Playing identity

The Right plays identity politics so much better than the Left. All this cloying talk of Alberto Gonzales's up-from-the-bootstraps life story makes me want to chew through my own immigrants'-child's wrists. As if benefitting from affirmative action gives you a free ride to promote torture.

These identity-based story lines have so much traction--just think of how Congress's investigation of the whole Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill episode shut down after Thomas accused the court of conducting a "high-tech lynching of an uppity negro"--and it continues to confound me that none of the major national LGBT organizations are headed by people of color. The Right loves to play LGBT rights against civil rights, as if they are oppositional, or as if all LGBT people are privileged white professionals who piggyback on the victories of truly oppressed groups. That's clearly bullshit: LGBT people are proportionately poorer than non-LGBT people, proportionate percentages of LGBT people are people of color, LGBT people suffer discrimination and oppression for fundamental, immutable facets of their identities, analogous to, but of course not exactly like, the discrimination and oppression that people of color suffer.

But it sure doesn't seem like that when the public face of the LGBT movement is so colorless. Sure, we're committed to diversity, and we work with groups representing people of color, and our workforces try to be diverse, and we support legislation and litigation that benefit people of color. I haven't done a staff analysis or a content analysis, but I'll bet you if I compared the ten most funded LGBT organizations with the ten most funded anti-LGBT organizations, I'd find that LGBT organizations are more diverse and the issues that we work on ultimately benefit people of color more than the issues that anti-LGBT organizations work on.

But the public only sees a dozen black preachers versus Cheryl Jacques and Joan Garry. This is tactically retarded. The Right isn't afraid to milk a person's skin color for political gain, and the Left should not undermine its own genuine efforts toward racial equality by presenting faces that do not represent its values.

In other words, Hilary Rosen ought to be Keith Boykin. Goddamn.