February 27, 2012
Brandon White
While Ward and likeminded Facebook Rainbow Soldiers”gay Atlanta scenesters have such super-fab handles as JaeMar Larue Kardashian-Thomas and Keith Tastee Dynasty-Dupree“were fighting the good fight, police rounded up the three beating suspects, all of them in their teens”Christopher Cain, Dareal Demare Williams, and Dorian Moragne. Both Williams and Moragne were charged with Aggravated Assault and Robbery”the latter presumably for snatching White’s cell phone during the beating.
But last week when Devin Barrington-Ward decided to interview Moragne’s family about the incident, the story took a queer turn indeed.
On Friday, Ward was again on local TV, but this time insinuating that Brandon White had lied about not knowing his attackers. Moragne’s mother and lawyer apparently told Ward that Brandon White had been assaulted because his cell phone contained video footage of one or more of the attackers performing homosexual acts.
Terik Jackson of Change Atlanta told TV reporters:
That’s why the cell phone was a target. They didn’t just beat him up because he was gay.
Another man featured on the broadcast claimed:
It’s a video of somebody performing a sexual act with one or a few of these young men….Brandon was basically agitating these young men about personally exposing them for being DL gay…on the Down Low, possibly gay. The young men responded because they don’t want their families to know.
Ward and his tireless civil-rights unicorns seem to be arguing that if White was attacked for revenge rather than his sexual orientation, it ceases to be a hate crime. I disagree. If the new account is true, this was an attack spurred on by self-hatred”the funniest kind of hate crime there is.
On Saturday, Change Atlanta and Moragne’s mother held yet another public rally urging for truth, justice, righteousness, healing, reconciliation, hope, hopefulness, change, and never-ending clichés. But according to Brandon White’s lawyer, her client was not invited. Change Atlanta has apparently shifted its sympathies from the beating victim to one of the alleged assailants. Brandon White appears to have betrayed a community far more important than the gay one.
America’s black community, such as it is, isn”t quite known for openly embracing white ideas of what constitutes “gayness.” And when it comes to identity politics and the all-important hierarchy of victimization, blackness seems to trump gayness every time. Reverend Al Sharpton still manages to have a career posing as an anti-hate warrior despite referring to Western Civ icons as “Greek homos“ and calling a talk-show combatant a “punk faggot.”
No matter how it may make white progressives squirm out of their gold-trimmed paisley jockey briefs to hear this, polls and voting patterns show American blacks to be “the nation’s most homophobic population.” According to a report from the National Black Justice Coalition, blacks are “more likely than other groups to believe that homosexuality is wrong, that sexual orientation is a choice, and that sexual orientation can be changed.”
Professor Griff, former Minister of Information for radical black hip-hop group Public Enemy, once said, “there’s not a word in any African language which describes homosexual….There are no such words. They didn”t exist.”
This doesn”t mean that same-sex activity doesn”t exist (or”cough”isn”t rampant!) in black communities. It only means that blacks generally tend to deny the very existence of a phenomenon called “homosexuality.” According to observers of “Down Low” culture”the black version of being “in the closet””a “faggot” is typically seen as a white male who acts like a girl. “Gay culture” is seen as the sole product of weak white perverts actin” a fool again. But two butch black males can aggressively engage in the sweatiest sodomitical acts without either of them being homosexuals”so long as it’s kept on the “Down Low,” i.e., no one sees the cell-phone videos.
If there’s one thing worse among blacks than a “faggot,” it’s a snitch. It’s as if by threatening to “out” a few street-corner gangsta numskulls, Brandon White wanted to shame the entire black “community,” or at least its carefully cultivated self-image. Too late now. The fags are out of the bag.
Unfortunately for the “community,” Down Low culture is a primary agent of HIV infection for American blacks. One study revealed that among all groups of closeted males, blacks are more than three times as likely to be HIV-positive. In terms of HIV infection, blacks are overrepresented by almost 400%. So in terms of demonstrable damage to the “community,” the fact that Brandon White’s assailants could be HIV-positive and murderously infecting their unwitting female partners probably far outweighs an occasional gay-bashing that doesn”t even leave cuts or swelling four days after the attack.
Just don”t expect any of the activists to acknowledge it. If it’s a simple choice between defending “the community” and saving it, they”re acting a little defensive. Where things really count, I”d say the activists are being far too passive.
