31 Aug 2008 @ 09:19, by John Grieve
HomoRacism : Homophobia and Racism
I’ve never really liked the terms Islamophobia or Homophobia because people don’t take these terms very seriously, even though they reflect the truth of the problems some people have with Muslims and those of different sexuality. The public consider these terms psychobabble and have always seemed to prefer more gutsy terms like racism, fascism etc. for analogous conditions. I would like to suggest that we rename the hatred of gays as HomoRacism.
Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, said a while ago in defence of gays that the hatred people showed for them was the new Apartheid and the new racism. Desmond Tutu, in my opinion, is one of the greatest men alive and a beacon to all. With religion playing such a large part in this new homoracism, it is noticeable that a large number of black people are themselves the perpetrators of this new form of racism. This seems paradoxical, and to an old-fashioned liberal a person of colour could never be a racist. But this is patently true. This fact makes us look closer into the complexities of being human, and makes us question the belief held almost as a truism that racism is the basic form of fascism. Similarly anti-racism is held to be the corner-stone of Anti-fascism. The Truth is that this view is too simplistic. Fascism is a huge problem, and always has been, with Identities and the Other.
Gays have always been persecuted, just like Jews, through-out history even in societies like the Roman Empire which was completely multicultural, and where racism was unknown. At that time it was a capital offence to be homosexual, and also the Jews were persecuted on account of their monotheistic religion, because they would not worship the emperor, and not because of their race. It is my personal view that identities based on sex are more fundamental than those based on race or religion and the modern emergence of the contradictions referred to earlier confirm this fact.
|
|
