race/ethnicity: prejudice/discrimination

Originally Posted at Discoveries

After the 2016 Presidential election in the United States, Brexit in the UK, and a wave of far-right election bids across Europe, white supremacist organizations are re-emerging in the public sphere and taking advantage of new opportunities to advocate for their vision of society. While these groups have always been quietly organizing in private enclaves and online forums, their renewed public presence has many wondering how they keep drawing members. Recent research in American Sociological Review by Pete Simi, Kathleen Blee, Matthew DeMichele, and Steven Windisch sheds light on this question with a new theory—people who try to leave these groups can get “addicted” to hate, and leaving requires a long period of recovery.

The authors draw on 89 life history interviews with former members of white supremacist groups. These interviews were long, in-depth discussions of their pasts, lasting between four and eight hours each. After analyzing over 10,000 pages of interview transcripts, the authors found a common theme emerging from the narratives. Membership in a supremacist group took on a “master status”—an identity that was all-encompassing and touched on every part of a member’s life. Because of this deep involvement, many respondents described leaving these groups like a process of addiction recovery. They would experience momentary flashbacks of hateful thoughts, and even relapses into hateful behaviors that required therapeutic “self talk” to manage.

We often hear about new members (or infiltrators) of extremist groups getting “in too deep” to where they cannot leave without substantial personal risk. This research helps us understand how getting out might not be enough, because deep group commitments don’t just disappear when people leave.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, or on BlueSky.

Content Note: Some slurs in historical context below the break. 

Since the white nationalist march on Charlottesville, VA, in August, many cities in the South are grappling with what to do about Confederate monuments in their public spaces. The argument, which I agree with fully, is that Confederate monuments celebrate people who dedicated their lives to the oppression of people of color and should be removed. While there is support for removing Confederate statues among many Northern liberals, treating Confederate generals as the only obvious indicators of state-sanctioned racism perpetuates the notion of Southern exceptionalism. 

The truth is that you do not need a white hood or the Stars and Bars to be a white supremacist. In Philadelphia, the debate over a monument is not about the statue of a general from 1865 but about a 1972 Democrat Mayor.

Across the street from City Hall, right in the entrance of the Municipal Service Building, a statue of Frank Rizzo towers nine feet high. Frank “The General” Rizzo served as Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the Mayor of Philadelphia from 1972 to 1980. Rizzo was known as a pull no punches kind of guy. During his reelection campaign of 1975 he famously told his adversaries, “Just wait after November, you’ll have a front row seat because I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” His brutal, and racially motivated, legacy on the Philadelphia Police department is still felt to this day.

Rizzo was born and raised in South Philadelphia in a home with a beat cop father. After dropping out of high school and briefly joining the navy, Rizzo joined the Philadelphia police, making a name for himself as “a no-nonsense cop who swung first and asked questions later.” In 1967, Rizzo become police commissioner. A year after he led police officers to a school administration building where black students were protesting for black history in their school curriculum. Rizzo told the cops, “get their black asses.”

The image that best captures Rizzo’s tenure as police chief is from 1970. A week before a Black Panther convention that was intended to take place at Temple University, police officers raided a group of Panthers and conducted strip searchers on the activists in the streets. The picture (content warning) was printed on the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News the day after.

In 1972, after a campaign in which he was endorsed by a KKK spinoff organization in Pennsylvania and in which his slogan was “vote white,” Frank Rizzo assumed the office of the Mayor of Philadelphia. The tenure of Rizzo as mayor could be thought of a series of civil right lawsuits. In 1975, the court issued a consent decree after a suit against Rizzo and the city for the failure to hire black fire fighters. In 1976, Rizzo was sued for violating the Fair Housing Act. In 1979, the Department of Justice filed what was called “an unprecedented civil suit” against Rizzo and the city for “condoning systematic police brutality.” These are just a few examples.

In 1978, the KKK awarded Rizzo the “Racist Hero of the Month award.”

After a long and failed campaign to seek a change in the City’s charter that would allow him to run for a third term, Rizzo left office in 1980. He continued his career as a “guardian of white rights.”

