Moving Beyond Proposition 8 and Single-Issue Politics

I presented this essay on a LGBT panel at CSULB in 2009, held just after the passing of Proposition 8 (California)  that denied marriage rights to gay people. I see the debate as an opportunity to think through our foundational presumptions of the ways that power, identity, humanity and love operate, especially in a hierarchical and divided society, and to collectively strategize our ways beyond bigotry.

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.

An essay about love

At an open-mike love party a few weeks ago, friends shared love poetry, songs, letters, scenes, musings of all sorts and wonderful loving energy. I wrote this essay for the occasion, with excerpts from love letters I've written during the past year of a new relationship.

Some things I’ve recently learned about Love  January 17, 2010

Our time together began last year on MLK day with a sweet sweet first date. We walked along the ocean. It has been a year of growing a whole new appreciation for what it means to love another person and gaining insight into the fullness of what it means to love unconditionally. It has been a year of growing whole new skill sets and tools and approaches for matching the intention to love without condition, need and demand. It is a really recent turn in my existence to set an intention to love unconditionally and to learn what that looks like. Agape is such a great place to practice the craft of unconditional love with all kinds of people through all kinds of crunchy relations. To take that show on the road is a whole other trip and a steep learning curve –where most people have not chosen to be Love as a way of life, on the freeway and in line at the bank and at your place of employment is where the practice shows up.

And maybe, the learning curve is steepest in an intimate relationship, because being in an intimate relationship with someone brings up all of my stuff, triggers/ buttons/wounds and unexamined expectations, and that’s when it gets interesting. I get to see myself anew, and reevaluate who and what I want to be. Being in relationship is like traveling to new lands:

I love to travel, esp to places that completely put me out of my element and challenge me at all levels. What I love is that all of my stuff is up for evaluation, every bit of what i take for granted is shaken, i get to see with new eyes, hear with new ears, appreciate new ways of being human and I get to shake off some old unnecessary dust. it is a thrilling journey that has me awake alert and on fire during the trip, and changed in deep and welcome ways after i return, never to be the same again. I'm reminded of this feeling as i travel in your country...

What does it mean to love without condition? This has been such a revelation to realize how many conditions I have had on love. Too hot, too cold, too present, too distant, too busy, too free, too domestic, too international, too close, too far away – all revolving around me and my needs, but not really in the business of cultivating Love, if love means to have no conditions.

At this moment, love without conditions means having a relationship that doesn’t depend on a script that unfolds according to any previous relationship. There are no necessary outcomes. The next step doesn’t loom ahead as something that has to happen to make this real or meaningful or worthwhile. There aren’t any scripts to follow about gender and sexuality, about being a couple, about relationships, about what’s happened before or what ought to happen now. I’m receptive and available, open to what transpires between us, open to inventing new ways of doing things the whole time. And, since we are both committed to our own evolution and continuous transformation, things are continuously dynamic and moving and surprising and awesome. There’s always more to learn about the way needs show up and interfere with love, more discoveries about egoic antics and about the human parts of me that interfere with genuine connection - with another person, with people at large, and with the planet.

Loving unconditionally also means seeing that the beloved is whole, perfect and complete, and knowing that this is true for me too. That’s where need disappears and love can happen, exactly when I am clear that I have everything that I need. I am already whole, you are already whole. Like I wrote last year:

Being with you gives me the chance to love freely openly and as wide and as deep as I can reach and that spills into and onto each and every encounter and the air and climate around me. The first flush of love is dismissed as not real and true, or hormone-driven and delusional, but I think it is the truth of the matter. The first flush erodes all the barriers and walls around full expression of a loving heart and the desire to merge with the universal that is embodied by the beloved. And, if we don't dismiss that as a bunch of hooey then it doesn't disappear after first flush but continues to resound as the tone and intention of the relationship. Like Marianne Williamson says, the beloved is perfect, we are seeing the truth when we first fall in love, but the mistake we make that results in disappointment is when we expect human perfection and confuse that with spiritual perfection. I know I'm seeing God when I see you; that is one thing I know for sure. I know I'm merging with the Divine when I kiss you. That's another thing I know for sure. I love that all this and more is possible with you, and I’m so so grateful.

