This post originally appeared on Counterpunch. 

To my classmates in the Class of 2007,

I remember Stephen Miller as a classmate, but my memories of him and of Duke differ from the depiction in your open letter, which praises Duke as home to a plurality of differences, indeed, as an institution so committed to diversity that it did not tolerate (to say nothing of how it might have enabled) the racism and sexism Stephen has articulated and authorized in the ten years since his (our) graduation, and especially as Donald Trump’s speechwriter-cum-advisor.

I recall his bi-weekly tantrums in column entries for our undergraduate student newspaper, The Chronicle, and especially the things Stephen wrote therein about Mexicans, about affirmative action, about Palestinian solidarity, and about black students’ response to former Education Secretary William J. Bennett’s statement that a black genocide (i.e., the abortion of “every black baby in this country”) would dramatically reduce national crime rates—to say nothing of the things he wrote about black women, or of his disdain for Durham’s mostly-black local residents.

Stephen’s opinions about black women, whom he condemned as liars, and about local residents, whom he caricatured as parasites—parasitic in his revisionist reading because Durham’s mostly-black locals exploit Duke’s mostly-white students—are particularly noteworthy; they converge in testimonials he penned (here, here, here, here, here, especially here, and here, and that’s only recounting his column entries) to redeem the white Lacrosse men who sexually assaulted Crystal Mangum, a single black mother from Durham, on March 13, 2006.

Stephen’s exaltation of the Lacrosse team’s toxic white masculinity was typical of his posture as a Duke student, as self-appointed champion of white supremacy—a strange allegiance, because his access to white privilege, as an ethnic Jew, was then, as it is now, tenuous—and high prince (err, peddler) of what he, instructed by David Horowitz and befriended by Richard Spencer, appropriated to mean “academic freedom”: the preference, in today’s jingoism, for ‘Alt Right’ perspectives in a liberal arts classroom, specifically, in the political makeup of Duke faculty.

In claim after hysterical claim Stephen made to bolster the reputations of the indicted men, this Stephen, like Trump’s Stephen, lamented the fate of white men who in an ostensibly ‘post-racial’ age feel themselves dislodged from atop their perch as vanguards of the social order. His was an appeal not just to the fragility of their white male egos but also to our (Duke’s) liberal need to uphold their rank and file, lest the entire edifice (liberalism itself) come crashing down.

Recall that in the inauguration speech Stephen scripted for him, Trump pledged to white Americans—white nationalists—”You will never be ignored again.” His was (is) a promise to right the alienation whereby they, the proper subjects of the American polity, no longer feel themselves hailed as the protagonists of its story. Stephen thus puppeteers today, on a world stage, what he rehearsed for us, his peers, in the four years we gave him an audience, at Duke.

Lest we forget (and it seems, you have) we were the first to indulge—to publish (The Chronicle is student-operated), read, and share, if only as a piece of salacious gossip—Stephen’s panicked rants about white vulnerability. Consequently, in the ten years since graduation and especially as our reunion looms, I have wondered not how Stephen “became such a horrible person” but about where your (our) outrage was at the moment he opened his mouth to speak, for the first (or the second, or the tenth) time, out loud, the hate by now definitive of his political brand.

I have wondered, too, if Duke’s administrators, who were complacent at the hour of Stephen’s becoming (as an undergraduate) and Richard Spencer’s, too (as a Ph.D. student in the Department of History), have paused in the last year to consider how it came to pass that Duke engendered the ideologues of Trump’s hate; that is, about how the animosity Stephen and Richard fomented as Duke students and which by now exasperates our national culture governs, as a matter of fact and not an inconvenience of circumstance, Duke’s campus culture.

Regrettably, it appears that the administration has not paused to reflect on how it might intentionally curate a different kind of campus culture: one committed to generating the ideas that can induce an/Other world. Instead, it continues to produce students who (at best) are politically apathetic, steeped in a privilege that goads them to entertain even the most vile and violent of ideologies under the liberal democratic guise of a free and open debate of ideas.

