This is an article I submitted following the very emotional events of National Coming Out Days in 1998, then withdrew at the urging of several people on campus. I now believe that doing so was a mistake.
Amid the celebrations of National Coming Out Days this year, we also saw violence and hate on our campus and around the nation directed at LBGT people and issues. In what I say here I am not making little of our queer community response to the incident at the rock on Thursday of NCOD, or our response to the death of Matthew Shepard the following Monday. These events affected me very deeply. But even as I participated in some events, a voice in my head was nagging me to take a look at what I was doing, and why.
I was the first person to call the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to report the defacing of the NCOD paintings on the rock. But I have never called DPS to report racist graffiti; I've accepted it as part of the environment on campus, or at least as someone else's problem. Is that right? Is that what I want to see from other people when it comes to issues that more directly affect me?
When I heard of Matthew Shepard's death that Monday morning, I cried, because I could so easily imagine the same thing happening to any number of people I knew. I question now just how similar to myself a victim needs to be, for me to have that kind of reaction. I'm going to be watching myself, and my reactions, to learn what I can so that no human being is so much a stranger to me that I cannot be moved when I hear of their pain or their death.
That last sentence sounded really good, didn't it? Do you believe I can do that? I think it's pompous bullshit; I've never learned how to do that, I don't even know how to begin.
I am disturbed that our vigil took even one hour from the events NAISO (Native American Indian Student Association) already had planned for 'Columbus Day.' Have we not already taken enough from the first occupants of this land? Yes, permission was asked and received, but what power dynamic existed in that parlay? Should we even have asked?
I grew up in Oklahoma, a state only forty-five years old when I was born, with the largest Native America Indian population in the country. I bet you can guess without much effort that I had predominantly white European descendants as schoolmates in the Tulsa public school system, where we put on 'cowboys and indians' skits in grade school. I shudder when I look back on my memories for evidence that I was in any way not part of the silencing and oppression of Oklahoma's native populations. I don't want any more memories like that.
I've been in the campus Pride March the past three years, and in the homecoming parade this year. Lots of fun. But when I recall the details, who marched with us, what our signs say, and what we yell at people along the way, I feel we need to do some serious thinking about the messages we are conveying. Are we truly coming across as proud? Or as a small group of arrogant, privileged people doing something that few others can get away with?
One of the hard things about being white and dealing with racism is that we are always in a position to plausibly defend our actions, which can make doing so itself a racist action.
[Written in fall 1998.]