Op-Ed: Straight Black Men’s Silence On Jussie Smollett’s Homophobic And Racist Attack Is Dangerous

Being black and gay can’t be broken into blocks that fit into desired identity politics. Both identities can’t live without each other.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning (Jan. 29), Jussie Smollett became the victim of a senseless racist and homophobic crime in Chicago. Two white men viciously attacked him with what Smollett believed to be bleach, fractured one of his ribs and spewed out a bombastic diatribe of disgusting discriminatory slurs. "Aren't you that f***ot 'Empire' n****r?" the masked men reportedly asked him.

The two unidentified men reportedly also wrapped a noose around the 35-year-old’s neck and reportedly yelled out, “This is MAGA country."

Let’s call it what it is: what happened to Jussie is a blatant hate crime by two homophobic white supremacists—the same type of white supremacists who put the lives of unarmed straight cisgender black men and women in danger, and the same type of white supremacists who call the cops when a black man is in his backyard living his best life and minding his own damn business.

The actor has received a slew of support from members of the LGBTQ+ community in and out of Hollywood, as well as black women alike. But aside from a few Hollywood peers and allies, those same straight black men who are targeted by white supremacists have been largely silent. Their probable homophobic attitudes or silence towards their black gay brothers can be just as lethal as the same white men that kill them and incarcerate them at more disproportionate rates than any other minority in America.

White supremacy is one thing, but the toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia that plagues black and brown communities is another.

To this day, as a 27-year-old Dominican gay man, I say a prayer when going inside a barbershop because I don’t feel safe. Most black and brown men find the shop as a sacred place of camaraderie with their boys. For me, it’s torture. “Nah he’s a f***ot, he lives up the block,” I heard a Dominican barber say to a black client. They both laughed in unison at a gay man who just left the shop in my neighborhood in the Bronx. I just sat there hoping I wasn’t their next target.

I’ve never felt supported by straight men to safely be my full self in front of them, with the exception of a few who are part of my personal or professional life (and maybe that’s a problem I need some soul searching on). What makes it worse is that when given the platform and opportunity to educate themselves on LGBTQ+ people, prominent voices in the media take it as a chance to display their ignorance.

In the summer of 2017, author and trans activist Janet Mock visited Power 105.1 The Breakfast Club to promote her new book, Surpassing Certainty. Days after her appearance, comedian Lil Duval went on the show and was asked what he would do if after four months of dating, a girlfriend disclosed she’s transgender. From here on, things took a turn for the worst. Duval made transphobic comments towards Mock and the community.

Mock detailed the experience in an essay in Allure. “Duval purposefully misgendered me (as the hosts laugh, thereby cosigning) in an attempt to put me in my place and erase my womanhood,” she writes. “Their fragile masculinity would not allow them to recognize a simple truth: I am an accomplished, beautiful black trans woman. Your willful ignorance will not stop me from being exactly who I am.”

Then, of course, there’s the whole Kevin Hart debacle with his homophobic tweets from 2011 and his Oscar hosting gig, but I digress.

What cisgender straight black men need to acknowledge is that in spite of identifying as queer, we’re still black people and our black bodies are just as susceptible to violence and injustice as theirs are. In a 1984 interview with The Village Voice, author James Baldwin succinctly explained this.

“A black gay person who is a sexual conundrum to society is already, long before the question of sexuality comes into it, menaced and marked because he’s black or she’s black,” Baldwin said. “The sexual question comes after the question of color; it’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live.”

He also went on to break down the chasm that exists between white queer people and queer people of color—or, really, just white people versus people of color, among all demographics when it comes to the benefits of white privilege. “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe,” he added. “The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society.”

That same racial dichotomy and breakdown of privilege that Baldwin expressed back then is still prevalent to how people on both sides of the spectrum responded to Smollett’s attack. Ellen DeGeneres, a privileged queer white woman, showed her support to Jussie by including that he came out on her show four years ago. Nowhere did she acknowledge that while being gay, he is also a black man.

Four years ago, @JussieSmollett came out on my show. I’m sending him and his family so much love today. ❤️ — Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) January 29, 2019

On the opposite side of that, many in the black community have spoken out on the attack by only highlighting the racial aspect of it, and ignoring Jussie’s gay identity. Prominent film producer and activist Tariq Nasheed blatantly refuses to acknowledge the intersectionality that comes with being a gay black man. A gay black man doesn’t have the privilege to pick and choose which marginalized identity he wears in society on any given day when he can be attacked for either of them.

Instead, he just denounces the white LGBT community for supporting Jussie but allegedly taking advantage of the situation and using their queerness as mechanism to manipulate identity politics to their favor.

The “intersectionality” crowd is totally silent when white media outlets ignore the racial element of the #JussieSmollett story. Yet they vehemently correct & chastise Black ppl who don’t mention the homophobic aspect. That speaks volumes — Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) January 29, 2019

W

H

A

T

?? https://t.co/4pNRL5FIZO — Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) January 29, 2019

With that being said, you can’t support the black and brown LGBTQ+ community if you’re not going to acknowledge the intersections between their race and their queer identities. That’s like concealing the issue with a tone deaf “all lives matter” slogan, which puts a bandaid on the identity you choose not to recognize.

I don’t care how historically homophobic black culture can be. That will never be a valid excuse for one’s silence or ignorance. In Hollywood, music, politics and sports, there are tons of black men with influence who choose to turn a blind eye or “mind their business,” and it’s not helping anyone.

Yet the silence that’s more weaponized comes from black men in our own communities. Usually when something happens to a cisgender black man that can take or has taken away his life, the community is in uproar. But when it comes to queer folks, the protests aren’t as loud. And for black transgender women, who suffer the most from fatal violence among the community, they are met with silence.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, approximately 26 trans women were killed in 2018, most of which were black. “Many people find it difficult to see that violence is intersectional, and that we must analyze it with nuance, understanding that various oppressive systems create the conditions for a specific instance to occur,” Raquel Willis wrote for Out. “This is why we often see initiatives that focus on alleviating threats of violence for one specific, marginalized identity group at a time: white cisgender women, white LGBTQ+ people, Black cishet men, and on and on.”

Here’s a message to all black men: we need your influence and your voice. You can’t just be vocal when rapping about the inequalities of the straight black man from the ‘hood in America. You can’t just be vocal about supporting Colin Kaepernick on his kneeling stance. You can’t just march in a Black Lives Matter rally, and not acknowledge your queer brothers and sisters marching right beside you—because our lives matter, just like yours do.