Race in the LGBT community: As we fight the world’s prejudices, do we still need to face our own?

Last December, a white blogger’s commentary on Forbes.com rose to a sort of Internet infamy. “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” author Gene Marks titled his 1,500-word prescription for young people of color growing up in poverty in West Philadelphia.

“I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible,” Marks explained. “I would use the technology available to me as a student” – such as public or school library computers – “I would use the Internet to research [magnet and charter] schools so I could find out how I could be admitted.”

The article went on to advise poor black kids on “becoming an expert at Google Scholar,” learning computer science, getting a part-time job and going to college, after which, Marks wrote, West Philadelphia’s youth would be easy hires for “a business owner like me.”

For much of modern American history, Marks’ comments would more likely have been kitchen table conversation in an all-white household, to an audience of two or three – met with a nod and smile then a bite of green bean casserole. But in the digital age, they reached a wide audience: many who had more personal experiences with Marks’ subject matter than he, and perceived a glib simplicity – and an all-too-familiar condescension – in Marks’ unsolicited advice. It sparked a thunder of overwhelmingly critical replies; “I’m not sure a more tone-deaf sentence has ever appeared in Forbes,” wrote Cord Jefferson, senor editor at Good.

A day later, The Atlantic’s senior editor, black author and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates, responded to Marks’ piece in his essay, “A Muscular Empathy.” Coates wrote, “When I read this piece I was immediately called back, as I so often am, to my days at Howard and the courses I took looking at slavery. Whenever we discussed the back-breaking conditions, the labor, the sale of family members, etc., there was always someone who asserted, roughly, ‘I couldn’t been no slave. They’d a had to kill me!’”

“… More commonly you get people presiding from on high insisting that if they had lived in the antebellum South, they would have freed all of their slaves.”

Marks’ editorial, followed by Coates’ reply, first begs and then suggests an answer to an existential question – who would you be if you weren’t you? In this context of shared experiences of community and race, Coates was more committed to realism: If you lived somebody else’s life – presumably knowing nothing of your current one – you’d probably fall within the confines of what people in that time and community are and do. What makes you so bold to think you’d do anything else?

“It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings,” Coates wrote – “to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.”

Unlike Carter – a Virginia plantation owner who, after a religious conversion, released more than 500 slaves in the 1790s – the vast majority of white slave holders did not release their black slaves. Overwhelmingly, they adopted a moral justification for their world – thought of their attitudes and choices as being not oppression or hatred but a reflection of natural order – a paradigm they held so dearly that they could not distinguish their white supremacist belief system from objective observation.

Throughout history, racists have failed to see themselves as such. By that same measure, how can anyone be confident she or he is free of prejudice today?

Coates wrote, “It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t have and then ask, ‘Why?’”

Aligning with a broader anti-racist movement, many people of color in the LGBT community point out the trickiness of their work: Racism can be subtle, even invisible, to all but those who it’s directed at – and sometimes even to them. Racism can be in the attitudes of partners, acquaintances and friends. It can be in people of your own race. The challenge of drawing awareness to racism where it exists within the LGBT community itself is steep.