Why Can’t Progressives Celebrate for Now?
By Tanya Paperny - Nov 6th, 2008 at 11:23 amWhen Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore wrote her anti-celebratory post entitled “Why One Queer Person Is Not Celebrating California’s Historic Gay Marriage Decision” back in May, I was miffed, but not that miffed, so I didn’t write a response. After all, I myself am not wild about mainstream LGBT organizations funneling all their money, energy, and resources into the battle for gay marriage rights when we still face unsafe schools, alarming numbers of anti-gay hate crimes, and sharp increases in HIV infection rates. And I agreed with her sentiments about how marriage equality won’t do anything to solve unequal access to housing and health care, even though I was simultaneously happily crying at videos of Californian queer couples hugging victoriously.
But with Sycamore’s most recent article, “Why I’m not celebrating an Obama victory,” she’s pissed me off.
Sycamore decries the fact that “so many people have such high hopes for an Obama presidency and I can see him shredding those hopes one by one until we’re left with nothing but the shredder… We don’t have to look far to see the ways in which Obama will betray us.”
Can’t you let people celebrate for once?
Sycamore acts like everyone on the left has had the wool pulled over their eyes by the Obama hype! I disagree, Sycamore. I think progressive LGBT folks and Obama supporters across the country are being real about their victories and their losses. Folks are mourning Prop 8 in California (though the battle may not be over just yet), mourning the death of affirmative action in Nebraska, and mourning Arizona, Florida, and Arkansas.
At the same time, these people have to have their celebrations and victories before getting back to work. Yes, progressives, liberals, radicals, Democrats, moderates, and whomever have to commit to applying steady pressure to the president-elect and his cabinet to get us out of Iraq, prevent us from ever getting into Iran, get us universal health care, and to truly rebuild New Orleans. But today, let’s give ourselves the time and space to mark this truly historic moment.
Like folks in New Orleans are doing. My friend Darwin who is living in NOLA sent me this report:
Tonight New Orleans is ringing with the sounds of celebration. Having endured the brunt and brutality of the Bush administration’s neoliberal economic agenda and neoconservative political agenda more heavily than any other community in the United States, the city has begun a party like only this town knows how to throw. The sounds of ship horns along the Mississippi River blasting in jubilation mix with cars honking along the main avenues. Cheers of hooray resonate across the town from victory parties at bars and crowded households.
Mattilda, have you not seen the videos and testimonials of older African Americans who have lived through de facto institutional racism only to see this nation’s first black president? Is that not something? If these videos don’t touch you and make you tear up, I don’t know what will.
Miriam adds that Sycamore’s comments “totally delegitimize all the progressive/radical people who worked for Obama,” making them seem like “idiots who have been duped.”
Also, Tim Wise has a really great post up over at Racialicious that works as a good response to Mattilda:
[L]et me say this, to some of those on the left-some of my friends and longtime compatriots in the struggle for social justice-who yet insist that there is no difference between Obama and McCain, between Democrats and Republicans, between Biden and Palin: Screw you. If you are incapable of mustering pride in this moment, and if you cannot appreciate how meaningful this day is for millions of black folks who stood in lines for up to seven hours to vote, then your cynicism has become such an encumbrance as to render you all but useless to the liberation movement.
…
Those who say it doesn’t matter weren’t with me on the south side of Chicago this past week, surrounded by a collection of amazing community organizers who go out and do the hard work every day of trying to help create a way out of no way for the marginalized. All of them know that an election is but a part of the solution, a tactic really, in a larger struggle of which they are a daily part; and none of them are so naive as to think that their jobs are now to become a cakewalk because of the election of Barack Obama. But all of them were looking forward to this moment. They haven’t the luxury of believing in the quixotic campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, or waiting around for the Green Party to get its act together and become something other than a pathetic caricature, symbolized by the utterly irrelevant and increasingly narcissistic presence of Ralph Nader on the electoral scene. And while Cynthia McKinney remains a pivotal figure in the struggle, the party to which she was tethered this year shows no more ability to sustain movement activity than it was eight years ago, and most everyone working in oppressed communities in this nation knows it.
…
And so it is back to work. Oh yes, we can savor the moment for a while, for a few days, perhaps a week. But well before inauguration day we will need to be back on the job, in the community, in the streets, where democracy is made, demanding equity and justice in places where it hasn’t been seen in decades, if ever. Because for all the talk of hope and change, there is nothing-absolutely, positively nothing-about real change that is inevitable. And hope, absent real pressure and forward motion to actualize one’s dreams, is sterile and even dangerous. Hope, absent commitment is the enemy of change, capable of translating to a giving away of one’s agency, to a relinquishing of the need to do more than just show up every few years and push a button or pull a lever.