We might compare, for example, student reactions to eugenicist Charles Murray’s visit to Duke’s campus on March 21st with the reaction of Middlebury College students on March 2nd. While Middlebury students refused the ruse of a liberal exchange in which Murray’s ideas would, supposedly, be made available to scrutiny—an alibi that assents to the validity of scientific racism precisely because it accommodates a free exchange of ideas on the topic—to make their campus inhospitable to Murray, only four Duke students protested Murray’s appearance on their campus, if they can be said to be Duke students at all; according to some eye-witness testimonials, the protestors were in fact local Durham community members.

As Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo State and Duke alum Christienna D. Fryar points out, the premise of a “marketplace of ideas,” as that model that prompts us to accommodate Murray’s and Stephen’s biases, does not account for how “exclusionary ideas are seductive beyond their ‘objective’ (if there is such a thing) merits or faults.” Exclusionary ideas like theirs “provide something that is not easily debunked by appeal to reason and argument” because they appeal, instead (also), to our libidinal and affective registers, that is, to the protocols of our visceral, gut, and instinctive reactions—like disgust, which is sutured by the discursive knowledge that persons of color, especially black Others, are accumulable and fungible object-things and not human persons—and by the need for a rationale or logic (an argument) that justifies our unreasonable, stubborn reactions to persons-cum-things of color.

Fryar continues, “choosing not to give someone” like the Stephen Millers and Charles Murrays of the world “a platform,” more to the point, choosing to disrupt and/or make impossible the free exchange of their ideas, does not amount to “squashing their ability to share their ideas.” One “can find [their ideas] in countless forums. [Their] ideas are out there,” poisoning our minds and especially our hearts without the addition of a university’s or college’s endorsement.

If Duke is analogous to the nation that voted for Trump, then Stephen’s hate is our (Duke’s) shame. Perhaps, too, his ascent is the shame of liberal ideology, which as an egalitarian social theory engenders multiculturalism, including its neoliberal variant: colorblind ideology.

The condemnation in your open letter hinges on a disbelief that Stephen might share a campus with marginalized peoples, including “migrants and refugees…who sought American shores for the promise of safety and opportunity,” “young women [who] were the leading lights of seminars and discussions,” “members of the LGBTQ community, some of whom were proudly public [and] others of whom remained in the closet due to fear and stigma,” and “students of color […] from all manner of socioeconomic backgrounds and locales”—specifically, black students who grew up in what today’s Stephen caricatures as “crime-infested, drug-ridden neighborhoods”—and still find himself unmoved to empathize with difference.

By this logic, Stephen’s hate defies his socialization at Duke, more to the point, the language in your open letter suggests that the institution of Duke did not birth Stephen as a “horrible person” because it birthed you as a good liberal citizen-subject of the multiculturalist state. This gesture seems to me insufficient, not least of all because Stephen’s political commitments today are animated, as they were yesterday, in his own words, by a steadfast faith in “the cultural value of individualism and liberty.” His is not, to invoke Ta-Nehisi Coates’ formulation, a “uniquely villainous and morally deformed…ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs,” but the banality of our liberal evil, which accommodated his racism and sexism without the slightest trepidation, to say nothing of how we (as a cohort, as a campus, and as a nation) expressly celebrated Stephen’s reprehensible comments about Crystal Mangum, a rape victim.

If multiculturalist liberalism is all Stephen has ever known—born in Santa Monica, California, he is a child of multiculturalist Los Angeles—then it is not exposure to a plurality of peoples that a young Stephen needed to learn how to emphasize with difference, but a kind of miseducation that explained to him how and why it has come to pass that peoples are not equally made. Such a miseducation would clarify that peoples are endowed with varying degrees and kinds of social capital (and that some, like Mangum, proscribed from access to even human recognition, are ineligible for social capital) because they are assigned to incongruous rungs on the social hierarchy Stephen has since high school vigilantly defended as the dominion of white men.

