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Marriage Equality and Humanist Evolution
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 14, 2012
Applauding the president for endorsing same-sex marriage last week,
the rapper said, “I think it’s the right thing to do ... whether it costs him
votes or not.”
“I’ve always thought it as something that was still, um, holding
the country back,” Jay-Z explained. “What people do in their own homes is their
business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It’s
no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and
simple.”
It’s aways [sic] wild seeing rappers come out
against homophobia. I’ve got more than my share of songs I can’t really enjoy
like I once did.
But it’s good to see, and I
can’t even say I live outside of it. I can remember coming out of Baltimore and viewing
every interaction with someone who was gay with a kind of smug derision. It’s
the closest I’ve come to a kind of deep, unstated pride in ignorance—not so
much a violent hostility, but a meanness based almost entirely on not
understanding. And frankly not even believing there was anything worth
understanding.
When I write with some
curiosity about the racist mind, this is really place I’m pulling from. I know
how easy it is to believe that people have nothing to contribute, and to hold
that belief not out of evidence of their lives, but out of ignorance of them.
Still it’s one thing for people to tell you why that’s wrong—and that’s
important. But it’s only philosophy. For the facts, I needed real world contact
with actual people. I could not simply be told that “diversity is good.” I had
to see it.
It was a really nice day in New York yesterday. I
took my wife and son out for brunch, then roamed a bit with Kenyatta. We ended
up in West Village
and I was suddenly struck by how thankful I was to gay America. There
is probably a more agile way to say that. But the fact is this. You can’t
really do my job, and live where I have lived, and live how I lived and not
deal with the LGBT world. I would go so far as to say that if you are a writer
with aspiration, homophobia is bad for business.
But less cynically, if you
are a curious person homophobia is bad for business. I was lucky. I got
schooled on that as a young man. And, as always—in the spirit of selfishness—it
was not good for LGBT world that that happened. It was good for me. Smug
derision is a kind of stupidity. And people who know better
are embarrassed for you, because you are not wise enough to be
embarrassed for yourself. The city saved me from that. And I’m happy.
The funny thing is I’m pretty
sure even in my other life I would have supported marriage equality. Whatever,
my ignorance—“an offense against God” didn’t factor in. And the notion that
consenting adults could live as they willed would have disturbed me. But that
isn’t actual enlightenment. Surely there are racists who voted for Obama.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/marriage-equality-and-humanist-evolution/257175/
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