Don Imus, sexagenarian radio commentator, recently called the members of the Rutgers women basketball team “nappy headed ho’s”. When I first read the comment, I was sort of bamboozled by the comment - it seemed a strange juxtaposition of words to me. Apparently “nappy-headed” is a derogatory term for the hair of many black people.” (BBC) though I remain unconvinced. Anyways, the comment has generated a lot of media attention. Recently Harvey Fierstein, an actor and playwright, joined the bandwagon talking about how slurs against homosexuals go unpunished while racial slurs like the ones mouthed by Imus do get punished. Fierstein’s commentary reminded me of a skit from “Chappelle’s Show” in which people from different ethnicities are sitting on an airplane with each airing their grievances about the person in front. It is fairly easy to discern that homosexuals are victims of prejudice and inarguably it is a problem except that homosexuals are not merely suffering one-dimensional victims but equal partners in spouting vituperative commentary against say Muslims. One would expect that being victims of prejudice makes people more alert to prejudices around them but unfortunately it quite often doesn’t.
I will stray here for a second to wrestle with how the gay rights movement is understood and framed and what it says about the current state of our society. Gay rights movement is at once framed as the “civil rights movement” of our era and as a movement about individual choice. The movement expropriates the terminology from the civil rights tradition (social good and social inequity) intermittently along with the postmodern discourse fixated on the individual expression. The highest ideal of this day and age is that individual be able to express himself or herself to his/her best ability. There is little thought towards what this means for society. It is a framing tradition that usurps the darling of existentially challenged and the individual capacity obsessed, Ayn Rand. It is not capability that is hindering the individual but freedom. What won’t an individual do if provided an opportunity. Frankly, not much. And it seems unlikely to me that a society can handle the unmitigated ambition and psychological needs of the millions. Roping back to the point with which I started this diversion - I don’t see gay rights movement as the most important movement of generation. The 650,000 Iraqis killed in four years, and the 200,000 more in Darfur, are the issues that need to be dealt with along with poverty and hunger. The gay rights movement has become the hip thing to support (and certainly I support it whole heartedly) but its hipness and cultural currency, something which was deliberately created, is a comment on the bankruptcy of social movements to raise issues more ethically and substantively. All social movements, from Darfur to environment, have become fads and they have become so because the marketers in those movements have woken up to the merits of framing things in a way that sells well. Unfortunately, they have done so by undercutting the moral validity of their positions.