If black women like Mangum occupy, as Hortense Spillers elaborates in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) and as the Combahee River Collective before her argued in their Black Feminist Statement (1977), the lowest, most derelict rung of this social hierarchy, that is, if antiblack sexism is the paradigm on which racism and sexism as the structuring grammars of this world and its making wrest—stated another way, if the intersection of antiblack racism and sexism sutures the social-cum-pecking order of this world, including our libidinal energies, or our visceral, guts, and instinctive reactions to persons and things (and persons as things)—then perhaps it was precisely because Stephen’s most vile comments came at the expense of black women, specifically, at the expense of a black single mother, that we, the Class of 2007, were unmoved to stand in his way at Duke, empowering him to articulate the hate that has since given rise to the nation that voted for Trump.

Rather than applaud all the ways in which we are not Stephen Miller, we might interrogate now, especially because we owe our black peers this debt, why of all the ways we are able to empathize with difference, as evidenced by the parade of social groups you identify in the open letter, we still, as a cohort, hold steadfast to the belief that Mangum was not raped by the Lacrosse men who, we seem so conveniently to forget, penetrated (violated) her not with their body parts but with a broomstick—a fact obscured when we recount, in our defense of the indicted men (really, of Duke’s good name, in other words, of our own reputations), that no DNA was found in Mangum’s rape kit. We might additionally recall and repent for the fact that we stood idly by as the Lacrosse men further demanded Mangum be “skinned” and “killed”.

Perhaps the reason why so many of us where silent at the dawn of Stephen’s rise is because we, as good liberal citizen-subjects of the Duke-cum-American polity, like Stephen and his bedfellows in the Alt Right, felt our libidinal energies cathected by the objectification of Mangum’s vulnerable body, doubly sexualized precisely because she is black. We were happy to make the Lacrosse men our heroes if doing so would further marginalize black women (to say nothing of how it criminalized the black locals from whom we distinguished ourselves), in other words, because the violation of her person and psyche functioned to authorize our visceral, gut, and instinctive reactions (of disgust) vis-à-vis black persons and especially black women.

I could not sign your letter, which responds too late and without any self-reflection about your own response to Stephen’s nascent claims as a Duke student (as your peer) about the precarity of whiteness and the dereliction of blackness. I could not bring myself to trade Stephen’s fascist violence with your liberal violence, and I suspect that I am not the only one. We might instead take some accountability as a cohort and Duke might as an institution for providing Stephen with his first podium. Against the liberal democratic doctrine of free speech to which we uncritically subscribe, which as a theater or marketplace of ideas prompts us to entertain a breadth of valuations—a band, it seems, that only ever manages to stretch in one direction (the right’s), more to the point, which has not (cannot) accommodate(d) the radical call for a world that might be Otherwise—another reaction is possible: one approximating the reaction at Middlebury College, in which not every worldview (certainly, not those that embolden indignant white men to assault persons of color, like Stephen’s and Murray’s) is abided.

I am haunted by the knowledge that we could have shut Stephen down at the moment of his becoming, had we been more interested in the psychic and material health of the marginalized peoples with whom we shared our campus than in the doctrine of liberalism; that is, if we had momentarily stepped outside of our own privilege to hold space for those others. This and not the empty gesture in your open letter is what it means to be an ally, specifically, to commit oneself to the response-able use of one’s social capital for the making of an/Other world.

M. Shadee Malaklou is Assistant Professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College.

“Race talk” has become so muddled that our very comprehension of race is reduced to theoretical caricature, replete with memes and pithy one-liners, all with the complicity of the chattering class who tend to read the nonsensical as legitimate “news.” It is no wonder then that our best thinkers are not widely known or dismissed as relics of an old age. And it’s likely by design that our movements suffer from a historical amnesia that limits Black resistance to an image of the 1960s (not its reality), conducive to not only liberal ideas and positions, but conservative ones. Above all, this image of Black resistance does not threaten the direct conditions of its emergence: racial capitalism.

