Contrasting Racism With Homophobia Essay

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Racism / Prejudice

Anyone that is not aware of the recent protest demonstrations in cities across the United States -- resulting from the killing of unarmed African-Americans by police in Ferguson Missouri and New York City -- are simply not paying attention to the contemporary events. These killings -- and the failure of grand juries in both cities to indict the blameworthy officers -- have stirred the conscious of millions of Americans. Some say these unfortunate actions by police against minorities have caused a groundswell for a new civil rights movement. These events, and the astonishingly high percentage of African-Americans in U.S. prisons, are not related to the Jim Crow policies of the past, but they represent a disturbing updated kind of institutional racism that Michelle Alexander writes about in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. How far this society still has to come before social justice and fairness for all Americans can truly be achieved seems to be an open question, but it is one that is addressed in Alexander's book.

This paper presents a thesis that racist behaviors -- institutionalized and personal -- towards people of color (including Native Peoples) is a malignant cancer in our society; and acts of intolerance against gay people is an unconscionable scourge that blots out the fresh air of fairness. The themes based on conspiracy and intolerance -- pervasive when held under the microscope of powerful literature albeit not always well understood by the general public -- will be followed in this paper. The Michelle Alexander book, and the Tony Kushner book, Angels in America, are the essential references used in the presentation.

Incarcerating African-Americans in the War on Drugs

As Alexander writes in her Preface, "This book is not for everyone," it is only for those who "care deeply about racial justice" and for those who feel "trapped" in America's latest "caste system." What Alexander does not write is that her book is also for the alert student seeking knowledge about the society we live in. No one ever suggested that the U.S. was utopia or was trying to be the perfect society -- but is America a fair society? Is it a society in which racial and social justice is pursued in a vigorous way? Are the precepts and fundamental tenets of the U.S. Constitution (in specifics, the Fourth Amendment) being followed and are elected officials approaching their work objectively in ways that reach out to every minority subculture and every socioeconomic neighborhood? Are the institutional checkpoints in place to assure that there is "liberty and justice for all"? The whole purpose of this book -- and of Angels in America as well -- suggests that the answers to those four questions is "no."

The truth is that most students and ordinary citizens go about their daily business are not likely to spend time doing research on the presence of conspiracies and of intolerance. This is the case simply because these struggles seem distant and unrelated to the average American whose skin color is white -- and whose sexual makeup is straight.

For example when the rhetoric that accompanied the "War on Drugs" was communicated from the highest levels of government ordinary citizens for the most part believed that this war needed to be waged. After all, on the nightly televised news programs -- while middle class viewers, home from work, settled into their comfortable couches and Lazy-Boy chairs -- videos of black men busted for crack cocaine were all the evidence that those citizens needed in order to reinforce their belief that there needed to be a war on drugs. The truth is that years before the drug war was launched crack cocaine was "…spreading rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country" (Alexander, 2010).

The successful media campaign by the Reagan Administration (to build public opinion and other forms of support for the legislation that would soon follow) was part of a conspiracy to put young black men into hideously overcrowded prisons. And that conspiracy was tucked neatly and logically under the "war on drugs" campaign.

"The timing of the crack crisis helped fuel conspiracy theories… in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States" (Alexander, 5). Looking for links that can lead to the roots of a conspiracy are not hard to find: the illegal drugs (think cocaine, which can be converted into cheap "crack") that were coming from Central and South America were being produced by "guerilla armies" supported (funded) by the Central Intelligence Agency.

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So, was the CIA actively allowing these drugs to flow into the United States so that blacks (presumed to be the principal consumers and dealers) would then be swept up by the war on drugs and salted away in prisons?

The author presents the disturbing evidence that even the U.S. Supreme Court has gone along with the conspiracy to incarcerate tens of thousands of black men. Indeed, Justice Stevens noted in 1991 that the High Court had ruled on thirty cases involving the Fourth Amendment; of those thirty cases, twenty-eight involved law enforcement authorities using search and seizure strategies without a warrant. Moreover, in twenty-seven of the cases the High Court "upheld the constitutionality of the search or seizure," Stevens wrote as part of his dissent in California v. Acevedo (Alexander, 61). To wit, the Fourth Amendment was bastardized and beaten to a pulp by the conservatives in the High Court.

Stevens, a liberal, went on to point out: "No impartial observer could criticize this court for hindering the progress of the war on drugs. On the contrary, decisions like the one the Court makes today will support the conclusion that this Court has become a loyal foot soldier in the Executive's fight against crime" (Alexander, 61). But was it really a fight against crime or an excuse to round up thousands of young black men and put them in their place -- which was of course the dingy violent hell-holes know as America's prisons (AKA, "correctional institutions")?

The attack on blacks (the "new" Jim Crow policies) could (and did) take place in America because government, law enforcement, the media, and the highest court in the land seem to believe and accept that black people are less than white people -- down a few rungs on the ladder of worthiness -- when it comes to intelligence, values, judgment and lifestyles. Keeping blacks in prison longer is a prime reason why prison populations have skyrocketed from about 350,000 twenty-five years ago to 2.3 million at the time Alexander published her book. Moreover, once labeled a felon that label ticks with you for the rest of your life.

Felon "…is the badge of inferiority -- the felony record -- that relegates people for their entire lives, to second class status," and more than that. Coming out of a prison, for example, after a long sentence for dealing crack cocaine, a felon is "barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to 'check the box' indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job" (Alexander, 92).

So, by seeing the terrible injustice for a felon who only used a small amount of drugs and was incarcerated for twenty years, a very sensitive and objective observer might shed real tears, tears of empathy and kindness for this individual. Those tears would slide down from the eyes of that loving, caring, very sensitive person because even after that felon has been released from the horrible prison; due to the black mark against him he basically remains imprisoned for the remainder of his life by the stigma of "felon." It's as though the conspiracy against men of color, especially young men who may be tempted to escape the racism by dipping into the world of drugs, is a life-long monkey on the backs of those unfortunate souls.

Gay men's commonality with the injustice black men endure

Gay men most certainly have something in common with felonious black men when it comes to sigma. Black men with the felon label certainly don't want those they meet and interact with to know they served time in correctional institutions. And when it comes to gays, as Roy suggests, "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. We have zero clout" (1:45). Black felons have zero clout as well.

And when it comes to a lack of societal respect for gay men, as Roy explains (2:42): the world treats "faggots" like common household trash because "We don't [count]; faggots; we're just a bad dream the real world is having." There was a major difference between what has happened to black men and what happened to gay men in the AIDs crisis however. Blacks are blacks; few people think of them as anything but black and generally….....

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