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Philadelphia Councilwoman Helen Gym tweeted: “All around the country, we’re fighting to remove the monuments to slavery & racism. Philly, we have work to do. Take the Rizzo Statue down.” This wasn’t the first time that a call was made to remove the Rizzo statue in Philly. Groups of activists have been protesting the statue every Thursday for the past year.

Southern exceptionalism is the notion that the group of Southern states of the United States, the former Confederacy, is an exceptionally racist entity that America battles with every few generations. By blaming the South for racism while ignoring the way the establishment, law-enforcement, and large parts of white America in the North treated people of color, Northern liberals absolve themselves of any moral wrongdoing. Historian Clarence Lang writes that Southern exceptionalism “celebrates the inevitable triumph of U.S. democratic values, and ignores the structural role of inequality in building and maintaining the U.S. nation-state.”

We cannot allow the conversation around confederate monuments to ignore the racism of America as a whole and scapegoat racism on the south. 

We must expand our political and sociological imagination about racism and white supremacy beyond the South and the Confederacy. Philadelphia is doing exactly that. Recently, the Office of the Mayor of Philadelphia published a call for ideas on what should be done with the problematic statue. The call received hundreds of ideas and now Philadelphians wait for a decision on the statue’s future.

At the end of the day, changes in law, policies, practice and wealth distribution will dismantle the legacy and presence of racism and oppression in the United States. Taking down monuments is a way to publicly  affirm a commitment to that goal.

There is no Confederate statue in Philadelphia, at least none that I know of. Taking down the Rizzo statue in the city of brotherly love will be a victory for progressives everywhere. Just as white progressives from the North support struggles to remove monuments in the South, they must identify the “Rizzo statue” in their towns and remove it.

Abraham Gutman is an Israeli writer and economist currently based in Philadelphia. His writing focuses on Israel/Palestine, race in America, policing, and housing. Abraham currently works at the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University where he conducts research on housing policy. All opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter @abgutman.

Originally posted at Montclair Socioblog.

Why did White House advisor Stephen Miller call CNN reporter Jake Acosta “cosmopolitan”?

At the end of last week’s press briefing, Acosta asked about the Trump administration’s new proposals on immigration – reducing the total number of green cards by half and giving preference to people who are more skilled and people who speak English well.

ACOSTA:   The Statue of Liberty has always been a beacon of hope to the world for people to send their people to this country. They’re not always going to speak English.. . . Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

MILLER: I have to say, I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree.

Cosmopolitan? Acosta’s question suggests the exact opposite – provinicialism. A worldly and sophisticated person would know that countries in Asia and Africa have English as their national or dominant language and that people all over the world learn English as a second language. Only a rube would think that English proficiency was limited to Great Britain and Australia.

What did Miller mean by cosmopolitan? The question sent me back to the article that put “cosmopolitan” into the sociological lexicon – Alvin Gouldner’s 1957 “Cosmopolitans and Locals.”

 Cosmopolitans:

• low on loyalty to the employing organization
• high on commitment to specialized role skills
• likely to use an outer reference group orientation

Locals: 

• high on loyalty to the employing organization
• low on commitment to specialized role skills
• likely to use an inner reference group orientation.

Gouldner was writing about people in organizations. Miller is concerned with politics. The common element here is loyalty. Miller, along with Steve Bannon, engineered Trump’s “America first” doctrine, and by “cosmopolitans” he seems to mean people who are not putting America first. On immigration, people like Acosta are thinking about what might be good for an uneducated but hard-working Guatemalan, when instead they should be thinking only about what’s good for the US.

Jeff Greenfield put it this way at Politico: “It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality.”

The alt-Right has been using cosmopolitan for a while now, and perhaps it was Miller’s familiarity with White nationalist discourse that made the word so available as a put-down of Acosta even though Acosta’s question seemed based on the kind of ignorance about the world that is much respected over on the right.

