This Says It All

Brevity has been called the soul of poetry.  It's also been called the soul of wit.

It might also be the soul of political and social messages. This ad on a London bus couldn't have made its point any better, or quicker:

From Patheos

 

He Knows The Words. But When Will He Play The Tune?

The other night, Barack Obama used the words "transgender", "lesbian" and "bisexual" in his State Of The Union address.  While he has used those words in other speeches, it was the first time they were uttered in any SOTU address.

Notice that I said "used the words".  That was a deliberate locution on my part.  What we have to remember is that he is a politician, and he is thinking about his life after the Presidency.  Like any skilled politico, he knows what to say and when to say it.

It's commonly forgotten that Obama had to be prodded into concerning himself with LGBT issues.  Dick Cheyney voiced his support for same-sex marriage before Obama did.  So did more than a few other Republicans--and Joe Biden, Obama's Vice-President.

I still have to question his true commitment to transgender--or lesbian, gay or bisexual--equality when he accepts as much money as he does from financial-services institutions. After all, they have done more to make and keep people poor--and thus vulnerable to bigotry and violence--than any other institutions, let alone people.

In other words, he is a corporate Democrat who is thinking about the boards he will sit on and the six-figure speeches he will make after he leaves office.  The banks and other financial institutions that support him employ a lot of gay men--more specifically, the kinds of gay men who hijacked the LGBT equality movement with their single-minded commitment to same-sex marriage at the expense of all other LGBT issues.

To me, he's only slightly more credible than a Secretary of the Interior who sells Federal land to mining companies.



 

Some Of Us Are More Equal Than Others

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

If you've read George Orwell's Animal Farm, you will remember that proclamation.  The pigs, who controlled the government in the world depicted in the novel, made it.

No gays are equal, but some are even less equal than others.

Of course, Orwell didn't write that in his novel.  But it's a pretty fair summation of the situation LGBT people face in Europe, and the rest of the world.

This map from ILGA Europe illustrates what I mean:

Map can also be seen here.

The percentage shown for each country indicates the degree of equality LGBT people have with everyone else.  As a region, Europe probably offers the greatest degree of equality in the world.  Still, there are great variations within it and some depressing (but not surprising) realities.  For example, the worst country for equality--the Russian Federation--scores 7 percent, and other countries in that region have very low ratings.  On the other hand, northern and western European countries fare best, with Great Britain scoring highest at 77 percent.  Belgium comes in second at 67 percent (two-thirds), while Norway, Sweden, Spain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands trail closely, all coming in at over 60 percent.

It would be interesting to see a similar map for the United States.  Would it reveal any surprises in comparing the states?

Where We're Covered

Right now, laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on gender identity or presentation are in effect for jurisdictions in which 47 percent of the US population lives.

Of course, that means if a couple more states or some more cities pass such laws, the majority trans people will be protected.  Still, there will be large "deserts" in this country.  

What is most troubling, though, is only pockets of New York and other states are covered.  Granted, cities with such laws are home to vast majority of the Empire State's people. Still, it's troubling that such a supposedly progressive state is not fully on board with transgender equality.

Of course, laws by themselves don't protect us against discrimination.  Too often, we are fired or hounded out of our jobs on spurious, trumped-up charges.  I'm not using the "imperial 'we'" here:  I know from whence I speak.

What Nobody Planned

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ROBINSON HALL

CAMBRIDGE 33, MASSACHUSETTS

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN DEPARTMENT OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING

June 21, 1961

Mrs. Alvin Richman

3055 16th Street, NW.

Washington 11, D. C.

Dear Mrs. Richman:

Although we have not yet received your official transcript from Brandeis, on the basis of your letters of recommendation there would seem to be a possibility of your admission to the Department of City and Regional Planning even at this date.

However -- to speak directly -- our experience, even with brilliant students, has been that married women find it difficult to carry out careers in planning, and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professonal education. (This is, of course, true of almost all graduate professional studies.)

Therefore, for your own benefit, and to aid us in coming to a final decision, could you kindly write us a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life in city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family?

Sincerely yours,

William A. Doebele, Jr.

Assistant Professor 

 for the Department

*******************************************

 

"Mrs. Alvin" is, in fact, Phyllis.  She was the Washington Post's restaurant critic from 1976 until 2000.  

Ms. Richman also managed to write books about food--including "food mysteries" as well as numerous articles on other topics for other publications.  And, oh yeah, she raised three kids, who are successful professional who report fulfilling lives.