Mattilda, do you have any real solutions to offer us?
Originally posted at t-paperny.blogspot.com.
i feel pretty similarly to you, thanks for this.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pmI think she is justified to be saying we shouldn’t celebrate just yet. We just broke through a racial barrier — electing a biracial black man to the Presidency — but we haven’t accomplished anything. And too many people have ascribed talents to Barack Obama, absolute faith, that is completely unjustified. We have a long road ahead of us, and looking at it realistically, there doesn’t seem to be that much chance of significant change if you look at how these gigantic lobbies are starting to move in and control the agenda.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:48 pmwhat i find strange and sad is that black turnout in california was up but they also voted 70% to ban same sex marriage. it seems that now that they don’t have laws banning their marriages, its fine to ban others.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:52 pmeric, you say “they” as if there aren’t any black LGBT people.
(comment I posted on another article on pushback)
To blame prop 8 on blacks only isolates people of color from LGBT people and LGBT people from people of color. Ultimately we abandon those in the middle–LGBT people of color who are somehow always forced to mend this divide
The exit polls also show that marriage equality is as much about age and education as it is about race. It doesn’t benefit ourselves or the movement to hold a single group accountable for what happened in CA.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:59 pmzaid: what do you mean, “We just broke through a racial barrier…but we haven’t accomplished anything.” ?!
perspective! I love it! thanks for this, T.
it would be irresponsible for us NOT to celebrate this occasion, since a social hurdle like this is proof that there is room for more. bigotry is an uphill battle and the mountain’s getting steeper.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:04 pmEric, I think that’s a dangerous and fundamentally divisive and unproductive comment. I think Vincent basically says it all (check out his comment on Saxon’s post here http://www.pushback.org/2008/11/05/perspective/#).
We need to be looking at our own organizations - see this loss as a potential for future alliances and a possible shift in strategy. Maybe the No on Prop 8 campaign didn’t do enough outreach to certain communities. Maybe the staff of the campaign didn’t reflect the racial/class/age diversity of the voters they hoped to sway. Who knows - we don’t know what the best practices are yet for such a hot-button topic. But we certainly can’t go drawing lines between our communities in the struggle. As my coworkers have been saying (hat tip to Erica), there need to be a lot more conversations between historically black civil rights circles and the new mainstream activist LGBT groups.
Check out this video - it’s certainly a good start to this conversation: http://indiana.bilerico.com/in_the_life_tv/
November 6th, 2008 at 2:07 pmfrom Queerty:
“When constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage were on 11 state ballots in November 2004, blacks in Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio and Oklahoma were at least one percentage point less likely than whites to vote for them, according to CNN exit polls. Only in Georgia were blacks slightly more likely to vote for the amendment. (The remaining four states had too few blacks to make a meaningful comparison.)”
November 6th, 2008 at 3:57 pmWhile I’m disappointed by Prop 8 and the three other hateful, homophobic ballot initiatives that were passed around the country, I think it’s important to keep focused on the big picture–and by that token, Tuesday was a resounding victory for all of us who believe in social justice. The election of Obama as the first person of color ever to lead a majority-white nation is an event of tremendous importance, and it speaks volumes to me about the human ability to overcome prejudice and fear. It should come as a surprise to no one that homophobia is alive and well, but beating it back is only a matter of time.
I’m more than a bit dismayed at the sentiment that seems to be going around that African Americans are to blame for Prop 8’s passage. This is a disingenuous, divisive, and counterproductive stance to take. As others have mentioned (again and again over the years, I might add), mainstream LGBT organizations have failed to reach out effectively to communities of color and have framed the whole topic of rights and marriage in ways that predominantly reflect white, upper-class values, with little cultural sensitivity.
In addition, when the “freedom to marry” campaign began in California, it was completely divorced (no pun intended) from any larger civil-rights struggle. Supporters were even instructed to avoid using terms such as rights, equality, or justice when discussing same-sex marriage. It was not until much later, when the Yes on 8 campaign was running at full steam, that the No campaign began to incorporate these concepts into its message. Even then, I never felt like they did a good job of making a compelling case of marriage in a broader struggle for social justice.
Anyway, it’s easy to be critical of this or that marginalized community, but I don’t think Prop 8 would’ve passed without the massive campaign of deception, fearmongering, and misinformation by its official proponents and funders. That seems to be a much more fitting target for outrage and denunciation.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:01 pmZaid: Since when does faith have to be justified?
November 6th, 2008 at 7:39 pmWhen it begins to encroach on the legal wellbeing of others.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pm