Enter: the life and works of C.L.R. James and their relative absence in many considerations of Black struggle in U.S. contexts.[1] Rupturing the logics of liberal hegemony that define what Black resistance has come to mean and how it must manifest now, requires us to resist the tendency to reduce James—and others like him—to an academic project. For James offered more than a historical reflection on the Haitian Revolution and a disquisition on cricket; these were parts of his larger project: a contribution to the conceptualization and enactment of the Black radical tradition. We ignore such accretions of “collective intelligence” at our own peril.[2]

How might James organize a project for resistance in these times? A possible answer lies in one of James’s analyses of the “Negro Question,” an address he called “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” (1948).[3] Moving to the United States from London in 1938, the Trinidadian native organized within the Socialist Worker’s Party, before leaving it and then rejoining in 1947. As a Trotskyite and member of the “Johnson-Forest Tendency,” James came to evince a healthy skepticism toward state-centered permutations of socialism then apparent in the Soviet Union. James’s anti-Stalinism, however, was neither the stuff of the Truman Doctrine nor a response to the politics of the Cold War, and his racial politics were a clear repudiation of the Myrdal-influenced liberalism of the era.

Shortly after James’s return to the Socialist Worker’s Party, he offered “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem” as an outline for comprehending the role of the American Negro in the “struggle for socialism.”[4] But James, like many socialists before him, does not repeat the folly of reducing the plight of Black Americans to the question of class. His analysis of Black struggle is premised on its independence. He offers three points which buttress this argument: 1) “the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another…”; 2) “…this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general and social and political life of the nation…”; and 3) “…it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat…”[5] It is not ironic that in Trotskyism, James found a revolutionary alternative to the “state capitalist” Soviet Union, and in the historical and contemporary “Negro struggle,” he found a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist-aligned organized labor movement.[6] In the Black radical tradition as it manifested in the United States, he found a mass of people whose direct experiences gave them reason to “reject this shibboleth of (American) bourgeois democracy.”[7] For James, and clearly for those struggling to imagine and create a “new society” today, the unique and enduring conceptions of freedom produced by Black experiences must be acknowledged and understood as central to the larger questions of human freedom (found, for James, through the creation of a socialist society).[8] This is the promise of the Black radical tradition, as elucidated by Cedric Robinson: the projection of a new order of things.[9] Let it be the promise of our Black lives mattering.

“The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States” was republished, along with the Socialist Worker’s Party resolution on the question, by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party as The Independence of the Black Struggle in 1975. This is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it occurred during what Anthony Bogues calls C.L.R. James’s “second sojourn” to the United States.[10] Secondly, James’s approval of the publication came as a result of his collaboration with many Pan-Africanist and Marxist formations in the United States during this period, namely the Centre for Black Education in DC. The “Negro struggle” he theorized about in 1948 saw in James a veritable intellectual presence as an elder. James’s Pan-African vision resulted in his participation for the call for the Sixth Pan-African Congress in 1974. (Always the iconoclast, James’s disagreement with the organizers on the question of opposition movement participation prevented his attendance at the Congress).[11] The Pan-African struggle for James was neither a contradiction nor a diversion from his larger quest for a new society, even as his “radical” colleagues dismissed his “nationalist” activities.[12] Like others who represented Robinson’s “Black radical intelligentsia,” these kinds of projects and initiatives, issuing from the political and cultural “independence” of Black thought, were perhaps more necessary to eradicating racial capitalism than even the best Western traditions—something they each had to confront.[13] “Marxism” had to be given life by the Black radical tradition in order to have any validity.

James’s pamphlet, along with, of course A History of Pan-African Revolt (also republished in DC in the 1970s), The Black Jacobins, and the 1939 New International essay “Revolution and the Negro,” represents his most salient works in this particular idiom. In these interventions James better frames “structural racism” than those who use the term without ever elucidating the nature of that structure.[14] In resisting these fallacious commonplaces resonant in the industry of “race talk” we offer better foundations for meaningful resistance—ancestral voices lead the way.

