[simon]

I'm hesitating to somehow get involved in something turning into what I think rappers would call a "bitchfight" between Ice Cream and PowerPuff Grrl. What I want to say is that I don't think that black people as a group can be blamed for homophobia. I know there is some polling evidence that on average black people in the US have more anti-gay prejudice than white people in the US, but remarks like

Originally Posted by Ice Cream

Would it be considered ok to hate black people because the majorly of them are homophobic and not actually because they are black? I was having this discussion recently with some of my friends and apparently I'm racist But of course I was having this conversation with 2 straight girls, so they wouldn't understand how annoying it can be that there is such a double standard.

are open to misinterpretation. It's not racist to hate a black person for being homophobic, but it is racist to hate black people because the majority of them are homophobic - that's showing prejudice towards individuals based on group characteristics. I once met a Jewish woman who told me that she hated Germans because of what had happened to members of her family in the Holocaust. She was of course being prejudiced, but was extremely angry when I tried to point it out to her. But to consider the Jewish analogy further (I'm of partly Jewish descent, before anyone starts accusing me of anti-semitism), look at the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians. After centuries of being mistreated in Europe, Jews go to Palestine and start mistreating the locals.

Originally Posted by Ice Cream

No offense to anyone out there, but I think it's a bit like the notion that abused children usually end up abusers themselves.

I recently heard about a priest or whatever from Atlanta that said something like "when a gay person compares him/herself to the black community, he/she doesn't know what suffering is." It appears he seems to believe that suffering has only been experienced by blacks people and that everyone should shut up and put up with their "discomfort." He fails to understand the impact that homophobia has on gay people.

The way that most Israelis respond to any criticism of treatment of the Palestinians is to go on about how they are the victims of the Palestinians and when that won't wash to bring up the Holocaust and talk about how Jews have always been victims. It's easy to see this as just cynicism, but there's actually something deeper going on, as some left-wing Israelis have pointed out. There is indeed a lot of anti-Jewish prejudice among Arabs and the world in general. Why is so much more fuss made about what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians than about, say, what the Sudanese government is doing in Darfur right now, which is a hundred times worse? In the minds of most Israelis this justifies a belief that any criticism of them is yet another example of anti-Jewish prejudice (when all it really shows is that there are double standards, yet you don't have to commit genocide to behave appallingly). They have view of themselves as victims which means that they can't see themselves as the victimisers and resent the people they are victimising for claiming to be the victims.

I think something similar is going on among some black people regarding gay rights. They have, like the Atlanta clergyman, this idea that since they have always been the victims they resent the idea that some other group is claiming to be more victimised than them. This annoys the hell out of them, so they respond with prejudice against gays.

A similar example is the prejudice that some feminists have against transsexuals.

It's not logical in the normal sense, but there's a kind of logic to the irrationality.

Now this isn't inevitable. When South Africa was writing its new constitution in 1994 they put in it straight off that in future there would be no discrimination on the grounds of race, religion or gender. Then it was suggested that they should also forbid discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. South Africa is a very conservative country, but when this point was raised, the ANC didn't want to be hypocrites and the National Party didn't want to be accused of having just replaced one set of prejudices with another. So in it went.

Ice Cream is right that there's something particularly galling about victims of prejudice being prejudiced themselves, but that's life I'm afraid. PowerPuff Grrl is right that black people shouldn't be held to higher standards than other people. Being the victim of prejudice doesn't make you a good, noble, logical or compassionate person. Often, it brutalises you. It's intrinsically no worse for a black person to be homophobic than a white person. But it is kind of inconsistent to say 'I'm against prejudice against me, but I'll be as prejudiced as I like towards other people'.