Divide and Conquer: A Warning to the Black Church about Hegemony

Hegemony is a media and political term that describes a phenomenon whereby a minority can maintain control over a much larger population through an array of tactics that have proven successful over the history of the world. The Black community need look no further than South African apartheid to know that it works against them, and that it has been used against them since the beginning of time.

If I remember my history correctly, it was warring factions within African tribal cultures that first started selling captured tribe members as slaves to white explorers.

The pastors of the Black Church need to examine themselves as it relates to this one specific tactic of hegemony, and that is the tactic of dividing and conquering. If hegemonic forces can keep the minority populations at each other's throats, then they will never band together to fight their real enemy, will they?

In a Sept. 29, 2010 article published by the Dallas Voice, Linus "Buster" Spiller wrote the following as a follow-up to the Eddie Long story:

"My greatest wish is that black gay men will place themselves in the forefront of this dialogue because our lives are at stake. No longer can we sit in these churches silently, pay tithes, and have verbal whipping after verbal whipping heaped upon us as though we are not worthy of basic human decency, even if we have deep family ties within that church community. No longer can we freely give our time and talents in support of religious institutions that don’t extend respect in return. And no longer should we tolerate hypocritical biblical teachings by those like Long, who feel comfortable leading efforts such as his infamous 2006 march against gay marriage, yet allegedly violated the marriage covenant with his own wife according to Christian doctrine."

You can read the full story on the Dallas Voice, but for now, I want to go on the record as one who states very clearly that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr would have never come out against homosexuals. Bayard Rustin was one of his most trusted allies and the genius behind many of the tactics that built the public support behind the Civil Rights movement. Coretta Scott King has always maintained this same kind of support for gay rights. At a Creating Change Conference for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force she said:

We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.

If the Black Church fails to change their views on the rights of the gay men and lesbians within their community, then they will become the stumbling block to the kind of change that needs to happen along the MLK Blvds of America.

Oh, and if you still want to read more about the Black struggle for civil rights and the connection that it has with gay rights, here is a fascinating link to a fringe story about Malcolm X.

* Photo could not be attributed to a specific source. It appears in dozens of on-line articles.

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