Tracy Morgan's Recent Anti-Gay Rant: The Moyo Afame Treatment

I do not often feel called to comment on current events. The recent and ongoing news-cycle around Tracy Morgan is a clear anomaly for me. So why bother? Well, its caught my attention in a way most news stories involving celebrities don't. Plus the story brings all the most contentious, hard headed American children around the same campfire at once. And that just doesn't happen all that often, even in this sometimes salacious country with reality television consciousness. And who are those "children" gathered around the campfire? None other than racism, homophobia, heterosexism, violence, sexism, scapegoatism (the LBGT community is the scapegoat here, lest some might have imagined I was saying Tracy Morgan is the scapegoat.) and even a little Southern Dis-comfort thrown in for spice.

You may be wondering, "where's the racism to be found in this story?"

I understand that question because it's not in Morgans reportedly hate-filled screed, a screed that apparently even included a shocking nod to filicide, or the deliberate killing of one's own child--but subtly tucked away in the response by some in the LGBT community. It never ceases to amaze me how so often, just under the surface of so many white and perhaps some other LGBT folks consciousness, lies this pesky little racist recessive gene that needs just the slightest little tug to transform that recessive gene into a full-out dominant gene that needs to shout out its dominance at every opportunity. It showed up in spades (pun intended) in 2008 when blacks were unceremoniously blamed by various whites and some others in the LGBT community for the passage of proposition 8 in the state of California, a state I happened to be living in at the time. I experienced firsthand the backlash of that. I, at the time, was a black, same gender loving man who had worked tirelessly and for months against that heinous proposition, attending all kinds of conferences and grassroots meetings to help strategize its defeat. After its passage however, I noticed several of the promised invites to attend strategy sessions planned in the terrible event of its passage, suddenly got uh...lost in the mail. And then shortly afterward appeared the infamously racist cover of The Advocate proclaiming gay as being the new black. Chile, as I first looked at that cover, I was imagining both Martin Luther King, Jr and Harvey Milk simultaneously twisting and turning in their respective graves.

I've read numerous articles about Tracy Morgan's horrifying, yes horrifying, lets just be clear about that-- Nashville "performance." After the first one or two, I simply jumped to the comments sections of said articles. Predictably, there were scads of understandably irate LGBT people needing to share a piece of their mind about this story. I wanted to feel connected to, in total alignment with them all. I truly did. However, so many of these commenters simply could not divorce themselves from seeing this whole incident in any other way but through the lens of black vs. white. What? Yep, that ole recessive racist gene just couldn't stay recessive through this one, baby. The call to resist the metamorphosis to dominant gene behavior was just too strong for many, it seems.

So for all of you white or perhaps other LGBT people who cannot see beyond the white vs.black angle of this story, let me break it down for you. This is not about Tracy Morgan being black. This is not primarily about a black man coming from an oppressed heritage and being unable to understand the depth of his own oppression to the extent that he then goes on to oppressing, through ridicule and mean spiritedness, another likewise oppressed group of people in return. It is not about that here any more than when gay and lesbian people who discriminate against and hold extremely prejudiced and hateful stances against trans people or radical feminists who truly hate men, regardless of ethnicity, is primarily about that same dynamic in those respective circles. Yes, once upon a time, even I, in my naiveté, believed that a member of one oppressed group should automatically respect and abhor the oppression of all other groups universally. So I understand, to some degree, the impulse to go there and believe that is mainly what is happening here. And God knows I speak out as frequently as possible about "The Black Church" and its inability to recognize the insanity of persecuting gays when so much of black history is about persecution. Eventually however, I learned that hate is an emotion that is often stronger than reason.

I believe white and other LGBT people who always want to play the "race card" whenever a black person shows their ignorance, hatefulness, disdain, violence or heterosexist views toward or about the LGBT community, are in fact displaying a somewhat nuanced racism that I am imagining most are unconscious of. And you know one of the reasons I believe this? One reason I believe this is because when an Asian or Hispanic person disses the LGBT community, I do not hear the voices of "also oppressed-ism insensitivity" so immediately and strongly invoked. When a Jewish person bashes the LGBT community I do not hear the voices of "also oppressed-ism insensitivity" so immediately and strongly invoked. When Andrew Dice Clay (who is not Italian, btw, but Jewish) went on his anti-gay tirades in the 80s and early 90s, I didn't hear members of the LGBT community loudly and instantly bemoaning his Jewishness and citing the holocaust as a rationale for Dice Clay somehow naturally needing to be more "mutually oppressed" sensitive.

Tracy Morgan's main crime on that sad night in Nashville, TN is not that he is a back man who needs to bone up on his African American history and see the light, as a result, as so many white and other LGBT bloggers and internet comment posters seem to believe. No, his main crime is that he is a wounded, perhaps mean-spirited, perhaps hate-filled, clueless individual who, like so many comedians and shock jock radio hosts and Fox News commentators and American Tea Party members and Republican politicians and members of The Christian Right and reality television "stars" and black churchgoers and Donald Trump and Sarah Palin and countless other Americans--first and foremost need to understand they are coming from a place of mean-spiritedness that is harmful and destructive. And right after that is the truth that many of these same people, Tracy Morgan included, also often speak from a place of heterosexual privilege. Third, these same people need to simply wake up to the fact that hate speech and hate-filled actions of every kind really have no place in the public or even private speech, truth be told, of a civilized society. Finally, there needs to be the simple realization and deep understanding that none of us are free until all of us are free. Hallelujah!