Like “America first,” “cosmopolitan” has a history of holding hands with anti-Semitism. In Stalin’s Russia, the phrase “rootless cosmopolitan” was a synonym for Jew, and he murdered quite a few of them. In the US today, the antipathy to “cosmopolitan” embodies this same fear of rootlessness and the same dislike of Jews. Here is one website’s take on yesterday’s press briefing:

The twist here is that Acosta, the alleged cosmopolitan, is not Jewish, but Miller is. (The alt-Right uses the triple parentheses around a name to designate a Jew.) I don’t know how Miller resolves the dissonance other than to claim that he has never had anything to do with White nationalists (a claim that is probably false).  For the anti-Semites, the website has this:

While not a Jew himself, Acosta is the end result of the education and programming pushed by the Rootless Cosmopolitans wherever they dwell – even Stalin grew wise to them near the end of his life.

So Acosta cosmopolitanism came from being educated by Jews.

Miller and other Jews must surely understand the overtones of the term. And finally, let’s throw in a good word for Stalin: an anti-Semitic Russian autocrat – what’s not to like?

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

Originally posted at Scatterplot.

There has been a lot of great discussion, research, and reporting on the promise and pitfalls of algorithmic decisionmaking in the past few years. As Cathy O’Neil nicely shows in her Weapons of Math Destruction (and associated columns), algorithmic decisionmaking has become increasingly important in domains as diverse as credit, insurance, education, and criminal justice. The algorithms O’Neil studies are characterized by their opacity, their scale, and their capacity to damage.

Much of the public debate has focused on a class of algorithms employed in criminal justice, especially in sentencing and parole decisions. As scholars like Bernard Harcourt and Jonathan Simon have noted, criminal justice has been a testing ground for algorithmic decisionmaking since the early 20th century. But most of these early efforts had limited reach (low scale), and they were often published in scholarly venues (low opacity). Modern algorithms are proprietary, and are increasingly employed to decide the sentences or parole decisions for entire states.

“Code of Silence,” Rebecca Wexler’s new piece in Washington Monthly, explores one such influential algorithm: COMPAS (also the study of an extensive, if contested, ProPublica report). Like O’Neil, Wexler focuses on the problem of opacity. The COMPAS algorithm is owned by a for-profit company, Northpointe, and the details of the algorithm are protected by trade secret law. The problems here are both obvious and massive, as Wexler documents.

Beyond the issue of secrecy, though, one issue struck me in reading Wexler’s account. One of the main justifications for a tool like COMPAS is that it reduces subjectivity in decisionmaking. The problems here are real: we know that decisionmakers at every point in the criminal justice system treat white and black individuals differently, from who gets stopped and frisked to who receives the death penalty. Complex, secretive algorithms like COMPAS are supposed to help solve this problem by turning the process of making consequential decisions into a mechanically objective one – no subjectivity, no bias.

But as Wexler’s reporting shows, some of the variables that COMPAS considers (and apparently considers quite strongly) are just as subjective as the process it was designed to replace. Questions like:

Based on the screener’s observations, is this person a suspected or admitted gang member?

In your neighborhood, have some of your friends or family been crime victims?

How often do you have barely enough money to get by?

Wexler reports on the case of Glenn Rodríguez, a model inmate who was denied parole on the basis of his puzzlingly high COMPAS score:

Glenn Rodríguez had managed to work around this problem and show not only the presence of the error, but also its significance. He had been in prison so long, he later explained to me, that he knew inmates with similar backgrounds who were willing to let him see their COMPAS results. “This one guy, everything was the same except question 19,” he said. “I thought, this one answer is changing everything for me.” Then another inmate with a “yes” for that question was reassessed, and the single input switched to “no.” His final score dropped on a ten-point scale from 8 to 1. This was no red herring.

So what is question 19? The New York State version of COMPAS uses two separate inputs to evaluate prison misconduct. One is the inmate’s official disciplinary record. The other is question 19, which asks the evaluator, “Does this person appear to have notable disciplinary issues?”

