Forgetting Freedom

Walking into the room where Northwestern College representatives were planning to share with the Equality Ride about the Freedom Tour, a bus trip students and faculty had taken to several important sites in the Civil Rights movement in the South, I was nervous. There were a lot of white people in that room, myself included, and I was thinking about how so often white folks praise the work of civil rights leaders like Dr. King, The Greensboro Four, and the Freedom Riders without taking responsibility for our part in the racist system that caused so many to sacrifice so much then and continues to cripple our country now. I was thinking of unexamined white privilege and how it still runs rampant in so many social justice movements: the mainstream feminist movement, as evidenced recently by the entire week it took NOW to denounce Imus’s statements about B/black basketball players, the anti-war movement, which has often ignored the racist overtones of war, and the mainstream LGBT movement, which has tended to present itself as being wholly or mostly concerned with the rights of white LGBT people while sometimes drawing simplistic comparisons between the struggle to end segregation and the struggle, say, for marriage equality. It’s true, of course, that the various oppressions often work together, that they do, at times, borrow from each other in ethos and tactic, and that they come down in their multiplicity on folks who fit into more than one community that the establishment wants kept out of power. But in my experience, these complexities often get lost when white folks talk about race, and people who are present often find their suspicions confirmed that white folks, even white activists, are not doing their work around racism.

Within a few minutes of listening to the Freedom Tour’s presentation, I knew my fears were unfounded. The faculty member who spoke first began with a definition of race as a constructed entity that had been used to parcel out social power. Another faculty member and students who spoke after the sideshow emphasized how their experiences highlighted the ways church and society have failed at addressing racism. A Hmong student challenged the US for its ongoing complicity in her people’s suffering. A white student explained how racism was a wound that, because it had never healed properly, was continuing to fester in our society, and stressed the responsibility that came with her color to work against racism in all that she did. Those students spoke powerfully and well. I was honored to be in their presence, and it was clear to me that Northwestern’s Freedom Tour had ‘done its work’ in thinking about racism in our time. I was looking forward to a complex and challenging discussion about this country’s history regarding race and what its implications might be for those who identified as Christians, as activists, as both.

And then, the final speaker came up to the podium. He began by revealing to us that he had been ‘homosexually raped’ as a child and that, in his words, God “had a sense of humor” because God had then called him to minister to “homosexuals” in the inner city in his adult life. Now, I do not in any way want to minimize this man’s experience of sexual violence. For such a thing to happen to a child is beyond deplorable, and my heart aches for any child who must spend hier life working to heal from that. But rape is rape, not an act made any more or less egregious by the gender of the perpetrator or victim. To equate that act of violence with the (presumably) gay men he worked among later in life was as outrageous as it was hurtful, both to me and to them. It was an awful statement, but the rhetoric got worse from there.

Later, he seemed to assume that members of the Equality Ride had come to the session in order to prove how his school’s Freedom Tour and our own bus tour were similar. (We hadn’t actually been given an opportunity to speak at that point, so he had not only not heard such a thing from any of us present, but as he spoke for over fifteen minutes he took up most of the time that would have been allotted for us and for group discussion). Without any acknowledgement that the two bus trips had been organized for very different reasons and under very different circumstances, he went on to say that, if the two were to be called similar, the spirit of repentance and taking responsibility on the Freedom Tour (I assume he was mostly speaking from his experience as a white rider on the bus, though he didn’t make that distinction) should be present on our ride, too. He suggested that the Equality Ride should be characterized by a spirit of repentance for our community’s sins, especially against children. Now, over the course of the last two months, I have been listening to all sorts of difficult and misguided rhetoric aimed at dehumanizing the LGBT community, but still, this one nearly knocked me out of my chair. That anyone could say such a thing when, as Amy pointed out during the precious few minutes left for discussion after this speaker walked out of the room to teach a class, most pedophiles are in fact straight men, and when the LGBT community has never aimed to equate straightness with the victimization of children, was astounding. That a college aiming to provide its students with a liberal arts education would choose a faculty member with such vastly ignorant and spiritually violent views about LGBT people to speak is, in my mind, nothing short of tragic.

After the speaker left, both students and faculty in the room spoke up to challenge his equation of sexual orientation with pedophilia. Amy and Wick spoke brilliantly in response to the speakers’ many and varied assumptions about the Equality Ride and the LGBT community in general. But we never did get to that complex and interesting conversation I was anticipating. We were caught up in the basic act of defending our humanity, something which a simple look at science and statistics could have avoided. And it wasn’t an hour later that a different faculty member asked me if I didn’t think a school had the right to exclude pedophiles from their campus, as a defense for Northwestern’s exclusion of students on the basis of ‘homosexual acts.’ Maybe it was the sheer repetition of the insult. Maybe it was the fact that the school had also invited a whole crew of ex-gay folks to campus that day, many of whom spoke about their life stories as if their addictions to pornography, drugs, and alcohol, as well as their uncertainties about ‘who they were’ in relationship to God had anything to do with being gay. In any case, I left Northwestern feeling as if we wasted a lot of time talking about things that were as ludicrous as they were unnecessary, that many of us never did get down to that level of interaction that Allison and I wrote in our vows to each other, and which we hope to extend to all humanity: to learn from each other in all the ways that we are wise.

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