December 1st: Blog Against Racism Day

Chris Clarke of Creek Running North has declared December 1st Blog Against Racism Day. For a brief moment on my drive home today, I was a bit torn about what I would write. While blogging against racism is a chance to start having a real discussion about race, today is also World AIDS day. I have lost someone to AIDS, or -- in medically correct terms -- a secondary infection permitted to run amok by an immune system destroyed by HIV. He was, and continues to be, the very best person I have ever known. There are not many aspects of who I am that would be as they are now, had I not had his example to work from.

My conundrum disappeared when I allowed a neuron or two to fire. I realized then that much of the racist discourse in America and Europe is inextricably linked to sexist discourse, all of it tied to Godliness in the perversion of faith that calls itself religion these days. Together, these discourses become the swirling vortex of fear, hatefulness, and apathy towards the injustices experienced by the "Other" in which we all live, whether we like it or not. Creek Running North, Quod She and Pandagon have good posts up about the hidden racist assumptions we make everyday, based on the information we've acquired as citizens of a racist culture. I'll let them speak to that.

The latest of the American Jeremiads, still continuing today in the body of neo-con "thought,"
became obvious to me and a number of others while watching the 1992 Republican National Convention. The basic tenets of that Jeremiad stated damned near outright that "we" (ie, WASP men in America) need to: 1) "Get the women back in line," 2) "Let the gays die of their disease, it's God's punishment, after all," and 3) "Get these Blacks to stop complaining about their fate, it's their own fault for having been born to the race of Ham anyway."

Let me quote Pat Buchanan, for the first and last time of my life:
"The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America--abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat--that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country."... 1992 RNC speech.

And a few years later:
"Martin Luther King was one of the most divisive men. Some see him as the messiah of the nation, others think he’s a dreadful person. He is a divisive figure." ... NPR Talk of the Nation, May 30, 2000.

So, what the hell am I getting at, other than that racist jackasses tend also to be sexist jackasses? The bray is in the same voice, it just changes key sometimes. We all know that. Here's the thing, though. Oppression almost always involves assaults on the sexuality of the oppressed. ( I don't have citations for this. I'm too lazy to go get them. Look up Gender and Race in the Early Modern Period.) Women in the colonial period were not to be trusted around black men because they were perceived to be sexually attracted to the enslaved men. Shortly after, the fear of sexuality was transferred to black men, and how they all wanted to rape the white man's woman. Of course, black women were also "devilishly sexual," which made raping them far less likely to work on the consciences of the white men in the colonies. Moving along through the centuries, the myth of 'animalistic sexuality' in blacks/Native Americans/women/gay men/anybody "we" (again indicating WASP men) wanted to feel better than began to be seen as Truth. And then in the eighties, HIV came along. Now, we know that HIV affects proportionally more minorities in America than straight, white men. We also know that there's been a strong correlation documented between economic class and likelihood of catching HIV, almost the same correlation as between race and poverty. Coincidence? Nay!

Yet, because AIDS is a sexually-transmitted disease affecting minorities most, we have a government that deliberately, and evilly, refuses to work as hard as they can and should to eradicate the illness, or even educate people about how to avoid getting or transmitting it. What our government will do is lecture to "these people" about abstinence. Don't have sex, and you won't get a sexually-transmitted disease. Sounds logical. Except that people, much like other mammals, have sex. All sorts of people have sex. The neo-cons would like you to believe that straight, white, wealthy and married couples are above that sort of thing, but they keep breeding, so that can't be true.

Ask a conservative about taking care of AIDS patients and their families, whether here or in Africa. Watch their reactions. Suppose there were a sexually transmitted disease that disproportionately affected straight whites, and came originally from a bunch of god-fearing European dudes. Maybe the theory is that these dudes were assaulting sheep on cold winter nights. Do you suppose there would be a call to lecture the Europeans about the dangers of sex, God's wrath against the sexually active, and avoiding "the wrong kind of sheep"? Probably not. I'm guessing there'd be an invention of some sort that would allow the European menfolk to have sex and not get diseases.

In this case, we have a sexually-transmitted disease that does not affect those in power as much as it does the under-class, so we go back to stereotypes that served so well before. "Those people" keep having sex, they keep breeding, they keep getting diseases, and it's not my fault, they aren't my family, so I don't care. Racism, and all the braying about sexuality that accompanies it, has EVERYTHING to do with the way we deal with the AIDS epidemic in America and the world.