But, as you can see, that was not what she envisioned in 1961.  She wanted a career in urban planning. A few years later, she would follow her husband when he got a job teaching political science at Purdue University.  She thought about enrolling in that school's urban planning program, but it was part of the engineering school.  Thus, the program emphasized things like land use and architecture. But Ms. Richman opted against it because she was more interested in people and the impact that urban planning has on our lives. 

She would, like many ambitious, intelligent women of her time, fashion a career around the "duties" to which Professor Doebele alluded in his letter.  

Fifty-two years after receiving that letter, she wrote back to Professor Doebele, who taught at Havard until 1997.  And he responded to her.  To be fair, he said he wouldn't write such a letter today, though he defended having written it.

I chose to write about Ms. Richman's story because, while interesting in its own right, it's also relevant now, as more states and countries are legalizing same-sex marriage and passing laws (or amending laws currently on the books) to ban discrimination based on gender identity, expression, history or appearance.  These things simply would not be happening were it not for the gains that women have made in the workplace, education and other areas of life.  While, as Professor Doebele says, things are "far from perfect," they are better.  And the fact that women are still fighting and making gains offers us lessons in the struggle for LGBT--and especially transgender--equality.

(You can see a copy of the original letter here.) 
  

Minnesota, Brazil And Michelle Bachmann's Stepsister

As you've probably heard by now, Minnesota has become the twelfth US state to legalize same-sex marriage.  Governor Mark Dayton signed the legislation yesterday, and the first gay weddings in The Land Of 10,000 Lakes will take place on 1 August.

This development really comes as no surprise.  After all, say what you will about him, Jesse Ventura voiced his support for same-sex marriage when he was the State's governor.  Also, Minnesota has a long history of progressive politics.  For example, it was one of the first states to pass laws to improve the welfare of farmers and laborers, and was one of the leaders in civil rights legislation.  Minneapolis was one of the first cities, and Minnesota the first state,  to include protections for gender identity and expression in its human rights laws.   

Plus, it's a neighbor of Iowa, which was legalized same-sex marriage two years ago.

One of the things that makes this victory so sweet and ironic is that Minnesota (or, more precisely, its 6th District, which includes the northern sububurbs of the Twin Cities) has also elected our good friend Michelle Bachmann--who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination last year--to Congress three times. She famously predicted that same-sex unions would become legal in her home state. 

The fact that her prediction has come to pass means that Helen La Fave is planning her wedding.  Who is Ms. LaFave?  She's none other than the lovely Ms. Bachmann's stepsister.  

Hmm...Maybe something is in the air or water.  At almost exactly the same time Governor Dayton was autographing his state's newest law, Brazil's National Council of Justice decreed that the country's notary publics must register same-sex unions as marriages if the couples so request.

Right now, same-sex marriages are legal in fourteen of Brazil's twenty-seven states. However, conservative evangelical legislators have derailed the Brazilian Congress' efforts to legalize gay marriage in the entire nation.  

I know little about the country, but I suspect that their situation parallels that of the US in one way:  There is a divide between the cosmopolitan coastal cities and the more homogeneous and conservative rural population of the interior.  On the other hand, in nearby Argentina and Chile--both of which have legalized same-sex marriage nationwide--most of the people are nominally Catholic, but the Church has little (and evangelicals have almost no) influence on national politics.

Still, I suspect that allowing same-sex marriages nationwide will happen sooner in Brazil than it will happen in the United States for one simple reason:  Rural Brazilians are moving to the cities in search of work.  On the other hand, religious and social conservatives in the US are moving to states that already have large populations of like-minded people, which means that those states will be even less likely to allow same-sex marriages, or even civil unions.

Wrapped In Lavender Paper

"He's not our President. He's not a Black President."

So said an African-American student of mine.  He believes that Obama has "sold out" black people on issues like immigration.  Also, he says, the President is "in the pocket" of banks and other financial service companies. "Who has profited more than they at the expense of black people?," my student wonders.

In brief, "it's no longer enough for a candidate simply to be black," he says.  

I'm thinking of my conversation with him after reading an article in this week's Village Voice.  In it, Steve Weinstein points out that not all LGBT people are happy that Christine Quinn will most be elected (in a landslide) the Mayor of New York City later this year.  Part of the reason for this is that many LGBT people will vote for her because she is "one of our own": essentially, the same reason why 95 percent of black voters pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and last year.

