The Modern Civil Rights Struggle: Why We Fight

Originally posted at Too Sense:

hen people talk about the Civil Rights Movement, they are almost always referring to the 1940s-1970s struggle for African American equality. Yes, the push for equal rights goes back farther than that, and continues to this day, but the most active period of time, with the most significant developments, is from the 40s to the 70s. There is a specific generation of African American leaders that most people have in mind when discussing the Civil Rights Movement, people like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young. These same people always seem to refer to the Civil Rights Movement in the past tense, as something that ended way back in the 70s (if not the 60s).

Here's the thing: the movement never ended, it just fell out of the public eye. What was once seen as a broad struggle for equality nowadays tends to get reduced to fights about affirmative action (even school bussing has largely fallen by the wayside). Further, once we had a national holiday to honor MLK, a black history month, and umpteen streets named after Dr. King, plenty of folks thought that we were "done," that some kind of victory had been achieved.

The Civil Rights Movement brought about tremendous change in America, forcing the government and the private citizenry to do much more to live up to the mantra of "all men are created equal." Many avenues in life that had been absolutely closed off for African Americans were opened up. Great progress was made.

But it wasn't "victory."

Schools and neighborhoods remain segregated today, only now it's de facto segregation brought on by white flight, rather than de jure segregation enforced by racist, unconstitutional statutes. There is still tremendous disparity in the funding and support that majority-white schools receive and what majority-minority schools receive. It's no longer an official "separate but equal" policy, but it is separate, and it's not equal. There are still significant disparities between the pay that whites and non-whites receive for equivalent work. And the criminal laws, particularly at the federal level, have a much greater impact upon black defendants because of the sentencing guidlines for crack-related crimes of possession and distribution. So, yes, progress. But not victory, not yet.

Today, I believe the Civil Rights movement needs to be seen as part of a larger movement. Not only a struggle for equal rights for African Americans, but also for Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic minorities; a struggle for equal rights for women; and a struggle for equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters.

Yes, I went there.

There's been a fair bit of controversy in recent years concerning gay-rights activists comparing their movement to the African Americans' Civil Rights Movement. A great number of people are uncomfortable with such a comparison, if not outright hostile to the idea (and plenty are just plain hostile). The discomfort is largely connected with religion, as many a black preacher will get up on Sunday and condemn homosexuals as violators of God's laws. But it's not just ministers saying these things. There is a huge amount of homophobia in black music and entertainment (how many hip-hop artists freely use "faggot" as a dis?). So I know a lot of people are going to read this and either get mad at me for talking about gay equal rights, disregard it altogether, or purse their lips and shake their head at the crazy white boy.

You can be uncomfortable with gays. You can disagree with their "lifestyle" (as if there's a gay way to wash your dishes, and a straight way). But what you cannot do, if you look at objective facts, is deny that homosexuals are the last minority against which it's acceptable to discriminate. One can't deny someone an apartment because they're black, but in lots of places one can deny them an apartment if they're gay. Many states not only refuse to provide any civil rights protection for gays, they outright ban any of their constituent cities from providing such rights. One can't get up on t.v. and talk about blacks or latinos being "aberrant," "against nature," or "abominations unto the Lord." But one can say it about gays. Gays are the most-hated and least-protected minority in this country.

What's that you say? Gays are different? It's a choice? Let me ask you: who the hell would voluntarily join the one group that can be freely discriminated against, oppressed, and outright assaulted if not killed? How would that thinking go: "Hey, you know I like sex with women and all, but what I really want is to start having sex with men, so that I can lose all my marital rights, lose my right to bequeath property to my spouse, lose my right to freely adopt children, possibly lose my apartment and my job, and maybe get my ass kicked by a couple of rednecks if I'm lucky!" Yeah, there's just so much incentive to intentionally relegate oneself to the openly despised fringe of American society and politics.

I'm not saying any of this because I'm gay. I'm married with four kids. I'm saying this because I have had, and continue to have, very good friends in the gay community. I support the gay community for the same reasons that I originally supported the African-American community: because to do otherwise would be to turn my back on my friends. It would be emphasizing group identity over individuals. It would be...wrong. I support the gay community for the same reasons that I support women's equality. Not because I myself would gain any new rights or protections, but because I believe that the same rights that I enjoy should be extended to everyone in America, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex or sexuality. That's what "all men are created equal" means to me.

For me, at least, the modern struggle for civil rights has to encompass everyone who has been denied their rights and their equality because of status, because of who they are instead of what they do or do not do. This is a fight against limitations on mobility, against the idea that if you are born as one kind of person you have a certain "place" in society, that you shouldn't "get uppity" or try to inject yourself into the realms of high politics and finance because of some accident of birth. It's a fight against the notion that you have to give up who you are in order to join the mainstream, rather than behaving in a manner consistent with the mainstream while still retaining awareness of and pride in yourself. A fight against the notion that any of us can be reduced to some asinine label: the black guy, the angry feminist, the queer. All of us are more than that, both individually and collectively.

It's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. There's no such equality within the white community: some prosper, while many, many more fall into the lower ranks of socioeconomy. So racial equality and gender equality won't mean that every black man becomes a CEO, or every woman becomes governor or president. It means that those goals won't be sealed off to anyone because they're black, or because they're a woman, or because they're gay.

Those goals have not been achieved yet, so the struggle must go on. We've made great progress, but the Promised Land has not been reached, not yet. So the struggle must go on. But it is a struggle that can be won, and is being won day by day. And victory won't mean victory for African Americans, victory for other minorities, victory for women or victory for gays. It will be victory for America itself, because it will mean that, at long last, the promise of America's founding documents has been fulfilled.