Josh Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and is a member of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and Positive Black Folks in Action. His research examines Black intellectual traditions and the conditions of its existence in the Western academy.

Notes

[1] This is not simply a “U.S. problem.” And neither should struggle in the U.S. be assumed to adhere to a U.S. national context. Rather, it should be understood in the ways that James, and thinkers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Angela Davis to Gerald Horne have understood it; in the words of Du Bois, “as a local phase of a world problem.” See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. Andrew Paschal (Collier Books, 1971), 263.

[2] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (UNC Press, 2000), xxx.

[3] This work is included in the recent collection, “The Black Radical Tradition,” compiled by the Communist Research Cluster and Viewpoint Magazine, https://libcom.org/library/black-radical-tradition. It has appeared in Anna Grimshaw’s C.L.R. James Reader (Blackwell, 1992) and Scott McLemee’s C.L.R. James on the Negro Question (University Press of Mississippi, 1996). A reproduction of the address with commentary by McLemee can be found in the International Socialist Review 85 (September 2012), http://isreview.org/issue/85/revolutionary-answer-negro-problem-united-states. I will be citing the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party edition, which includes the both address and the Socialist Worker’s Party resolution, appearing as, The Independence of the Black The Struggle (A-APRP, 1975).

[4] James, The Independence of Black Struggle, 3.

[5] Ibid, 2-3.

[6] In the address, James repeatedly discusses the potential of the Negro for radicalizing organized labor.

[7] Ibid, 3. James also perceptively pointed to the potential of the Negro to break up the Democratic coalition. He could not see however, that this would fail to radicalize the party (See Ibid, 5).

[8] “New society” is from Frank Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

[9] Robinson, Black Marxism, 177.

[10] Anthony Bogues, “C.L.R. James, Pan-Africanism and the Black Radical Tradition,” Critical Arts 25 (2011): 492.

[11] Ibid, 495.

[12] See Rosengarten, Urbane Revolutionary, 117-135.

[13] See Robinson, Black Marxism, 182-184.

[14] Representative of this trend is Jamil Smith, “Structural Racism Needs to be a Presidential Campaign Issue,” The New Republic, July 17, 2015, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122321/fighting-structural-racism-needs-be-presidential-campaign-issue.

Subscribers to The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research have access to the following related essays:

Interviews: “C. L. R. James,” Volume 2, Issue 1, 1970 (Special Issue: Black Studies)

Imamu Amiri Baraka, “Some Questions about the Sixth Pan-African Congress,” Volume 6, Issue 2 (1974) (Special Issue: Black Politics 1974)

Seth Markle, “Book Publishers for a Pan-African World’: Drum and Spear Press and Tanzania’s Ujamaa Ideology,” Volume 37, Issue 4 (2008) (Special Issue: Rethinking Pan-Africanism for the 21^st Century)

Walter Rucker, “A Negro Nation Within the Nation”: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Creation of a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist Tradition, 1903–1947,” Volume 32, Issue 3-4 (2002) (Special Issue: Black and the United Nations)

Ever since the Charleston, South Carolina shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, at which Reverend Clementa Pinckney and eight of his parishioners (Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson), were murdered by a white supremacist vigilante, pressure had mounted on southern states to stop displaying the Confederate battle flag. The massacre was another reminder of the various battles facing black America today. But because the flag was just one emblem, the tendency is to view these events as isolated incidents rather than see them as an indication of the zeitgeist.

President Barack Obama’s soulful eulogy for Reverend Clementa (and singing of “Amazing Grace” at his conclusion) added gravitas and dignity to the senseless tragedy. Supporters of the flag viewed the shooting and the flag as unrelated. But it should be embarrassingly obvious that this flag is more than an historical symbol. It’s an icon of war. Incorrectly described as the Confederate flag, it was first used in northern Virginia battlefields in 1861, and it was never officially adopted as the flag of the Confederate States. On June 22, The New York Times included a blurb to remind the nation’s readers that the eponymous flag was, and is, a battle flag.[1]