However, as blogger Joe Jervis--a.k.a. JoeMyGod- points out, "In New York City, even Republican candidates are right on about gay issues".  Indeed, one of that party's Mayoral candidates, Joseph Lhota,who previously served as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a Deputy Mayor for Rudolph Giuliani, has publicly supported Federal legalization of same-sex marriage. "The best part of New York City is its diversity," he says. " You gotta celebrate it.  You really do."

Now, of course, there's more to being in favor of LGBT equality than supporting same-sex marriage.  (As I've said in previous posts, I support it only because it's the best solution available under the current system. I really believe that governments should not have any power to define marriage and bestow benefits based upon it.) It also means being on the right side of a number of other issues which aren't specifically labelled as "LGBT issues" but nonetheless affect our lives. And that is where Christine Quinn, during her term as Speaker of the City Council, has failed.

For one thing, just as she and a host of other Council Members--and Mayor Michael Bloomberg--were reaching the end of their term limits.  After that vote, she could no longer even pretend to be "adversarial" toward the Mayor or other city power brokers.  Instead, her pandering to him not only brought him and her a third term in office; it also meant that he would help grease the wheels that could carry her into City Hall.

From then on, she also made, or helped to make, deals with some of the city's realtors and financial services companies that have further accelerated the displacement of poor, elderly and "minority"--including LGBT people.  It led to, among other things, the closing of St. Vincent's hospital, which will be turned into luxury housing. 

And, along the way, she also committed what is, in my book, one of her worst sins:  She supported the NYPD's "stop and frisk" policy. Its critics point out, rightly, that young black and Latino males are disproportionately stopped.  But so have transgender people, especially male-to-female. I have talked to more one MTF who was stopped and harassed early one afternoon as she was waiting for a bus in a Greenwich Village residential area and have heard similar stories from others.  Indeed, one hot day early in my life as Justine,I was stopped as I was riding my bike home from work.

She has also done other things that some could (with justification, I believe) see as "selling out" the LGBT community, especially trans people.  For that reason, they (and I) concur with veteran gay rights activist Bill Dobbs, who calls her "a classic old-style machine politician wrapped in lavender paper".

 

Same-Sex Marriage And The Economy

I'm not entirely a fan of Obama, though I am glad he defeated Mitt Romney in the most recent election.

Now I'll defend Obama in a more specific way: In at least one area, he's doing exactly what he should be doing.  That is to say, he is endorsing gay marriage. 

(N.B.:  I don't think a government should have any say at all in marriage.  All couples should get the equivalent of a domestic partnership agreement and, if they want to marry in a church or wherever, let them.  But marriage in a religious institution should not confer tax and other benefits married heterosexual couples currently enjoy.)

Now, some people wonder why he's mentioning such an issue--or LGBT equality when we're experiencing the worst economy we've had since the Great Depression.  Well, if this isn't one of his reasons, it should be:  Allowing same-sex marriages makes economic sense.  Isn't that how he should be making most of his decisions?

Take a look at this infographic from Unicorn Booty:

Why Imperialism and LGBT Equality Don't Mix, Even If Obama's Stirring The Drink

In an essay he wrote during the time of the Civil Rights movement, James Baldwin recounted how some of the “agitators” were accused of being Communists, or at least puppets of them.  As Baldwin pointed out, it was an incredibly stupid allegation because, to many poor and oppressed people in the world, it made the Kremlin seem like a supporter of human rights—which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the McCarthyites wanted Americans to believe.

History is irony when it’s not tragedy.  At  times—like now—it’s both:  Someone who has fashioned himself as a champion of peace and human rights has done more damage to both than any of the past few predecessors in his office.

I am talking about the current US President, Barack Obama.  Like many other LGBT people, I am glad that he has done more to bring us—especially transgender people—closer to equality with hetero and cis people than, perhaps, all of his predecessors combined.  Of course, he had to be prodded into some of his actions—most notably by his second-in-command, Joe Biden, into supporting same-sex marriage.

Still, I can’t help but to wonder whether he’s actually demonizing the cause of LGBT equality in the rest of the world, save for a few European and a couple of Latin American countries.  While we can celebrate, and push for more change, in the majority of the world, we’re not even deemed fit to exist, let alone marry or go into the same professions and occupations as other people.  A Jamican lesbian I know tells me she can’t go home: “I’d be killed as soon as I got off the plane in Kingston.”  A Pakistani and a Chinese gay man of my acquaintance have expressed similar anxieties. 