Advocates of predictive models for criminal justice use often argue that computer systems can be more objective and transparent than human decisionmakers. But New York’s use of COMPAS for parole decisions shows that the opposite is also possible. An inmate’s disciplinary record can reflect past biases in the prison’s procedures, as when guards single out certain inmates or racial groups for harsh treatment. And question 19 explicitly asks for an evaluator’s opinion. The system can actually end up compounding and obscuring subjectivity.

This story was all too familiar to me from Emily Bosk’s work on similar decisionmaking systems in the child welfare system where case workers must answer similarly subjective questions about parental behaviors and problems in order to produce a seemingly objective score used to make decisions about removing children from home in cases of abuse and neglect. A statistical scoring system that takes subjective inputs (and it’s hard to imagine one that doesn’t) can’t produce a perfectly objective decision. To put it differently: this sort of algorithmic decisionmaking replaces your biases with someone else’s biases.

Dan Hirschman is a professor of sociology at Brown University. He writes for scatterplot and is an editor of the ASA blog Work in Progress. You can follow him on Twitter.

President Trump recently declared that Obamacare is “essentially dead” after the House of Representatives passed legislation to replace existing health care policy. While members of the Senate are uncertain about the future of the proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA) — which could ultimately result in as many as 24 million people losing their health insurance and those with pre-existing conditions facing increasing health coverage costs — a growing number of Americans, especially women, are sure that the legislation will be bad for their health, if enacted.

On the same day that the House passed the Republican-backed plan, for example, a friend of mine revealed on social media that she had gotten her yearly mammogram and physical examination. She posted that the preventative care did not cost anything under her current employer benefit plan, but would have been prohibitively expensive without insurance coverage, a problem faced by many women across the United States. For instance, the American Cancer Society reports that in 2013 38% of uninsured women had a mammogram in the last two years, while 70% of those with insurance did the same. These disparities are certainly alarming, but the problem is likely to worsen under the proposed AHCA.

Breast care screenings are currently protected under the Affordable Care Act’s Essential Health Benefits, which also covers birth control, as well as pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care. The proposed legislation supported by House Republicans and Donald Trump would allow individual states to eliminate or significantly reduce essential benefits for individuals seeking to purchase health insurance on the open market.

Furthermore, the current version of the AHCA would enable individual states to seek waivers, permitting insurance companies to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions, when they purchase policies on the open market. Making health insurance exorbitantly expensive could have devastating results for women, like those with a past breast cancer diagnosis, who are at risk of facing recurrence. Over 40,000 women already die each year from breast cancer in our country, with African-American women being disproportionately represented among these deaths.

Such disparities draw attention to the connection between inequality and health, patterns long documented by sociologists. Recent work by David R. Williams and his colleagues, for instance, examines how racism and class inequality help to explain why the breast cancer mortality rate in 2012 was 42% higher for Black women than for white women. Limiting affordable access to health care — which the AHCA would most surely do — would exacerbate these inequalities, and further jeopardize the health and lives of the most socially and economically vulnerable among us.

Certainly, everyone who must purchase insurance in the private market, particularly those with pre-existing conditions stand to lose under the AHCA. But women are especially at risk. Their voices have been largely excluded from discussion regarding health care reform, as demonstrated by the photograph of Donald Trump, surrounded by eight male staff members in January, signing the “global gag order,” which restricted women’s reproductive rights worldwide. Or as illustrated by the photo tweeted  by Vice-President Pence in March, showing him and the President, with over twenty male politicians, discussing possible changes to Essential Health Benefits, changes which could restrict birth control coverage, in addition to pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care. And now, as all 13 Senators slated to work on revisions to the AHCA are men.

Women cannot afford to be silent about this legislation. None of us can. The AHCA is bad for our health and lives.

Jacqueline Clark, PhD is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Ripon College. Her research interests include inequalities, the sociology of health and illness, and the sociology of jobs, work, and organizations.

Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided. By definition, political parties have differences of opinion. But these divisions have widened. Twenty years ago, your opinions on political issues did not line up the way we have come to expect them. Today, when you find you share an opinion with someone about systemic racism, you’re more likely to have like minds about environmental policies, welfare reform, and how they feel about the poor, gay and lesbian people, immigrants and immigration, and much more. In other words, Democrats and Republicans have become more ideologically consistent in recent history.

