The shame of it all

by David Benjamin

“[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.”

— Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

MADISON, Wis. — For most of my life, the consensus of American society toward the gay community (whose members insist, tongue-twistingly, on calling themselves “eljeebeeteekew”) was to force it underground. The methods of heterosexual tyranny, applied both implicitly and unanimously, were to exclude, to ostracize and to isolate.

Fearful of losing their jobs, their families’ love and their very lives, gay men, lesbian women and the transgender folks in between were shamed into denying their own nature. The operative, essential word here is shame. 

When gay people chose not to be ashamed, when they came out, when “gay pride” became both a battle cry and an invitation to romance, the onus of shame began to shift. The speed and force of that transition became stunningly clear on Monday when two right-wing Supreme Court justices — one of them handpicked by Mitch McConnell as the Horatio of homophobia — agreed with their liberal colleagues to include lesbians, gay men, multisexual people and trans folks under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. 

Donald Trump’s traitor, Justice Neil Gorsuch, simply said, “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”

I doubt that the ultra-conservative Gorsuch would have written this sentence ten — or even five — years ago, when the balance of shame was still teetering. 

In media mythology, the “gay pride” movement began with the Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village in 1969. But that was a mere harbinger. Social justice for gays languished for decades more, and caught AIDS in the meantime. Even while more and more gays came courageously out, they continued to live behind a veil of misunderstanding, fear and shame. Gay marriage was the unlikely catalyst that changed everything. As gay men and lesbians fought openly for the right to marry (and divorce) the partners they loved, thousands of families realized that their sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles, even moms and dads, were gay. Friends discovered that their buddies and BFFs were queer as a three-dollar bill but, at the same time, no different from how they’d been before. 

America had a choice to either stand by their gay relatives and friends, or stick with exclusion, ostracism, isolation and hate. If you chose the latter, suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. You were a bigot, and shame on you.

It might be a coincidence, it could be destiny. But today, as gay people experience a dramatic advance toward liberty and equality, the Black Lives Matter movement — propelled by the white-police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Tamir Rice, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera — has found favor with a vast majority of white people in the United States. 

For all our history, black Americans have been issued sackcloth and ashes as their official uniform. In slavery for 250 years and then for another century of lynch mobs and Jim Crow, a black American, just to survive, had to assume a posture of shame, to bend and bow, to avert his eyes, to enter at the backdoor and to submit to a thousand petty cruelties. To forget your shame was to risk your life.

In the Sixties, beginning with the Rev. King, then expanding into Black Power, the Black Panthers and “Black is beautiful,” black Americans made strides toward shrugging off a legacy of shame. But it was a halting and partial struggle punctuated by backlash, murder and white complacency. To this day, black parents still give their children “the talk,” which is a lesson in bending and bowing, averting one’s eyes, and submitting to the taunting, tyranny and terror of an occupying sturmabteilungen of white police.

For the first time in my life, there seems a shifting of shame in racist America. There are throngs of white people who appear to regret their lifelong supremacy, who seem to perceive at last the plague of capricious cops whose idea of fun is tormenting black and brown people and whose avowed mission, as they cruise the mean streets of apartheid America, is “keeping the niggers down.”

Because the happenstance of my skin connects me to those stunted bigots for whom absence of pigmentation is princely identity, I’ve been quietly ashamed all my life. Ashamed of slavery and Scarlett O’Hara, ashamed of Jim Crow, ashamed for the Colfax massacre and the rape of Greenwood. Ashamed of the Klan. Ashamed for Medger Evers and Fred Hampton. Ashamed of Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, George Wallace and Louise Day Hicks. Ashamed for the Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till and the Central Park Five. Ashamed of Plessy v. Ferguson and Shelby County v. Holder. Ashamed of the police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and at the Algiers Motel. Ashamed of Stepin Fetchit, Sheriff Clarke and Clarence Thomas. Ashamed of Daniel Pantaleo, Derek Chauvin and Garrett Rolfe.

More than any moment I can recall, there are white folks who seem to share my shame. Chastened by video images of police sadism and racist murder, parades of guilty white people are on the march, joining black protest, carrying signs, signaling their virtue and enduring the discomfort of tear gas and late dinners.

Police reforms are everyone’s agenda now and opinion polls have swung violently in favor of Black Lives Matter. Gosh! No one has ever seen anything like this before. Could this be a shift in shame that echoes the transformation that turned Neil Gorsuch from homophobe to queer-hugger?

Maybe.

Trouble is… there are material consequences to social justice. Last week, Senator Kamala Harris told the Times she’s not holding her breath in hopes that white America will consummate its brief love affair with cats like Reverend Al.

For his part, Reverend Al — a man of both faith and doubt — has yet to see a diamond and a pre-nup.

I’ll believe that America’s shame has truly shifted when the helicopter moms and dads of Wauwautosa and Lake Forest, who shield their snow-white mozniks from MMR vaccinations and GMO carrots, send their kids off to rub elbows daily in public schools with lettuce-pickers, immigrant Muslims, Hmong refugees and colored girls who eat subsidized lunch — sharing their desks, breathing their air, learning their slang, picking up their ghetto cooties.

As Phil Ochs once said, marching is easy. Risking your kids, in the name of social justice? That one’s a bitch. 

I’ll believe when the white demonstrators in BLM t-shirts tell their realtors to erase the red lines around their enclaves, when they throw a housewarming party after Antwan and Taneisha have moved in next door. I’ll believe when they don’t call an emergency meeting of the Homeowners Association when they hear that Guillermo and Serena have put in a bid on the raised ranch across the street. 

People can have a change of heart. Neil Gorsuch’s strange vote suggests as much. But white power, whose Nero tweets and fiddles his days away in the Oval Office, has kept a knee on the neck of dark-skinned America for 401 years. Exclusion, ostracism and isolation are hard habits to break. Shame is a heavy burden to accept.

So, maybe.

But I’ll wait ’til the plywood comes off the windows, the yellow paint fades on the pavement, and the dust settles. If it’s thick enough, we won’t be able to see, remember or change what’s underneath.