Fly in the Buttermilk

and my body shook with joy. It had been announced that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right. Finally, I thought, something that appears such a basic, reasonable, and most importantly, humane assessment now has to be enforced across the land. I felt a little taller and thought that a number of possibilities had been opened up not just for me — as if any dude anywhere has ever wanted to marry anyone as militant and exacting as I am— but for so many others who wanted to sashay down the aisle in chiffon, lace, sequins, and penguin suits. It’s such a remarkable thing to celebrate. Let there be love, pomp, circumstance, prancing, and merriment!

I was elated, in particular, that Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito — three of the most hateful and consistently-on-the-wrong-side-of-history judges to sit on the bench since Chief Justice Roger Taney and his infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford assessment — had lost in such a public and stunning defeat. I simultaneously giggled and spat at their written dissents and tap danced on their hurt feelings. This one’s for Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, I said to myself. And then I stopped, jolted by a thought that came with a pounding of heart and shortness of breath:

Don’t misunderstand me. A part of me believes this is an occasion for which we should cheer and be proud. But pride doesn’t actually move mountains. It only imagines that it does because it’s too vain to notice that the movement is really just its feet sinking in the mud. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was just more of an attempt by the country to assimilate even its fringes into the status quo.

I wondered, for example, how same-sex marriage will protect transgender women of color from brutality and murder. Marriage equality activists assure me that the normalization of queer relationships vis-à-vis the institution of marriage will eventually, effectively, make queer people appear more acceptable to mainstream society, potentially reducing, gradually, the daily violences faced by us in some sort of trickle-down-theory sort of way. The more society is exposed to us, the more they will embrace us until, at some future date, queer-antagonists die off because they no longer serve an evolutionary purpose. Or some shit like that.

And my skepticism is informed by history.

Decades ago, some of my forebears wondered about the central thrust of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. In particular, they wondered if desegregation and voting rights were the most prudent places to start and the most pressing items for which to petition. Ella Baker and others wondered if this strategy would be an effective first step in radically transforming the quality of life for black people in the country. They wondered if achieving these initial, primary goals would serve as anything more than symbolic sources of self-esteem. And black people needed so much more than just the warm and fuzzies.

Would it reduce poverty in black communities? It did not. Would it curtail institutionalized racism? It did not. Would it hamper state-sanctioned violence committed against black people? It did not. What has happened since we made desegregation and voting our target goals? Black people are as poor as they ever were, maybe even poorer. Racism runs as rampant as it ever did in every institution in the country, despite the fact that the leader of the country is a black person. State-sanctioned violence lashes out at black people with the same impunity it did in the antebellum period. The plantation has evolved into the prison industrial complex; overseers and patrollers are now officers and police. Schools are as segregated and racist, economically and otherwise, as they were before the civil rights movement. And those voting rights that so many people were canine-ravaged, cop-knocked, water-hosed, set-ablaze, and strung-up for?

These are painful but instructive truths. And so I ask on what basis, then, do marriage activists believe same-sex marriage is going to serve as a basis for the liberation of queer people? History tells me that a society does not eliminate its bigotries. It merely molds them into more contemporary forms, biding its time until it can return to its original station at some later date. The bigot, it turns out, never falls far from the burning cross.

It’s, therefore, only a matter of time before the jubilation wears off and non-queer people revert to their foolish, 1950s-pink-menace-style hunting of the “freaks.” Because, you know, your boss can still fire your married ass and your landlord can still kick your married ass to the curb on general principle. And the law is on their side. All that’s required — all that’s ever been required — to renege on a public promise is a consensus of assholes with power and vigor. And America produces these assholes with stunning efficacy. Ask any person of color who has ever conducted business with America about dishonored treaties and duplicitous amendments. We’ll have much to tell you.

I imagine that the leaders of the marriage movement are well aware that their campaign only serves, by design, a small segment of its population — namely, white, wealthy, cisgender, straight-acting men who wish to reclaim, as James Baldwin put it, “the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society,” advantages they lost when the society deemed they failed to meet the requisite definition of the most coveted identity in all the land: white manhood. In other words, the gay rights movement as it currently stands is only interested in the restoration of Whiteness to those who believe they should have had it from the beginning — in theory. This is not a movement that considers the desires of people of color or transgender people. We would know this if we spent half as much time interrogating the racism and trans-antagonism in gay communities as we do the queer-antagonism in black communities. By the nature of economic reality, rich white folk and poor people of color have conflicting interests.