The battle flag was exactly that: the flag of an enemy nation that went into relief after the Civil War for decades. In 1962, South Carolina flew the flag over the dome of the State House in observance of the Civil War Centennial. Apparently, the flag wasn’t flown at the South Carolina capitol for generations after the Civil War but during the upheaval of the 1960s, during the tumultuous era of desegregation, the flag was resurrected to renew the sense of embattlement felt by anti-integrationists. But the history of this flag, which has been obscured over the years by the Klan’s appropriation of it, as well as in current conversation about its contemporary meanings, makes it unequivocally clear that the flag was exactly what blacks folks always thought it was: an aggressive symbol of white supremacy.

Thankfully, the debate was put to rest. On Thursday July 9, the final vote in the State House of Representatives was 94 to 20, well above the two-thirds majority required for Governor Nikki R. Haley to sign into law a bill to remove the battle flag from state grounds. Yet even as we’ve won the proverbial battle over the battle flag, we’re losing the war.

It’s not the “war on drugs” or the “war on terrorism,” we are losing as much as it’s the war on Black America. It’s a cold (or lukewarm) war comprised of several moving components. And, it is happening in spite of – or perhaps as partial backlash against – Barak Obama’s presidency. First, there’s the ongoing travesty of mass incarceration, which was bolstered by RDLs or Rockerfeller drug laws (before Eric Holder’s sentencing policy reforms) and by privatization.[2] Hopefully, Obama’s visit to the medium security El Reno Federal Correctional Institution near Oklahoma City – and the ongoing activism of thousands — will bolster the movement against mass incarceration. But the current statistics are devastating. The Economist ran a cover story (“Jailhouse Nation”) on June 20, providing an update on incarceration figures among industrialized nations. Whereas The New York Times reports 2.2 million incarcerated Americans, The Economist and The Brennan Center for Justice estimate the population to be 2.3 million, if we include the array of state and federal prisons, local jails and immigration detention centers. It still holds true, no country in the world imprisons as many people as America does, or for so long. A disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated are black and brown. Its common knowledge the system is particularly punishing towards black people and Hispanics, who are imprisoned at six times and twice the rates of whites respectively.[3]

Second, there’s the ongoing police brutality and white vigilantism against blacks. We are routinely witnessing the senseless killings of unarmed black men, boys and women (i.e., Trayvon Martin, Jordan David, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Dejerria Becton) who then find themselves entangled in the criminal justice system. Third, there are efforts to obstruct (and deter) black voter registration with voter ID laws. Fourth, there’s the burning of, and assault on, black churches.

One cannot help but feel concern that Abigail Fisher’s case against the University of Texas at Austin isn’t also part of the cold war on racial diversity, multicultural learning environments and black racial uplift. Miss Fisher – a white applicant – sued the university for discrimination after being denied admission to the Austin campus in 2008. Its significant Fisher’s case doesn’t take issue with the admission of alumni progeny.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fisher’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to take up her case a second time after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit last year again upheld the Austin campus’s policy. Among dissenting parties, a claim has been made that the university clearly define what it meant in seeking a “critical mass” of minority students. The new appeal will be heard during the court’s 2015 term, which begins in October, with a ruling expected in the summer of 2016.[4] These decisions are weighty because, as Peter Schmidt notes, they have “the potential to reframe how courts and colleges think about campus diversity.”[5]

Abigail Fisher’s outlook and actions shouldn’t surprise us if the Texas State Board of Education is any indication of the kind of schooling young Texans receive. In 2010, the State Board adopted more conservative learning standards and opted to teach American history with a particular ideological inclination. The new books downplay issues like slavery and skirt others like Jim Crow laws, and causes for the Civil War. Yet next month, 5 million students will receive the new state board approved textbooks.[6] This is an example of cold war tactics. It is a crime of omission against (African) American history and an assault the minds of American youth.