A recent Pew Report reported that in 1994, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat on a political values scale. By 2014, 92% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat. Democrats have become more consistently liberal in their political values and Republicans have become more consistently conservative. And this has led to increasing political polarization (see HERE and HERE for smart posts on this process by Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharpe). You can see political polarization happening below.

You might think ideological commitments naturally come in groupings. But there are lots of illogical pairings without natural connections. Why, for instance, should how you feel about school vouchers be related to how you feel about global warming, whether police officers use excessive force against Black Americans, or whether displays of military strength are the best method of ensuring peace?  The four issues are completely separate. But, if your Facebook feed looks anything like mine, knowing someone’s opinion about any one of these issues gives you enough information to feel reasonably confident predicting their opinions about the other three. That’s what ideological consistency looks like.

Consider how this process affects understandings of important systems of social inequality that structure American society. Discrimination is an issue that sociologists have studied in great detail. We know that discrimination exists and plays a fundamental role in the reproduction of all manner of social inequalities. But, people have opinions about various forms of discrimination as well—even if they’re unsupported by research or data. And while you might guess that many Americans’ opinions about one form of discrimination will be predictive of their opinions about other forms, there’s not necessarily a logical reason for that to be true. But it is.

The following chart visualizes the proportions of Americans who say there is “a lot of discrimination” against Black people, gay and lesbian people, immigrants, transgender people, as well as the proportions of Americans who oppose laws requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex at birth. And you can see how Americans identifying as Democrat and Republican compare.

The majority of Americans understand that social inequalities exist and that discrimination against socially marginalized groups is still a serious problem. By that, I mean that more than half of Americans believe these things to be true. And data support their beliefs. But look at the differences between Democrats’ and Republicans’ opinions about important forms of discrimination in U.S. society. The gap is huge. While just less than 1 in 3 Republicans feels that there is a lot of discrimination against Black people in the U.S., almost 8 in 10 Democrats support that statement. That’s what political polarization looks like. And Pew found that the trend is even more exaggerated among voters.

Republicans and Democrats are not just divided about whether and what to do about forms of social inequality. They’re divided about whether these inequalities exist. And that is an enormous problem.

Tristan Bridges, PhD is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Inequality, and Change with C.J. Pascoe and studies gender and sexual identity and inequality. You can follow him on Twitter here. Tristan also blogs regularly at Inequality by (Interior) Design.

Recently Nadya Tolokonnikova was interviewed by NPR about Pussy Riot’s latest video. In it, Tolokonnikova explores themes of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny and its influence on governance through a graphic and violent imagined America under a Trump presidency. Trigger warning for… most things:

Tolokonnikova is making a statement about American politics, but she is clearly informed by Putin’s performance of masculinity and how that has translated into policy measures and electoral success. When he took office in early 2000, Putin needed to legitimize his power and counteract the global impression of Russian weakness after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The projection of masculinity was a PR strategy: fishing and riding a horse shirtless, shooting a Siberian tiger, and emerging from the Black Sea in full scuba gear. These actions combined with bellicose foreign policy initiatives to portray Putin as assertive and unrelenting.

In the book, Sex, Politics, & Putin, Valerie Sperling makes a case that his strategy was successful. She investigates the political culture under Putin and argues there is popular support for Putin’s version of masculinity and its implications for femininity, even among young women. As a consequence, the gender and sexual politics of Russia have deviated from those of wider Europe, as indicated by the rise of the Russian slur “gayropa.”

The machismo and misogyny embodied by Putin have also translated into policy: the “gay propaganda” law, for example, and the ban on international adoption to gay couples. In his 2013 address to the Federal Assembly, Putin framed these policies as necessary to combat the “destruction of traditional values.”

