BLACK NATIONAL HARVEST

I surf the lyrics of the legendary Isley Brother’s tune “Harvest for The World” knowing their full meaning. It was arguably the most simplistically prophetic tune ever produced, and it is so applicable to our intra-race predicament.

A critical component of intra-race bigotry or prejudice against Same Gender Loving people is this need to pitch one’s tent of personal hostilities against those seeming most vulnerable. Like racism and sexism, intra-race bigotry can be a self-protective device – a tool of deflecting attention away from oneself as a disguise. The one way we can hate Blackness on the sly is to espouse bigotry against Black Same Gender Loving and Transgendered folk. After all, so many people practice it that to have a conscience is less required.

Compounding the dilemma is the mad rush to belong – to be in agreement like a verb with a noun. But, while many of us practice mind boggling prejudice to fit in, the rest of us - forced to dress for self-defensive battle – simply want some peace so we can live out our days strategizing around the battle against racist forces.

Another inherent characteristic of this bigotry is how people feed their own hunger for love in a parasitic framework. We nourish our emotional craving for intimacy and sexual balance by hurting and ostracizing others who dare to have some – and who dare to enjoy it differently. Love’s bountiful in them, lodged down in their greed - when will there be a harvest for the world.

One must stop and contemplate ostracization and discrimination in a world that feigns or play-acts having overcome it. While many of us delude ourselves about a fair world if you only work hard, in many states it is perfectly legal to discriminate against Black Same Gender Loving and Transgendered people. We can be legally denigrated in the workplace, prevented from caring for our partners in medical emergencies and discriminated against in housing and eviction processes. That is an exact replica of pre-1950’s racist oppression. While half of all Black Same Gender Loving people are Mothers and Fathers, many of their pastors, family members and others deliver scorching and humiliating sermons and diatribes that “shock and awe” our children’s ability to meet life’s challenges. We should give our discriminators and naysayers homework assignments in the scriptures – making them find all equivalents to the phrases, “Overlookin’ none,” and “hopin’ life gets better for the world.”

All babies together
Everyone a seed
Half of us are satisfied.
Half of us in need.

The tentacles of that bigotry and discrimination to which I speak wrap-around generations of us. They leave emotional scarring, squeezing energy from our children’s and loved one’s health and well being – delaying our Diasporic harvest. This conduct contradicts the delight in which some will lament about children being our future. Ask yourself which of the little ones you come into contact with daily can be presumed the offspring of Same Gender Loving men or women? There is no way to know from the outside looking in. But, inside looking out – children witness how bigotry is inflicted on the people they love the most. We see in their behavioral responses the simple truth that half of us being satisfied, and half of us in need – is not working.

“In Every Sense of the Word”