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Black people are made perpetual victims of confirmation bias.

If you’re black, I don’t need to tell you this. But, if you’re not or you just don’t know what it means, confirmation bias is that thing you do when you swear every fat person in the world eats at The Golden Corral every day and then ignore the hundred and fifty skinny people you see in there in order to point to the one fat one and scream “I told you so!” Confirmation bias is not a joke, though. It ends lives and then reassures the person who possesses it that they were right all along making them all that much more stupid. All black people are on welfare in the confirmation biased mind because it will subconsciously ignore the millions of white people on welfare in order to point to the black ones who are. See how that works? Confirmation bias is the way that dumbshit people make sense of the world and make themselves feel comfortable in it. Because if the complexity and arbitrary nature of cruel reality was ever made clear to them, it would be too far too much for them to handle. Tiny brains can only handle so much information before they freak the fuck out and put Trump in office.


I have, myself, fallen prey to confirmation bias and I swear on Shirley Caesar’s wig that I didn’t mean to. The information that I was given was false, misleading and designed to turn me against my own people and I swear on every fake follicle of Shirley Caesar’s wig that even though I believed it for the longest time, black men are no more homophobic than white ones.

The very first person to ever straight up ask me if I was gay was an enormous heterosexual brother, six foot million and three thousand pounds; he was made out of granite with shoulders that would take a Sherpa to get across. Big muscles and a shiny bald head and a shiny bald Buick sedan that he blasted rap music out of. I was young and we were coworkers at a grocery store. I tried to act “manly” around him so as not to give myself away and greeted him with all manner of “Sup’s” and minimal hello head nods throughout the day. One day, we were on break together and I was regaling him with stories about how drunk me and my “roommate” had gotten the night before while carefully omitting where we got drunk.


“Are you together?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you together?” he asked again.

“Yeah, we went there together.” I think I know what he’s asking. But, I can’t believe he’s asking it so casually.

“No, fool. I mean, are you together as in is he your boyfriend?”

Never in all your born days have you seen a man stutter so hard and then try to lie as ineffectively as I did. It didn’t hit me then that he was just asking conversationally as one would. What hit me then was that my act wasn’t good enough to fool him and I was ready for the onslaught of “faggot,” “batty boy” and “punk” that he was sure to rain down on me. Eventually, I just stammered so much that he figured it out on his own.


“So, he’s your man. Cool.”

His candor and his acceptance blew my whole world apart for a day or so until I went right back to believing that black men are more homophobic than white ones because black people are where other races store their most shameful attributes. Their hate and self-loathing. We have been given the job of being the wretched of the Earth so that other races can just get on with it fully justified in the idea that they can do absolutely anything to us and that it doesn't matter.


Where there is laziness, we are the most indolent. Where there is violence, we are the most brutal. Where there is libidinousness, we are the most lustful. Where there is danger, we are the most threatening. Where there is dirt, we are filthy and where there is homophobia, we are the worst purveyors of it. Your church choir director aside, black people in general have been saddled with this stereotype that we are relentlessly backwards when it comes to gay issues and, black men, violent when it comes to gay men. So white preachers send for the most bigoted of us when they want to attack gay people and I’ve spent the better part of my gay ass life avoiding straight, black people and that’s a lotta black people to avoid.

No matter how many times heterosexual black men have proven to me that they didn’t give a shit whether I or anybody else was gay or not, I still clung to the believe like Shirley Caesar’s wig cling to her head. I would avoid offers of hanging out, friendship and collaboration. I would instead run back to gay clubs and surround myself with nothing but black women and white people. But, let me tell you the damn truth. No black man has ever threatened me as I walked my ass out of those clubs into the night by myself. White men have. No black American man has ever written up legislation to strip gay people of human rights, require that they participate in “ex-gay” therapy or remove sexual orientation from being a protected status free of discrimination. The most black straight men have ever done to me was holler “Sashay, Chante’!!” at me when I was swishing out the grocery store with a little too much sugar in my tank.


The flaming black queens who live in my black neighborhood strut around in hotpants unbothered like African peacocks screeching, screaming and hissing like teapots. Unafraid, because they’re not worried that six white gay bashers like the ones in Philadelphia will break their jaws requiring them to be wired shut and then get a slap on the wrist. The reason they can strut is not just because them bitches can fight. It’s also because the vast majority of straight black men don’t care.

Don’t get it twisted, please. There are some homophobic black motherfuckers out there and we know who they are. Rappers have not done themselves any favors in this area nor have Jamaicans. But, Jamaicans move slow in general not just with regard to political issues. There are homophobic black dudes out there and they scare me to death. But, I’m not gonna be more scared of my brethren anymore because of the persistence of confirmation bias.


Homophobia is the product of an adolescent mind. If you have gotten to be an adult in this life and you’re still homophobic, you are thinking like an adolescent in the sense that you are thinking about how everything that is not you supposedly affects you. You are still thinking about whether or not someone thinks you a sissy or not. Your image. You’re still thinking about what other people say and do. You may’s well be covered in acne and masturbating nightly and watching the VMA’s. I refuse to believe that most black men are like this and my experience has borne out the fact that most straight, black men don’t give it shit. Either we can kick it or we can’t. I was lied to by forces that are determined to keep black people separated and it don’t take long to figure out what those forces are. Black men are undoubtedly affected by toxic masculinity. But, it’s a different kind, not necessarily more abundant. All in all, homophobia is just the natural byproduct of a weak mind or a too tight wig and I’m not willing to stand here and say that most black men are afflicted with either.