Then there’s the recent celebration of the SCOTUS decision in favor of same-sex marriage, which should be a victory for all to celebrate. But it’s a celebration that obscures the rest of what’s happening in America. In light of the erosion of Black American civil liberties; white supremacist assaults on black churches and their parishioners; efforts to undermine black voter registration; challenges to racially-sensitive college admissions policies that ensure access; and a literal re-writing of history, one wonders whether we should be celebrating or if our LGTBQ brethren (white, and of color) should be mourning– and strategizing – with us?

Activist-author Darnell L. Moore summed it up well in his June 26, 2015 article entitled: “I Am Black and Gay, But I Refuse to Be Proud this Weekend.” I tweeted and posted Moore’s article on my Facebook page seconds after reading it because I wanted my friends and family (who were busily posting rainbow selfies and profile photos in the wake of the SCOTUS decision) to think twice about the climate and the cause for celebration.

As a heterosexual woman, I tread lightly in this area. It is probably inappropriate for me to ask how much this decision is going to help black (gay) people or other sexual minorities of color. But I wonder. Fortunately, Mr. Moore, asks the pertinent question about who is served by this when he writes:

“The LGBTQ movement has been likened to the black civil rights movement of our past, with “gay” even being called the “new black”…Thus gay liberation has often been fueled by the rhetoric of black liberation. In April, for example, joyful proponents of same-sex marriage gathered outside of the nation’s highest court singing “We Shall Overcome.” But I wonder, who is the “we” they imagine?” [7]

Throughout his brief commentary, Moore references a critique that has been issued by progressive folk of various backgrounds. Activists, scholars and academics have questioned the simplistic paralleling of racial identity with sexuality for years. The cracks in the rhetoric have always been there – as has the critical resistance.

The troubling irony is not that folks want to celebrate a moment uniquely invested in gay liberation (when black and brown people are dying), as Moore asserts. The problem is that many other marginalized Americans (and white folks) have utilized this bridge (called our backs) to achieve the very civil rights and liberties all Americans should enjoy without lending the same efforts, energy or passion to African American struggles.

Perhaps I’m just particularly sensitive to white appropriation of black disenfranchisement, black culture, and black radical discourse in the wake of Rachel Dolezal’s Afro-Saxon masquerade. She reminded me of how easily (and often) white folks have, can, and do appropriate discourses closely associated with blackness to enhance their own cultural or social capital. After all, Dolezal got academic appointments on the basis of her knowledge, affinity and proximity to African American Studies. If she faked other aspects of her identity, did she fake her credentials too? Moreover, Dolezal’s not the first white person to claim an “awareness and connection with the black experience,” as a way of making allowances. Many folks have made such claims (be they friends, schoolmates, colleagues or neighbors). These statements remind me of Greg Tate’s aptly titled anthology: Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture (2003).

My hope for the future is that those who are celebrating SCOTUS on gay marriage or college acceptance rates for white women (who statistically have been the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action) will reciprocate by one-day turning their full energy and attention to another battle: the problem of the color line.

[1] “Divisive Symbolism of a Southern Flag” The New York Times, June 22, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/22/us/Divisive-Symbolism-of-a-Southern-Flag.html

[2]In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act.

[3] “American Prisons: The Right Choices,” The Economist, June 20, 2015. See also, “Criminal justice and mass incarceration:The moral failures of America’s prison-industrial complex,” The Economist, July 20, 2015. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/07/criminal-justice-and-mass-incarceration

[4] Peter Schmidt, “What to Expect as Supreme Court Revisits Race in Admissions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. LXI., No. 40, July 10, 2015,

[5] Ibid.

[6] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/07/13/421744763/how-textbooks-can-teach-different-versions-of-history

[7] Darnell L. Moore, “I Am Black and Gay, But I Refuse to Be Proud This Weekend.” Identities.Michttp://mic.com/articles/121420/Civil-Rights-Marriage-Equality, June 26, 2015.

Mia Mask is Associate Professor of Film at Vassar College. She teaches African American cinema, documentary history, feminist film theory, African national cinemas, and genre courses. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film. She edited Contemporary Black American Cinema. In 2014 she published Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age.