pronoia: All the Queers are White, All the Blacks are Straight; or, Seriously? We're Still Falling For This Nonsense?

It's taken me a while to recover from the news about Proposition 8. While I know that the march of progress will continue, it's hard to be the ones whose lives and relationships hang in the balance in the meantime.

And I'm pretty disturbed by the turn the conversation around Prop 8 has taken -- blaming people of color and in particular Black people for its passing. The argument seems to be that the extra people-of-color turnout for Obama is about the same as the margin of victory -- therefore, it's their fault.

This argument is specious on so many levels, not the least of which is that A HUGE PROPORTION OF WHITE VOTERS HAD TO VOTE FOR IT TO PASS BEFORE THESE "NEW" VOTERS WOULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com has a lovely rebuttal of the blame game, pointing out that if California's electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, the measure would have passed with an even greater margin.

But do we then have news stories arguing that white people are homophobic? No, we don't. And we don't because we don't ever assume that white people do anything as a block, but we do assume that people of color are homogenous. Does the news media stop to think about the fact that there are people of color who are also queer? Or that many people of color are highly progressive, while many white people are very, very, very conservative? Apparently not.

One of the things stories like this accomplishes is to further balkanize different identity groups. Let me be clear: white-identified/begun equity movements have often brought such balkanization upon ourselves by assuming that white experience constituted the whole of the movement. Just look at the history of feminism and the ways it excluded the experience of women of color as well as queers. LGBT struggles have often done the same thing: assumed that white (often male) experience was the "norm" and marginalized everything else.

But moments like blaming minorities for the passage of Proposition 8 only reinforce such division and hatred. What they really do is suggest that there's only room for one (non-male, non-white, non-straight, non-rich) identity group at the table at any one time -- and so we have to fight each other to be that chosen group.

Resist this. Resist the idea that we are in competition, that justice for one group necessarily means injustice for another. Resist the idea that the groups are themselves separate and homogenous, that we don't all overlap each other in so many ways.

Stories like this, they're business as usual. While I'm not enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe they're deliberate, they participate in an age-old consolidation of power that keeps those out of power unbalanced, disconnected, and squabbling.

There is room for all of us at the table. All of us. One day. But we have to stop falling for the idea that we're not all in this together.

And a shoutout to my white, queer friends: examine your own racism in this. Seriously.