Date: Saturday, June 02, 2001 10:42 PM
From: A.D. Powell
Subject: Being your true self affects not only gays
Being your true self affects not only gays
http://www.miami.com/herald/content/features/columnists/pitts/digdocs/005615.htm
“Black” columnist Leonard Pitts (leonardpitts@mindspring.com) is at it again – promoting the “one drop” myth (while carefully avoiding mentioning the “black blood” in Latinos) and his crusade against self-identification. He starts out by denouncing “passing for white” (an accusation usually made against people who ARE predominately European) and compares it with gay people who refuse to “out” themselves. Let’s translate his ravings and show what he really means:
“Put simply: Is a gay man obliged to publicly live as a gay man?
Gay people, it should be noted, are not unique in having to confront that question. To the contrary, the issue of hiding one’s cultural self has been around for as long as there’s been an American mainstream and people who couldn’t get into it. A legion of American immigrants changed their names, gave up old country practices or forswore their religion in order to be seen as “white.” In African-American neighborhoods, they used to talk of people “passing” — light-skinned folk living as Caucasians.”
Translation: I (Pitts) wish I were white enough to blend into “white” communities. I can only express my frustration by claiming mixed-whites as “African American” even though I know that there is nothing “African” or “black” about them. It is my cowardly way of expressing my hatred of “whites” – claim some of them as “black.” I do this even though I know that I am defining “black” as simply a stigma placed on people who are too “inferior” to be anything else.
” The issue that faced blacks and immigrants then is the same that faces gays now: whether those who disavow the group should be allowed to get away with it.
There is, after all, something demeaning about being left behind by people “passing.” Some sense of betrayal. How must it feel, if you’re openly gay, to suffer workplace threats and insults while some gay man in the mail room ducks those difficulties by pretending to be what he isn’t? It’s not hard to imagine you might feel animosity toward him.”
Translation: Deep down, I (Pitts) believe I’m racially inferior and desperately want to drag others down to share my psychological misery. People “tainted” with my “inferior” blood aren’t worthy of the honor of being “white.” They should be forced to call themselves “black” and marry “blacks” so my “race” can be “improved” with the “superior” blood of the hated yet adored “enemy” (“whites”). I am so insecure that, despite my exalted position as a national columnist, I envy a lowly “white” employee in the mailroom. I imagine them as mortals who have scaled a “white” Olympus and are living like gods.
P.S. As a good “racial” inferior and in-house Negro for The Miami Herald, I will take pains to limit “racial kidnapping” to Anglos and Louisiana Creoles. I respect the fact that Latinos (especially the whie purity loving racist Cubans who rule Miami) disdain my “inferior” black blood and do not want to be pubicly recognized as having the “tainted” African descent I claim to champion.