While there is no systematic research on the role of masculinity in Trump’s rise to the national political stage in the US just yet, and while the nature of the link between Putin and Trump remains unclear (if one truly even exists), we should consider Putin’s Russia a cautionary tale. His performances of masculinity – his so-called “locker room talk,” discussion of genitalia size, and conduct towards pageant contestants — could go from publicity stunt to public support to actual policy measures. His bombastic language about defeating ISIS and the need for more American “strength” at home and abroad, for example, could easily translate into foreign policy.

Coverage of Trump during this election cycle is credited for hundreds of millions in profits for news agencies and Trump himself has enjoyed an unprecedented level of coverage. While Trump has benefited from far more airtime than Putin did in 2000, he has not been able to find the same level of popular support. At least not yet. When Putin rose to status as a national figure in Russia his approval rating was approximately 60%, and it grew from there to levels most American politicians only dream of. If Trump is willing and able to adopt other components of Putin’s leadership style, there is precedent for the possibility that his presidency could truly turn American back.

It was “Latino night” at a gay club. When the story finally broke, that’s all I heard. Orlando’s tragedy at the Pulse puts Latina/o, Latin American, Afro-Latinos, and Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean LGBT people front and center. Otherness mounts Otherness, even in the Whitewashing of the ethno-racial background of those killed by the media, and the seemingly compassionate expressions of love by religious folk. The excess of difference—to be Black or Brown (or to be both) and to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (or queer, as some of us see ourselves) serves to shock, through difference, how news are reported. Difference – the very basis of feminist and ethnic politics in the 20^th century – has been co-opted and ignored, sanitized even, to attempt to reach a level of a so-called “humanity” that is not accomplishable. We know this, but we don’t talk about it.

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Don’t get me wrong: empathy is essential for most social codes of order to functionally sustain any given society. To pay one’s respects for others’ losses, however, does not mean that we think of those lost as equals. Liberal people demanding that sexuality be less important in the news (and thus removed from the coverage) is an inherent violence toward those who partied together because there was real love among them, in that club, for who they were – and are. Religious righters may spread hate while trying to give the illusion of compassion, but they do so in a clear hierarchical, paternalistic way – that is hypocrisy, and we must call it out every chance we get. But this goes beyond liberal notions and conservative hypocrisy – even while Anderson Cooper wept when reading the list of those killed, he knows the distance between himself and many of those at the club is enough to build a classed, raced, and social wall between them. Clearly, empathy is not enough.

To be Latina/o in the US – increasingly another Latin American country, again – is to breathe in hate, to face retaliation, to be questioned at every turn about our allegiances, tested on our sense of citizenship, pushed in our capacity to love the nation and thus hate “like the rest” (a testament to the masculinity of the nation). At a minimum, to be Latina/o guarantees one to be looked at oddly, as if one was out of place, misplaced, inappropriately placed. Simply by being, Latinas/os rupture the logics of normalcy in USAmerica. To be Latina/o and LGBT is to disrupt the logics of racial formation, of racial purity, of the Black and White binary still ruling this country – all while de-gendering and performing an excess (of not only gender, but sexuality) that overflows and overwhelms “America.” In being Latino and queer, some of us aim to be misfits that disrupt a normalcy of regulatory ways of being.

A break between queer and América erupted this past weekend – in Orlando, a city filled with many Latin Americans; a city that, like many others, depends on the backs of Brown folk to get the work done. Put another way, Orlando’s tragedy created a bridge between different countries and newer readings of queerness – Orlando as in an extension of Latin América here. Queer-Orlando-América is an extension of so many Latin American cities as sites of contention, where to be LGBT is both celebrated and chastised – no more, or less, than homophobia in the US.

Enough has been said about how the Pulse is a place where people of color who desired others like themselves, or are trans, go to dance their fears away, and dream on hope for a better day. Too little has been said about the structural conditions faced by these Puerto Ricans, these immigrants, these mixed raced queer folks – some of whom were vacationing, many of whom lived in Florida. Many were struggling for a better (financial, social, political – all of the above) life. Assumptions have also been made about their good fortune as well. Do not assume that they left their countries seeking freedom – for many who might have experienced homophobia back home, still do here; though they have added racism to their everyday lived experience. Of course, there are contradictions on that side of queer-Orlando-América, too; yet same sex marriage was achieved in half a dozen countries before the US granted it a year ago. This is the world upside down, you say, since these advances – this progress – should have happened in the US first.Wake up. América is in you and you are no longer “America” but América.

