(Hat Tip: Tim)
Daniel W.K. Lee has hit the ball out of the park in a brilliantly-exercised and succinctly-drawn essay on how, by stating in our online hookup profiles that "it's just a preference" with regard to whom we'll consider hooking up with, is only the latest perversion of a fractured gay rights movement.
He begins by indentifying the various ways in which the modern civil rights movement has been watered down and fully co-opted by consumerism. We no longer protest, we boycott.
He goes on to note, with equal perspicacity, that the march to repeal DADT would have been a non-issue in the late 60s and early 70s because military adventurism was as wrong then as it is now, the only difference being today's weakened gays and lesbians have an infantile need to be recognized by the state (even if it means the slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children).
But it is Lee's analysis of racial segregation that is the meat and potatoes of his analysis:
"But it isn't ''just a preference,'' because why one is attracted to what one is attracted to wasn't written into one's DNA. We come to our desires because of a profound socialization process. People are taught to value one thing over another throughout our early lives. When parents say things like, ''Boys don't cry,'' ''Good is in the light, and evil in the dark,'' or when you are habitually exposed to certain kinds of bodies deemed attractive, the messages a person receives from those cues are internalized. A ''preference'' for ''straight-acting'' men is not like Athena bursting out of Zeus's brain: it emerges in part because of how you evaluated femininity and how you eroticize bodies and behaviors associated with masculinity. Likewise, racial preferences aren't in-born. They are formed and entangled with associations about gender, body-type and behaviors that have been racialized and evaluated."
Don't believe him? Check out any schoolyard across the United States. What do you see? You see hundreds of children of all races playing with each other with scant regard to the social dictates of their parents.
I've often argued this point with others, asking people who say, "I'm not into black guys, it's just a preference." (To which they add that mind-numbingly embarrassing rejoinder: 'But I have black friends.') When I ask them why - and really press them for an answer - it's almost always inevitably, "I don't know. It's just a preference."
I've even broken up with guys for housing this belief.
No, it's not just a preference. It's sexual racism. And it's as wrong when white people do it as when black, Latino, Asian or any other race or ethnicities engages in this sort of politics of personal preference.
© 2012, Victor Hoff. All rights reserved. Menofcolor.blogs.com
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