These horrors should come as no shock. The price for participation in the American Dream has always been, and perhaps, always will be, allegiance to patriarchy and practices designed to make marginalized peoples suffer. You have to be willing to kill for the country before it allows you even the minutest piece of dignity. It is no coincidence that redress of grievance begins only after petitioners have enlisted to kill and die in the country’s wars. Medals are handed out, patriotic reverence is awarded, death is meaningless, but surviving friends and relatives might share in the bounty of your sacrifice. It is no small thing to be overlooked or dismissed that both black people (some of whom were queer) and queer people (some of whom are black) had to kill for this country before they could have their love recognized by the State. Not to mention the numerous, pre-existing problematics of the institution of marriage itself and why it might not be an adequate measure for equity.

The promise of the end of misery, to be recognized by your oppressor as a human being, is just too precious for some people to give up. Perpetuating the status quo has its privileges. Capitulation comes with seriously boss benefits. How can anyone be upset with them for wanting freedom from pain? The problem is that the pain has an insidious source that is only temporarily alleviated by complicity. The pain will certainly return — with much more force when it does — when your oppressors need to be reminded of their power.

Refusal costs. Muhammad Ali refused and paid a terrible price. Jennicet Gutiérrez refused, too, and paid another. But they refused because they understood an essential, unpopular truth that movements of respectability try to obfuscate: We are meant to transform these antiquated structures, not be transformed by them. Monuments built on top of the bodies of the marginalized are doomed to fall. We are wasting our time decorating ballrooms that will be rubble by the time we’re ready to utilize them. Marriage will not protect us, just like the right to vote and desegregated schools didn’t protect Renisha McBride or Eric Garner. Rashawn Brazell, Sakia Gunn, Islan Nettles, and so many others still haunt the very ground we walk on and there will be no stepping over their souls without tripping.

One might ask: So if these incremental steps are not leading us down the path toward liberation, what will?

Our demands have to be larger, grander than we have ever imagined. And we cannot be afraid to die. The only way to make a dent in institutionalized bigotry is by making the bigotry, itself, illegal, punishable, in utterance and in deed, not merely in American businesses, but in American life. And we cannot rely on the government to do this for us; they are not on our side. We must take back our schools and the minds of our children. Educate them differently. Raise them to defy the oppressor’s narratives and eschew the laws. Boycott, divest from, and sanction the institutions that perpetuate mythologies of white heterosexist able-bodied male superiority. We have to make the sins of the society impossible to escape, minimize, or ignore. We must topple the society if for this reason alone. This in spite of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bigots believe exempts them from human responsibility. I’m, in short, calling for an end to white patriarchy.

But I know this will not happen because America is not that evolved of a place; it’s prehistoric in that sense. It has yet to develop the conscience required to feel a sense of shame for what it does to its marginalized peoples. Americans are, in fact, proud of their ability to be hateful and discriminatory, declare it as a solemn right. It is a heritage they wave with flags, pin on lapels, strap to belts, stick on bumpers, preserve in postcards, and bookmark in holy texts. It is the buttermilk from which they receive sustenance, which is why they cry so loudly, and explode in infantile rage, when they believe it is going to be taken away.

This is why we need the fly all up in it — black as it wants to be, buzzing, kicking, and flapping its wings. For it makes the fantasy a little harder to digest and gives those who embrace plausible deniability fewer opportunities to look away.

Forgive my cynicism, but if you still insist upon drinking, swallow this: Assimilation will not save us. It is a chimera. Just like respectability, these compromises of spirit will merely prolong our doom. The status quo is toxic even on the subatomic level and it can only render, ultimately, death.

Remember that as the rice pelts you in the head before you pump off into most exquisite of all ignorances: wedded bliss.

All illustrations by Jermaine Dickerson [@jermainedesign / jermainedesign.com]

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer and editor from Brooklyn, N.Y. and the creator of the Son of Baldwin social justice/social media brand. He is currently hard at work on his first novel. He can be found on Twitter @sonofbaldwin.

This piece was reprinted by EmpathyEducates with permission or license. We thank Robert Jones, Jr. for his kindness and for inviting an open, honest, more complete and connected discussion. We also wish to express our appreciation for Medium‘s, Those People and Curator, Felicia Megan Gordon.