Homophobes Burst From Closets as Trump Cancels Race Training
By: James Finn
Tags: LGBTQ, Social Justice, Politics, Equaity, Racism

Racism is rampant in the US

If you’re a white person raised in the United States, you know deep in your heart the deck is stacked against Black people. I know you know, because I’m white too, and I hear all those racist conversations we pretend don’t happen.

My fellow white people, we’re not kidding anybody. If you’re one of those people who denies the ingrained depth of America’s racism, you’re either not paying attention or you’re in denial.

I’m sure what I just wrote doesn’t genuinely shock anyone, so I won’t say much more. I’m not writing primarily about racism today, I’m writing about the intertwining of racism and anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

As a gay man and lifelong LGBTQ activist, I’ve learned something racism and othering. Scratch an American who supports discrimination against LGBTQ folks, and you’ll likely find a white supremacist.

Ordinary white supremacy is a practice

I’m not talking about neo-Nazis, KKK members, and jerks who march in the streets for white power. I’m talking about the everyday kind of white supremacist, that nice couple who live next door or the devout church-going family down the road. I’m talking about people so invested in white privilege they speak up for it and vote for it in millions of little ways that add up to white people staying on top of the pile, holding others down.

To deny the truth of America’s systemic racism, after all is said and done, is to practice white supremacy.

So why is it that those who deny that truth so often express the strongest anti-LGBTQ sentiment? That’s a question worth asking, but first a topical object lesson. Let’s look at what’s going on in the news right now.

Trump cancels race sensitivity training in government agencies

Last Friday, OMB Director Russell Vought issued a letter to federal agencies directing them to identify and end funding for racial sensitivity or diversity training:

All agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.

On Saturday, President Trump went on a tweetstorm, revealing he had been motivated by reports in the right-wing press, including Fox News and Breitbart. Here’s just one of the president’s tweets:

NPR notes that “Racial sensitivity training has long been conducted on college campuses and across much of corporate America.” Typically, such programs aim to raise people’s consciousness about privilege and about challenges members of minorities, especially Black people, face in the workplace.

It’s unclear how much sensitivity or diversity training goes on at federal agencies, but conservatives have been complaining about it in recent weeks. Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the conservative Discovery Institute, argued on Fox News last week that Trump should immediately end funding for such programs.

He calls sensitivity training “the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy,” and claims it’s “being weaponized against the American people.” His arguments don’t make a lot of sense. They boil down to asserting that acknowledging the harm of systemic racism amounts to preventing the unity of the American people.

From my perspective, we can’t unify until we work on the racism that keeps us apart.

Trump’s tweets flush out homophobes

Trump’s Saturday tweeting flushed a lot of racists out of the woods as public figures who deny systemic racism exists cheered the president on. That’s no shock. What might surprise people is that many of those figures are also loud homophobes and transphobes. They often cite religious belief systems to prop up the supremacy of straight/cis people.

Reporters at LGBTQ nation noticed the “coincidence” right away.

Tony Perkins — head of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council and a former Louisiana state legislator with ties to the Ku Klux Klan — praised Trump immediately.

Scott Lively, a prominent Republican anti-LGBTQ activist took the opportunity to “blame” gay people for the rise of Critical Race Theory and the downfall of Western civilization.

Senator Josh Hawley (R)-MO, tweeted out his own support, bizarrely equating diversity training with Marxism, joining Lively in invoking the threat of civilizational collapse.

I’m not at all surprised Hawley is an extremist homophobe the Washington Post has called “the Senate’s new culture warrior.” LGBTQ Nation calls him a “religious right poster boy.” He’s a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage who bitterly opposed the Supreme Court’s June decision mandating workplace equality for LGBTQ people.

It turns out Christopher Rufo, who helped kick the whole defunding thing off, has his own history of inciting panic over transgender people.

The list of homophobe-racists goes on

I could cite many more examples — of people and organizations praising Trump for killing diversity training — who are on the public record opposing LGBTQ equality. Most of them are at least as extreme as Senator Hawley, who doesn’t want gay and trans people to be protected from discrimination at work. Many of them are as deranged as Perkins, who fears God is going to destroy the world over the gays.

But I think I’ve made my point.

Public racists and loud homo-transphobes are often the same people, seemingly motivated by the same kind of ideas. They often reference bogeymen like socialism, the fall of “Western” civilization, or the destruction of the family.

They’re invested in keeping things exactly the way they are right now, in keeping themselves at the apex of a hierarchy that reserves the most privilege to white, cis, straight, Christian men.

It’s no coincidence that if you poke a homophobe, you often discover a racist. It’s no coincidence that people who wants transgender folks to disappear usually also want to pretend Black folks in the US don’t get the short end of the stick.

It’s no coincidence that churches that revile LGBTQ people are filled with white folks who won’t admit systemic racism exists. That’s probably why Trump ordered diversity training cut in the first place. He’s throwing another bone to the Evangelical base whose support he must keep in order to win in November.

The status quo cannot stand

The United States was torn up by racial strife this summer in the middle of a pandemic. Americans everywhere are admitting to one another that we have a big problem. Admitting we have to fix it. Demanding our elected officials take action.

That won’t ever happen on the federal level while Trump maintains a grip on power. But it has to happen. The alternative is unending violence that will tear apart the fabric of our nation.

The only way we can fight racism and othering is to see it and talk about it. Federal sensitivity training is clearly no panacea, but it’s certainly an important part of seeing and talking.

We must understand that the people trying to stop that process are most invested in their own privilege, in maintaining their own wealth and power as white people, as straight people, as cis people, as Christians, and often as men.

Racism and homophobia are strange fruits of the same evil tree. Facing that reality empowers us as a people to start doing something about it.