Everyday is new, because everyday is an adventure in love, an experiment in unprecedented aspirations and a step into a new paradigm of love and relationship.I wrote this a year ago; it is truer today:

Life on the planet has become more delightful joyful and charming with each day that passes with you in it, more than I'd ever imagined hoped or let myself want. I don't have all the words to express what's in my heart but know that it is true, deep and abiding lovelovelove and nothing but love. You fill me way up and sink deep under my skin and each step and breath I take is colored with the hue tone and sparkle of you, a dear and precious treasure, a divine and perfect playmate, a deep and soulful companion, a genuine and honest light. Blessings abound! Life sings! I'm in deeper than even a few days ago and full of anticipation for more and more and more of you you you. omg. You are incredible.

I really take to heart what Rev M says about creating heaven on earth by being the Love, by living in the vision of what the future of the world could be, by growing in consciousness and continuing to evolve into our next best selves. How grateful I am to be able to grow in consciousness with my beloved and to be guided to love in deeper ways, as it happens between us, and as it radiates out into all of our relations. How grateful I am to be part of a community of Love, to be connected to all of you.

September 11 and the World Conference Against Racism

I was at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa in August 2001, working as a consultant with non-governmental groups. I lived in Canada at the time. The conference was an amazing, volatile, tumultuous and revolutionary gathering. Besides the usual crowd of non-governmental groups were large movements of landless peoples from South Africa, Dalits from India, Indigenous Peoples from the South Pacific and reparations for slavery movements from the US. One thing that became so clear during the conference is that racism structures global politics in a multitude of ways, and there is a general lack of a strong comprehension of the complexities of race and racism nationally and globally. The conference ended on September 9, 2001. I returned to Canada on September 10. I wrote this essay on September 17.

Durban, Canada

The manichean world view that unfolds in response to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is not unlike the world view that prevailed throughout the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) negotiations in Durban two weeks ago: North versus South, East versus West, Jew versus Arab, Christian versus Muslim and the thinly veiled civilized versus barbarian. The civilized world has been attacked by fanatical Oriental zealots who hate us because we are free, we are told. It is a crime against humanity, we are told. This is the story told by those who would not participate in declaring the brutal enslavement of sixty million Africans a crime against humanity. This is the story told by those who would not acknowledge that colonizing peoples on the basis of their perceived racial identity is racist. This is the story told by those who would not agree that injustice marks the flow of capital, goods and people.


These were among the more sensational refusals that dominated media reports on the WCAR. However, there were quieter, but no less disturbing, negotiations on seemingly less contentious issues like affirmative action, immigration policy and indigenous claims at the WCAR that forecast a less respectful, more intolerant climate for racialized people in Canada and elsewhere. Coupled with the state's renewal of our collective license to fear and loathe the Other in response to the hijackings, we can predict that it will not be the Canadian government that offers an anti-racist voice in these troubled times.

Canada had imagined that it would walk hand in hand with civil society at the WCAR, to showcase the made-in-Canada solutions to the problem of multiculturalism. In fact, civil society came with quite the opposite plan: to compel the Canadian government to acknowledge the multiple ways that institutionalized racism impacts the lives of racialized peoples here and to seek solutions. Rather than imagining that citizens from a broad spectrum of the population might have some reasonable claims to make, the negotiators entrenched and retreated, embarking on a course of watering down the governmental agreement in ways which should be disturbing to all Canadians.

For example, in a paragraph referring to affirmative action policies, Canada argued to remove any mention of the potential benefactors. In a paragraph stating that immigration policies should not be administered with discrimination on the basis of racial, national or ethnic origin, Canada argued (about a legal document) that we need not mention the grounds of discrimination because "it is a conference on racism, we all know to what the paragraph refers." Canada supported the inclusion of paragraph 27 which undermines the decades-old global recognition of the rights to self-determination of Indigenous Peoples. Lest we believe that Canada acts at the behest of powerful allies, it was clear that we were witnessing made-in-Canada policies, especially when their amendments were not supported by the usual friends. Government negotiators from several like-minded countries were mystified about Canadian intentions in the negotiations. It is usually Canada that introduces language to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, we heard. It is usually Canada that introduces language on affirmative action, they said. Scores of witnesses were growing curiouser and curiouser, asking Canadians: what is going on in your country? Canadian NGOs witnessing the negotiations shared profound discomfort and collective misgivings about returning to Canada after Durban, even though it is our home, the place of our birth for many and the only home many of us have. And yes, we have all heard the bigoted invitation to "go back to where you came from if you don't like it here". We know what the options are, thanks very much. Somehow we have to live here and somehow we have to demonstrate that to live in bigotry, no matter to whom it is directed, is a soul-destroying existence for all inhabitants. Now, more than ever, as Canada prepares for war along with its allies of "western civilization", as immigration polices and border controls prepare to overtly prohibit the free movement of particular racial or ethnic groups, as people perceived to be Muslim or Arab or simply Other are the recipients of hate messages, death threats, fire bombs and beatings, it is urgent that we resist the vengeful manipulation of our fear, grief and compassion and stand vigilant against this new wave of old racism, unleashed on us all.

