Black card trumps gay card?
Homophobe Isaiah Washington plays the black card in response to his sacking from Grey's Anatomy. Speaking of his altercation with Patrick Dempsey in which he referred to TR Knight as a 'faggot', Washington wails: "It was a fight between two men that shouldn't have happened ... Someone heard the booming voice of a black man and got really scared and that was the beginning of the end for me. I see that now, but I didn't then."Actually, no - somebody heard the booming voice of a homophobic fuckwit. Homophobia can be colour blind, just as racism knows all gender and sexual identities.
Further:
It didn't help me on the set that I was a black man who wasn't a mush-mouth Negro walking around with his head in his hands all the time. I didn't speak like I'd just left the plantation and that can be a problem for people sometime. I had a person in human resources tell me after this thing played out that 'some people' were afraid of me around the studio. I asked her why, because I'm a 6-foot-1, black man with dark skin and who doesn't go around saying? Yessah, massa sir' and? No sir, massa' to everyone? It's nuts when your presence alone can just scare people, and that made me a prime candidate to take the heat in a dysfunctional family.
My mistake was thinking black people get second chances.
No - your mistake was being a homophobic tool in an industry where, actually, a lot of 'faggots' work. Being a homophobic actor is about as sensible as being a homophobic hairdresser - or a lesbophobic tennis player (although, that seemed to work for Margaret Court...)
Very little shits me more than members of oppressed or marginalised groups using their particular card to defend their own oppressive or marginalising behaviour. And in Washington's case, it makes him look even more of a drop-kick than he already is - or is he genuinely claiming GA's creator and executive producer Shonda Rimes is in on the Conspiracy Against the Black Man? Hmm. He may want to take a closer look at Ms Rimes before he gets too carried away with that particular theory.
Washington then goes on to play the class card, defending his homophobia in the context of his upbringing in the South - Texas, no less! - where there was "a lack of awareness of cultural sensitivities". No shit! I would've hoped a black man growing up in Texas would be the one person who fully appreciated the damage that ignorance and prejudice causes.
Something tells me Washington would be the first to cry racism if an argument had been reported on the GA set in which Dempsey, for example, called him 'buoy-ah' (think of it being said by Foghorn Leghorn) in front of the cast and crew. But he expects to get away with calling his castmates faggots, and if he's punished it's a racist conspiracy?
Piss off.
Labels: homophobia, racism
posted by Sam @ Tuesday, July 03, 2007
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