They all come from conservative—and, in the case of the Pakistani and Jamaican, religious—societies in which any deviance from cisgenderism and heterosexuality are crimes that could be punished by death.  Subtract religion from the equation and you have China, where the law allows the state to execute someone who loves someone of his or her own gender.

And, of course, the situation is probably even more dire for LGBT people in some Middle Eastern countries, particularly ones like Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Even in Turkey, I didn’t have the sense that a gay man or lesbian was particularly safe, and I knew that my own well-being had much to do with the degree to which my gender identity wasn’t in question.

In addition to ingrained homophobia and transphobia, those countries and others share resentment, if not outright hatred, of the United States—or, at any rate of its foreign policy.  More precisely, those countries have histories of economic and cultural —and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jamaica, political and military—colonialism and young people know it.  So, naturally, they detest our invasion of Iraq and our attempt to subjugate Afghanistan.  And, I imagine, they aren’t too happy about the fact that we have military bases in over two-thirds of the world’s nations—or that we’ve conducted drone surveillance and strikes.

Ah, yes, the drones.  Some argue that they’re better than putting young Americans in harm’s way.  However, that argument misses the point:  the drones aren’t meant to replace “boots on the ground”.  Rather, they’re meant to go above and beyond (in military terms, anyway) what live human beings can do to gather information and strike targets.   Also, if they’re meant to replace soldiers and sailors and airmen, why was a drone sighted at  JFK International Airport?

In the first two months of his administration, Obama ordered six times as many drone strikes in Pakistan during his first term as George W. Bush did during both of his terms.  (Of course, GWB started the drone program.  Still, the facts speak for themselves.)  He also did something that wasn’t part of Bush’s, or even Dick Cheney’s, wildest dreams:  He, in essence, gave himself the right to order the murders extrajudicial killings of US citizens anywhere in the world simply by deciding they are "enemy combatants".   I don’t think that even Humphrey and Nixon claimed such rights when they were invading Southeast Asian countries, and I don’t think George W's father even thought of such a thing when he invaded Grenada and conducted what was essentially a drug bust against Manuel Noriega. 

Now, as Jody Williams has wondered, how can a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize—and still thinks of himself as a champion of world peace and who has expressed his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.—do such things?  At best, it makes him blind to his own contradictions.  At worst, it makes him a rank hypocrite.  How can the rest of the world see him as a torch-bearer for liberty and justice?

Moreover, I can’t help but to wonder how countries and peoples who have been subjected to his version of “peace” see his support of women’s and LGBT rights and equality.  If other countries can see our universities, our culture and our economy—not to mention our militarism—as manifestations of “The Great Satan”, how can they see our (or, more specifically, Obama’s) expression of support for LGBT equality?   How can our leaders talk to Ahmadinejad about his country’s treatment of women and gays (or denial that the latter even exist in his country) or his revisionist views of history when our own foreign policy is killing innocent people all around him?  And, what’s going to make him, or the leader of any conservative Muslim country or military dictatorship, believe that LGBT people simply should have the right to live, let alone love and marry the people they love, when a President who supports such things is killing innocent people who just happen to live in countries deemed to be our enemies?

"Passing" Does Not Mean "Equal"

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, previous generations of transsexuals tried to go "stealth" as much as they could.  That meant, not only looking and acting as if they were members of their "new" genders, but also erasing their pasts, often to the point of creating wholly fictitious histories (Is that an oxymoron?) for themselves.

I've pointed out some of the fallacies and pitfalls of doing so.  For one thing, amnesia is not healthy; self-imposed amnesia can only be worse.  Also, as Victoria Brownworth says, a person who "passes" is trapped:  He or she believes the lie or is caught in it.  Yet, as long as we're not caught, society will reward, and even demand, such fabrications.

We see one of the major problems in "going stealth" or "passing" when we look at the law.  I used to believe that if I were to "pass" well enough, I would never have to worry about transgender equality:  If I had to throw my (all-too-considerable) weight behind a movement, it would be feminism.

Well, I still tell anyone who knows about my history that there's nothing like becoming a woman to turn you into a feminist.   While I may not have to worry about daycare (unless, of course, I adopt), I still have to think about other women's workplace and lifestyle issues because they affect me.  