Liz Philipose attended the World Conference Against Racism by invitation of the South African NGO Coalition, WCAR Secretariat.

What's true these days?

In the past several decades in the Western world, there’s been a steady erosion of the idea that there are things that are true. Often attributed to poststructuralist theory and nihilistic thinking, Truth has been characterized as a dominating and colonizing claim designed to suppress dissent or effective challenges to power. Many truths that were trotted out as Universally valid turned out to be exactly that, from the construction of racial hierarchies designed to naturalize inequalities to the idea that there is one linear path of human evolution that we all have to walk to be human. Yet, there are things that are true. Some are Universally True and others are true about the ways we have constructed the world.



The Truth of the Matter is that we are emanations of Spirit, and Spirit is One, Undividable, Whole, Absolute, Omnipresent and True. Spirit is another way of saying Life, Life is another way of saying God, and God is another way of saying something that makes us who we are beyond our physical, biological and material manifestations. All Life emanates from the same Source. That Source is infinite, unlimited, continuously Present. Once we become Present to the Presence, we see the Truth of the matter and see that it is not dominating and colonizing, but in fact, is the Supreme Liberation.

The truth of the matter is that we live in a world of human-designed oppression, immiseration, devastating deprivation, horrifying violence, and everyday heinousness, hatred and bigotry. We have constructed a world that is out of alignment with human rights and human dignity, a world that is out of alignment with respect for life in its myriad and diverse forms, a world that is out of alignment with Life itself.

We denigrate anything that has to do with femininity, from the characteristics of nurturance and cooperation, to the casual abuse of women here, there, and everywhere, to the hobbling of our collective power to truly and genuinely connect with one another.

We entrench and re-entrench racial hierarchies and then wage bloody hate-filled wars to ensure that black and brown peoples of the world remain contained in the place of debtors and supplicants and outsiders to the full and equal enjoyment of their own and the world’s material rewards and benefits. We’ll justify any amount of violence to keep 2/3 of the world’s resources to ourselves when we are a mere 1/8 of the world’s population; we will send black and brown peoples of our society to fight to their deaths to make sure that 20% of the world’s population continues to consume 70% of the world’s resources.

And this in a situation where there is more than enough to go around. We are in a world of abundance. Just look at the over-bloated houses, cars, malls, children and adults all around us in the US. We are busting out of our seams. Even in a recession, we are circulating per capita 3500 calories per person, per day, throwing out a substantial portion of that everyday while many in the US do not get enough to eat. We have this much for ourselves not because we are more worthy than others, or because we work harder than anyone else, or because there was a natural division of Good and we happened to get the bulk of it. No. We have it because we fight people to the death for it.

The truth of the matter is that we are against love. It is love to be fed, clothed, housed, and to have our material needs met. It is love to ensure that we have it and that others have it. It is love that seeks to legitimize same-sex couples. Our conception of love could expand if we could recognize it when we see it.

So, this is the material, historical, political, social, earthly truth of the matter. It is one dimension of this moment in human history, alongside the Truth of the Matter, that God is all that there is, God is Love, we are each unique expressions of God, and we ourselves are Love. If there’s not enough Love, it is because we are not bringing it in its fullest expressions. My commitment is to figure out ways to bring the Love and to shift out of the prevailing narrow consciousness that keeps us divided, fragmented and blind to our Divine connection to each other.

My new blog

I decided to create a blog so I can start posting the essays and articles I've written over the years that are about knowing the truth and transforming the world. Some of them have been published elsewhere, others were public talks I gave, while others are essays written for me - usually to figure out what bugs me about something! My interests are in personal/social and global transformation, social movements for change, women's movements, international politics, consciousness, and the ways that race, gender, nation, sexuality and empire interrelate in national and global settings. These are the themes you'll find represented here.

The first essay is about the title of this blog and the impulse of my writing. Stay tuned.