You see, this is how we become queer-Orlando-América: we make it a verb, an action. It emerges where the tongues twist, where code switching (in Spanish/English/Spanglish) is like a saché-ing on the dance floor, where gender and race are blurry and yet so clear, where Whiteness isn’t front and center – in fact it becomes awkward in this sea of racial, gendered, and sexual differences. This queer-Orlando-América (a place neither “here,” nor “there,” where belonging is something you carry with you, in you, and may activate on some dance floor given the right people, even strangers, and real love – especially from strangers) was triggered – was released – by violence. But not a new violence, certainly not a Muslim-led violence. Violence accumulated over violence – historically, ethnically, specific to transgender people, to Brown people, to effeminate male-bodied people, to the power of femininity in male and female bodies, to immigrants, to the colonized who speak up, to the Spanglish that ruptures “appropriateness,” to the language of the border. And in spite of this, queer-Orlando-América has erupted. It is not going down to the bottom of the earth. You see us. It was, after all, “Latino night” at a gay club. You can no longer ignore us.

As the week advanced, and fathers’ day passed us by, I have already noticed the reordering of the news, a staged dismissal so common in media outlets. Those queer and Brown must continue to raise this as an issue, to not let the comfort of your organized, White hetero-lives go back to normal. You never left that comfort, you just thought about “those” killed.  But it was “Latino night” at a gay club. I do not have that luxury. I carry its weight with me. Now the lives of those who are queer and Latina/o have changed – fueled with surveillance and concerns, never taking a temporary safe space for granted. Queer-Orlando-América is thus a “here and now” that has changed the contours of what “queer” and “America” were and are. Queer has now become less White – in your imaginary (we were always here). América now has an accent (it always had it – you just failed to notice).  Violence in Orlando did this. It broke your understanding of a norm and showed you there is much more than the straight and narrow, or the Black and White “America” that is segmented into neatly organized compartments. In that, Orlando queers much more than those LGBT Latinas/os at the club. Orlando is the rupture that bridges a queer Brown United States with a Latin America that was always already “inside” the US – one that never left, one which was invaded and conquered. Think Aztlán. Think Borinquen. Think The Mission in San Francisco. Or Jackson Heights, in NYC. Or the DC metro area’s Latino neighborhoods. That is not going away. It is multiplying.

I may be a queer Latino man at home, at the University, at the store, and at the club. That does not mean that the layered account of my life gets acknowledged (nor celebrated) in many of those sites – in fact, it gets fractured in the service of others’ understandings of difference (be it “diversity,” “multiculturalism” or “inclusion”). But it sure comes together on the dance floor at a club with a boom-boom that caters to every fiber of my being. It is encompassing. It covers us. It is relational. It moves us – together. So, even if I only go out once a year, I refuse to be afraid to go out and celebrate life. Too many before me have danced and danced and danced (including those who danced to the afterlife because of AIDS, hatred, and homophobia), and I will celebrate them dancing – one night at a time.

We are not going away – in fact, a type of queer-Orlando-América is coming near you, if it hasn’t arrived already, if it wasn’t there already—before you claimed that space. No words of empathy will be enough to negotiate your hypocrisy, to whitewash our heritage, or make me, and us, go away. If anything, this sort of tragedy ignites community, it forces us to have conversations long overdue, it serves as a mirror showing how little we really have in common with each other in “America” – and the only way to make that OK is to be OK with the discomfort difference makes you experience, instead of erasing it.

We must never forget that it was “Latino night” at a gay club. That is how I will remember it.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, PhD, is associate professor of sociology at American University; he also teaches for their Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. He coedited The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men and Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism. He wrote this post, originally, for Feminist Reflections.