One of those issues is discrimination. While a prospective employer may know nothing of my history from seeing me, and nothing of my experience of life from my resume and cover letter, he or she could always find out about those things without searching very long.  Even if I never wrote this blog, or any of my articles or essays about transitioning or living as a woman, a prospective employer could do a simple background check.

So, for that matter, could a health insurer, or any health-care provider.  Or prospective landlord or lender.  Even trans people whom other people simply cannot imagine in their birth genders run into discrimination and other difficulties as a result of having had to live their previous lives.

Those are reasons why I now realize that I simply cannot ignore the issue of LGBT rights, or think that including protections for transgenders in civil rights laws is not as important as some other issues.  Simply distancing myself from my old life will not insulate me from it.  I made my transition and had my surgery so I could live as the woman I am, but there is no point in denying that some of my experiences are different from those of other women.  More to the point, my body has a different history from those of other women:  Even if I am no longer at risk for, say, prostate cancer, I may still need treatment for some residual condition.  (Trans men encounter this when they need screening for cervical or breast cancer.)  On top of that--as I learned early in my transition--there are some medical care providers who won't treat you, give you inappropriate treatments or will harass and humiliate you because of who you are.

Those are just some of the reasons why, no matter how good we are at "passing" and how little semblance our current lives bear to our former ones, we still need to work for equality, whether it's by getting language added to the 1964 Civil Rights Act or our employers to adopt fair and equitable policies.  As someone who's spent more than her share of time in classrooms, I can tell you that simply passing doesn't mean that you're equal to anyone else.  At least, you haven't gotten there yet.

MLK And LGBT People

Sometimes President Obama seems to think he's channeling Martin Luther King Jr. when he doesn't think he's a reincarnation of President Lincoln.  I guess he can do worse for role models although, aside from his being black and his stated belief in civil rights, I don't see much connection between Barack and MLK.  The latter was a visionary, a prophet.  Whatever his merits, Obama is a politician.  That means MLK adopted views that aligned with what he perceived and exprienced; Obama is thinking about votes and donations.

I don't mean this as a condemnation of Obama.  After all, he did change his position on gay marriage.  However, it's hard not to notice that he opposed it during his first campaign for the Presidency; he finally came out in support of it after Vice-President Biden expressed his.  

On the other hand, he did voice his support.  Plus, even though he could have been more proactive, he's done more to support transgender people than all of the presidents before him did.  Then again, the best of his predecessors did nothing; the others did what they could to make our lives more difficult.

But, as I said, Obama deserves some credit.  And, perhaps, he can claim MLK's mantel after all.  Nobody knows for sure whether King would have supported LGBT equality, as he was slain more than a year before the Stonewall Rebellion.  But we do know that he never said anything negative about queer people, and didn't countenance a "literal" or "fundamentalist" reading of the Bible that interprets Leviticus and other books of the Bible as injunctions against loving people of one's own sex.

Furthermore, King allowed Bayard Rustin, a friend who happened to be openly gay, to serve as one of his closest advisors.  Plus, he when he wrote an advice column for Ebony magazine, he responded in a sensitive (though, not surprisingly, pastoral) way to a letter from a boy who confessed his feelings toward other boys.  Given the time--1958--it was a very tolerant and forward-thinking response.

Still, some insist that King would not have considered LGBT rights the next logical step in the civil rights movement.  One of them is his own daughter, Rev. Bernice King.  In 2005, she led a march her father's grave while calling for a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. During a speech at a church meeting in New Zealand, she said her father "did not take a bullet for gay marriage."

But King's widow, Coretta Scott King, vocally supported gay rights.  One of her closest aides was gay.  (Are you seeing a pattern here?)  Furthermore, the FBI tapped his telephone conversations, and he was one of the most surveilled people on the planet.  Yet no one could find a conversation, sermon, speech, lecture or letter of his that expressed any sort of anti-gay sentiment.

Given what I've seen and read, I think that if MLK had lived longer, he would have made LGBT equality part of his civil-rights platform.  After all, he didn't turn away anyone else whose rights were denied or trampled.  I suspect that, being a preacher from the South in the time in which he lived, he simply didn't think much about LGBT people because, well, they hadn't made it onto his radar yet.  The same could be said for any number of other people of good will from that time.

How Could I Ever Break Up Your Family?

