Why bother

I spent some time yesterday thinking about this post and the response, which I think on the whole, can be summed up as follows--"Nigger, what?" I guess I now have to explain that I don't mean nigger in the sense of an old Southern racist, but the way Kenyatta might look at me after I attempted to make an argument for polygamy. I guess I also have to add that I've never made an argument for polygamy. Everything on the internets must be explained down to every painstaking detail, less people think the Atlantic has hired a Klansman to blog. Or a polygamist.

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The post "Understanding black anti-gay marriage sentiment" does not fall into that category. When you have the mic, and you aren't broadcasting clearly, the temptation is to beat-down the sound-man, or blame the listeners, to berate them for their oversensitivity, to tell them to toughen up. But that's stupid anger. It never got anybody anywhere. We've talked quite a bit about gay marriage on this blog, but not a lot about kids in gay households. In not smacking down that whole "growing up in a gay household" deal, I not only left room for misunderstanding, I lept right past the most jarring part of the comment. I assumed that, on its face, that the comment was absurd--that it couldn't be logically defended, but perhaps the key to understanding lay at the end of the comment. We get a little too comfortable in our socially liberal cocoon and assume a level of familiarity and comfort that isn't really ours. You can't assume that everyone will automatically see the absurdity of that comment at this moment in history. That was myopic--and ultimately wrong--of me.

That said, I do my share of righteous condemnation, but I hope, by and by, to do less. I've written about why people might like Sarah Palin, why white people roll up their windows, why black people would like Wal-Mart, why black men should be grateful to cops, why cops shouldn't be prosecuted for police brutality and so on. I don't write those sorts of things to affect some fake-ass contrarian pose (I'm not up for being that black writer) but because I'm genuinely curious. I know what I know. I'm fairly certain and confident in what I believe, and I find it boring to rewrite the same old denunciations day after day after fucking day. More interesting to me are the following--1.) What am I missing? 2.) What is the logic at work in the people I so vehemently dismiss.

When Cosby made his speech back in 2004, I took a bat two him--twice. I got a lot of kudos from my like-minded buddies and I felt really good--for about a month. And then came this gnawing sense that I was missing something. I didn't think I was wrong, but I thought that maybe I wasn't fully grappling with what was going down. When i went back to actually do that grappling, I didn't so much change my mind, as I came to see what other people saw. I understood so much more.

One of the more unfortunate things about being black is that if you expect to go out and function in the world, you don't really have the luxury of existing in the space of constant condemnation. There are black people who do this. I tend to avoid them. They give me chest-pains. More useful is to try to get a handle on where white folks are coming from. You don't have to agree with it, in the spirit of Barack, you can support Affirmative Action and still understand why poor whites might resent it.

I know what I think and believe. The basics aren't going to change much--though my view on tactics might. Now I want to know what people outside of my circle think. Condemnation isn't exactly rare on the internet. I do my share of adding to the noise. But every once in a while, it's nice to also cut through the noise. Who knows what you'll find on the other end.