Rosa Parks

On this day in 1955 Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat on the bus. 


Her action was an iconic moment and its consequences are still being felt. At the dawn of the gay civil rights movement activists took inspiration from, her, and African-Americans have been annoyed ever since. Keith Boykin put matters in perspective three years ago on the fiftieth anniversary:

"Can you compare civil rights with gay rights?" That's the question a young student at Vassar College asked me Monday night after I spoke at the school. "Of course you can," I told her. "The problem is that when people hear 'compare' that think they hear 'equate' and black people are reluctant to equate the civil rights movement with the gay rights movement." But to compare simply means to look at the similarities and differences, and on that score, we absolutely can and should compare the civil rights movement with the gay rights movement.

One of the principal arguments raised against comparing black suffering with gay suffering is the red herring that gays did not have to sit in the back of the bus in the same way that gays did. Well, not exactly. Of course gays had to sit in the back of the bus because some gays were black. Bayard Rustin was a black gay man, and one of Dr. King's closest advisers, and he too was forced to sit in the back of the bus. The simplistic reductionist view that seeks to create a wedge between sexuality and race ignores the reality that some blacks are gay and some gays are black.

But there's a larger issue here too. Why does it matter if gays had to sit in the back of the bus? We don't tell Latinos or Native Americans or people with disabilities or women or any other oppressed group that they have to prove their suffering is identical to black suffering in order to be legitimate. Nor are we concerned with which group is worse off in the artificially constructed hierarchy of oppression when we talk about other minorities.

The point is it doesn't matter which group is most oppressed or which was first oppressed or whether they are identically oppressed. What matters is that no group of people should be oppressed. But the more we focus on the hierarchy of difference, the less we focus on the actual oppression.