“Gay really is the new black,” proclaimed Daily News columnist John McWhorter in a recent article. John McWhorter is über insightful and I always enjoy watching him on Melissa Harris-Perry, but as Rosa Parks so eloquently said, “No.” No, gay is not the new black.
Courtesy of the Daily Californian
America’s legacy of racism is vastly different from its history of sexual-orientation discrimination and homophobia. The struggle for racial equality is also inapposite to the gay rights movement. The twenty-first century world in which the gay rights movement has so rapidly progressed has itself become a rapid place. Instant gratification is no longer instant enough. “Attention span” has become a sort of a misnomer, suggesting that our attention lasts long enough to actually span. Once upon a time, the adult attention span was somewhere around twelve minutes; that is, the average adult could stay focused on a task for twelve minutes without becoming distracted. Today, however, it’s dropped to five minutes. Some reports even claim that the average attention span on the Internet is two and a half seconds.
Courtesy of David Goehring via Flickr
That’s just ridic. Alas, these are the times in which we’re living. This wasn’t always the case.
Change used to happen at a snail’s pace and the civil rights movement reflects as much. Understanding then that “the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, civil rights lawyers like Thurgood Marshall employed a strategy of chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson’s wall of segregation. They slowly and methodically attacked the system piece by piece. After more than fifty years, the chipping-away strategy culminated with the Brown v. Board of Education cases in 1954 and 1955, reducing the wall of segregation to a pile of rubble. The gay rights movement on the other hand has bulldozed its way toward some semblance of equality. It was just the mid-1980s when the Supreme Court gave us Bowers v. Hardwick — when it upheld the constitutionality of a state sodomy law that criminalized private, consensual oral and anal sex between two gay men.
In Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 the Court overruled its decision in Bowers. And in the ten or so short years since Lawrence, discriminatory laws across the country have fallen at a neck-breaking pace. Now, I’d probably be hard-pressed to find many people who’ve even heard of Bowers v. Hardwick.
I’ll concede, the reasons the LGBTQ community has accomplished so much so fast are far more complex than I’ve intimated. Somewhere in the mix of reasons is necessarily that the world itself is a faster place today. But who the hell has the time or attention span to delve into all those complexities? Maybe I do? After all, I did spend oodles of time before and during law school thinking about all this stuff. So, after much thought and deliberation about this topic, I’ve come to the conclusion t–
What were we talking about again?
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Chris Copeland (@ChrisRCopeland) is a staff attorney at a non-profit organization in the Bronx, a blogger, and a California ex-pat living in Brooklyn. When he’s not reading, writing, or watching horror, he explores the intersection of race and LGBT issues with Law Street.
Featured image courtesy of [Andy Smith via Flickr]