marker of superiority. White skin doesn’t guarantee whiteness; it is a package that includes lineage, class, gender and procreative heterosexuality. The marker of Whiteness is one that excludes and marginalizes many many people, the majority of people in the room today, and the majority of the planet’s population, in fact.
I think the task is beyond individual morality, whether I have a good heart, or want to see bigotry end in my lifetime. It is an analytical task, a study and an engagement with all the ways power operates in our inner and outer worlds, not with a view to lay blame, but to consider the larger framework that makes bigotry possible. In other words, it takes some effort and work to learn to think beyond bigoted frameworks of knowledge. I grew up in a racist homophobic context that left me with a lot of knee-jerk bigotry and assumptions about the relative social worth of people based on their skin color or origins or who they love that I’ve had to exorcise continuously to shed the vestiges of those ways of thinking. And along the way, there has been much confusion and bewilderment and missteps and steep learning curves. My own experience, and the experiences and expressions of others around me, suggest to me that not many of us are immune to the bigotries that are told as truth to us on a regular basis. We internalize them and externalize them and really, frankly, the evidence is everywhere. So, yes, the Prop 8 debate was by turns homophobic and racist, and that gives us an opportunity to understand the how and the why of what makes that happen.
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