On Physical and Physical Violence: Race and Gender in the LGBT Community

Two horrific, excessively violent events in the last month have left communities in the Bay Area reeling: four young men gang raped a lesbian in Richmond, CA and now former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot an African-American passenger who was laying prone on his stomach. I am particularly interested in these events as I wrote my dissertation on violence and gendered/racial trauma. My research, and own personal experiences, have lead me to conclude that such public acts of violence deeply affect the psyches of members of communities/groups who identify with the recipients of such violence.
But in truth, it is a recent debate on a local lesbian listerserv, of which I am a member, that has compelled me to address these two acts of violence in relation to each other. Recently on the listerv, one member commented that she was surprised and disappointed that, after weeks of dozens of messages each day about Proposition 8 during the election season, there had been so few comments on the list about Mehserle shooting of unarmed Oakland resident Oscar Grant. Shortly thereafter, another member posted that the police shooting "isn’t LGBT related at all."
I am not posting this to call out a particular individual, who, in all fairness, was in no way implying that the shooting is insignificant in the context of her post. Rather, I want to take this as an opportunity to begin a series of discussions/questions about LGBT commitment to broad issues of civil rights versus LGBT appropriation of civil rights agendas. I am growing seriously concerned that there is a trend in some LGBT communities and larger LGBT public discourse that asserts LGBT activism, especially around marriage, as a civil rights issue – and simultaneous demands of support from ethnic minority communities – without at the same time offering an LGBT organizing commitment to anti-racism and other ethnic/racial civil rights issues.

To give an example, which I will discuss further in the next couple of days, I was greatly troubled by a "No on 8" television advertisement that was broadcast prior to the November 4 election on network television that begins with the following voice over narration from actor Samuel L. Jackson:

It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination was legal in California. Japanese Americans were confined in internment camps. Armenians couldn’t buy a house in the Central Valley. Latinos and African Americans were told who they could and could not marry.
It was a sorry time in our history.

The assumption (outrageous, in my mind) that discrimination is no longer legal in California, that state-sanctioned violence, racism, economic inequality, and housing segregation no longer occurs and is just "a sorry time in our history," reflects a dire lack of knowledge of history and current cultural conditions in the larger "LGBT community," an inability to take seriously the experiences of LGBT people of color who regularly face homo-bi-transphobia and racism, as well as a lack of desire to form alliances with communities of color and participate in contempoary anti-racist organizing (broadly defined). Public statements by LGBT groups and individuals to the effect that racial discrimination has been long left in the past (and no, Barack Obama is NOT proof that this is true) and that police violence toward African American men is "not an LGBT issue" are intimately related, and they paint a picture (perhaps rightly so) of organizing by predominantly white middle and upper class LGBT people as being both inured to violence toward people of color and uninterested/unaware of issues facing ethnic/minority communities today.
I am deeply touched by the outpouring in the local lesbian community of grief and support for the Richmond lesbian who was assaulted last month. But dare I suggest that it not be left only to the LGBT women of color, such as those who have spoken up on the listserv, to be stricken by both the gang rape and the police killing? Well, I will. It is high time that white LGBT people start caring about what happens in other minority communities and forming alliances, especially if we care to have support for our own causes from those very communities. There is an old, oft-quoted poem by anti-facist Martin Niemöller, which was popular in the 1960s black civil rights movement, that bears repeating:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew; And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.