Diversity at Work

The recent Washington, D.C., Council vote to recognize other states' gay marriages produced no shortage of YouTube moments. Take, for instance, Council Member Marion Barry, who claimed he was "standing on the moral compass of God" as protesters and black pastors sang "We Shall Overcome."

Barry stirred up matters further when he told The Washington Post there would be "civil war" if the bill was approved. He noted that -- despite his consistent track record of supporting gay rights -- he had to represent his constituents in "98 percent" black Southeast D.C. This gave "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart ripe material as he juxtaposed clips of Barry's moralizing with his infamous crack-smoking footage from 1990.

News media coverage of the 12-1 vote in favor of the bill zoomed in on Barry's remarks and scenes of angry, mostly black crowds being subdued by police.

So what does it mean when the complex intersection of sexual orientation and race -- an apparent conflict in which archetypes of the Civil Rights Movement are invoked to speak out against another civil-rights movement -- becomes largely defined by one man, one two-minute video clip, one punch line?

In this case, the black blogosphere stepped up with its own message of protest: Don't paint African Americans, the District of Columbia or the black church with a broad brush labeled "homophobia."

"Marion Barry can't speak for all of D.C., any more than Harlem can speak for Jamaica, Queens. Eleanor Holmes Norton (the District's Congressional delegate and an avoid supporter of the bill) is just as black as Marion Barry," Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his blog for The Atlantic.

Kai Wright wrote in "The Browntable" blog on TheRoot.com that "The Chocolate City has long had one of the most pro-gay, progressive municipal governments around" and that Barry's comments were "patentedly absurd and should be reported as such."

The basic Aristotlean syllogism proves tempting: Many blacks are socially conservative Christians. Socially conservative Christians don't support gay rights. Therefore ...

"If you start looking at the facts, it becomes clear that black versus gay doesn't hold up from a whole bunch of different angles," Wright told me in a phone interview. "There is a significant problem in the black community about homophobia -- the same way there is a significant problem in all of America around homophobia. It's easy to exoticize the problem to the black community."

In a recent article for ColorLines magazine, for example, Wright addressed what he called "the Prop 8 blame game," in which media and white gay-rights leaders concluded that the black vote was instrumental in passing the California anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative.

An oft-cited CNN exit poll revealed that 70 percent of black voters supported the initiative. Even relentlessly progressive columnist Dan Savage made reference to "the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans."

Why didn't reporters do what reporters are supposed to do, Wright asked, and investigate the story behind the poll numbers? CNN's sample was geographically random, and therefore unlikely to account for the fact that blacks are significantly represented in only nine of 58 of the state's counties.

Also, he noted, 60 percent of white Protestants, people over 65 and people with children under 18 also voted yes on Prop 8. Why single blacks out?

I've often said -- in my classrooms and in this blog -- that our discomfort with talking about race (and for that matter, sexual orientation) makes journalists forget Reporting 101: Acknowledge what you do not know, and then find the right sources to gain that knowledge from a variety of perspectives.

Overlay race and sexual orientation and we become "idiots," Pulitzer-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. once said. (Well, he said that in regards to talking about race, but I'll take the liberty to say it applies doubly to the race-and-sex combo.)

Wright offered a few simple questions for reporters covering these issues:

• Why do reporters often quote a gay source, a black source, but rarely a black gay source? "It's very difficult to say there is an inherent conflict between the two," he said, "when I stand here embodying both of them."

• Does it occur to reporters that there are very few people of color in leadership positions in national gay-rights groups? 

• Does that lead them to believe they should look for more diverse sources when representing that side of the story?

To that end, I asked Wright for a few links that might help reporters incorporate black gay voices into stories. Here they are:

• The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has a People of Color Media project.

• The National Black Justice Coalition is the leading black gay rights organization in the United States.

• Author, CNBC contributor, BET host Keith Boykin was a founder and first board president of the National Black Justice Coalition.

• Katina Parker, an artist and activist, most recently worked on "New Orleans: A Labor of Love," a public-awareness campaign.

• The Root, the online magazine owned by The Washington Post, features dynamic black gay and lesbian voices, including Dayo Olopade and Wright.