If I recall correctly, one of the characters in Alberto Moravia's The Conformist (and in Bernardo Bertolucci's film based on the novel) says something to the effect that in Italy, people can rationalize anything in the name of their families.


That's more or less what any number of Italian-Americans (Remember, I speak as one!), from church officials to Mafiosi, have done.  However, in America, instead of one's own family, one can use "The Family" to rationalize all manner of prejudice and hatred.


To wit:  Nearly all of the opposition to equal rights for transgenders (or, for that matter, gays, lesbians and bisexuals) includes some group or another with the word "family" in its name.  It's happening now in Maine, where a group called the Maine Family Policy Council is trying to get the state to roll back some of the protections for transgenders it encoded in its laws.  The Massachusetts Family Council is trying to do the same thing in their state, and in Connecticut, "family" groups are trying to prevent that state from passing a gender-inclusive anti-discrimination bill.  Similar scenarios are playing out in other states that have passed, or are trying to pass, such legislation.


How, pray tell, does protecting the rights of LGBT people threaten the family?  If a man marries a man, or a woman a woman, I don't see how that undermines heterosexual families.  If anything, allowing same-sex marriages might prevent a few broken homes, as some young person who, not so long ago, might have entered into a sham marriage in order to "fit in" will have the option of creating a family on his or her own terms.  I think such a union would have a better chance than some marriage that's based on nothing more than guilt or misplaced familial or societal expectations.


And I don't know how making it illegal for someone to fire or evict me, or to commit violence against me, because I had an "M" on by birth certificate will break up anyone's family or persuade some kid to be like me unless he or she feels about gender identity as I did.


Finally, even if you define marriage as "a man and a woman," and believe that is the basis of a family, I still don't understand how I can be such a threat to it.  I never stopped any heterosexual couple from getting married or having kids, and I never broke up anyone's marriage or family. Well, I've been blamed for the latter, but I still don't understand how I came to have such power.


If anyone can explain how undergoing having undergone my transition, or loving whomever I love, is such a threat to the formation or stability of someone's family, I would be very interested in hearing it. 

What Would MLK Do?

Forty-three years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death.  It's the first assassination of a public figure that I can recall:  I was nine years old at the time.


Of course, anyone who concerns him or herself with equality has to think about King.  Thinking about him invariably brings to mind the man who is often thought to be his opposite:  Malcolm X, who was also gunned down.


Most people who are working, or have worked, for the betterment of their group of people see King as an icon.  The fact that he faced the institutionalized (and, too often, legal) discrimination of his time is reason enough to venerate him.  However, I think that it's often assumed that King would be in support of some cause or another.  The same people might have wanted to claim Malcolm X as an ally, except that they see him as someone who pursued his ends through violence, and advised others to do the same.


I think it might be fair to assume that King would favor LGBT equality.  However, I'm not so sure of what he'd think of same-sex marriage, or even legal protections for transgender people.  After all, he was ordained as a minister in a conservative Protestant denomination.  Then again, his views on LGBT equality might have evolved had he lived longer.  There was evidence that some of his views, or at least his focus, was starting to change in the days before his assassination.  He had treated the fight for equality mainly as a legal and moral issue.  However, it is said that by the end of his life, he was starting to think about the economics of the issue more.  Perhaps he understood, as James Baldwin said more than half a century ago, that no community can hope to improve its lot when even the local supermarket isn't owned by someone in the community and the profits are going to some faraway place.


Malcolm X understood that from the beginning of his days as an activist.  He said that, in essence, African-Americans had to develop their own economy, which would be separate from the larger American/Western economy.  He did not want, or expect any assistance from the government or any other established institution.  Ultimately, I believe that he had the right idea:  Groups of people, if they want to better themselves, ultimately must establish their own stores, banks, schools and whatever.  However, that wasn't possible in his time because African-Americans and other marginalized communities didn't have the resources necessary to bring about such a system. 


King was beginning to understand that.  And, after the journey to Mecca he took the year before he was killed,  Malcolm was starting to realize that in order to bring about economic, not to mention ethical and spiritual, justice, unity rather than separatism was needed.  So he started to see the need for a universal brotherhood that would include alliances and friendships with sympathetic whites and people of other races.  That, of course, was Martin Luther King's territiory.


Would they have joined forces?  (Interestingly, their widows became very close friends.)  Would their alliances and brotherhoods have include LGBT people.   Somehow the notion that they would have done those things seems not so far-fetched.