NEWSBYREV. IRENE MONROE

In an attempt to dole out advice on the n-word, popular talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger recently slipped into a rant using it.

When a caller — a distraught African-American woman who called in to be advised on how to handle racist jokes and comments hurled at her by her white in-laws and neighbors — asked Schlessinger if it’s okay to use the n-word, Dr. Laura needed advice before she advised.

"It depends how it’s said. ...Black guys talking to each other seem to think it’s OK," Schlessinger told the caller.

Whether used as an expletive or term of endearment, what is it about this word that captures the rage and shame of the American public?

In 2006, we blamed Michael Richards, who played the lovable and goofy character Kramer on the TV sit-com Seinfeld for using the n-word. Richards' racist rant was heard nationwide and shocked not only his fans and audience that night at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood — it also shocked Americans back to an ugly era in U.S. history.

Lena Horne died this Mother's Day at the age of 92 — a pioneering Hollywood icon, one who both challenged and reinforced our existing ideas about race.

Horne's breakthrough on the silver screen came in 1943, when Horne starred in the all-black production Stormy Weather (in which she performed the title song that became her signature tune). That same year, with the help of the NAACP, Horne broke the color barrier when she signed a seven-year contract with MGM, making her the first African-American performer to receive a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio.

However, in an era in which African-American actors in Hollywood were portrayed as toms, coons, bucks, mulattoes and mammies, Horne's roles were limited, because she refused to play stereotypes.

As she shared in a 1997 PBS interview, when Horne was asked by Hollywood agents to play mammy roles, her father would emphatically chime in, stating, "I can get a maid for my daughter. I don't want her in movies playing maids."

Her light-skinned complexion and white facial features might have opened MGM doors for her. But once she got through them, Horne discovered her tenure with MGM was fraught with all sorts of racial issues — the biggest one being her light-skinned complexion. "I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she told PBS. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

For example, her first screen test at MGM was alongside African-American comedian Eddie Rochester Anderson, who played the happy-go-lucky "darkie" to Jack Benny's eponymous hit radio and television series The Jack Benny Program. Because her complexion was too light when juxtaposed against Anderson's, the make-up department came up with a special shade for Horne, called "light Egyptian," to dispel the notion that the movie studio was promoting an interracial couple.

But as much as Horne detested how the white show business world exploited her light-skinned complexion, she was also able to exploit the privilege of having it.

As one of the most renowned and liberal institutions in the world, it's always hurtful and harmful — both to the campus milieu and the school's reputation — when racist and sexist acts occur at Harvard University.  

Last week, a lengthy email written by a third-year student and an editor on the Harvard Law Review, Stephanie Grace, was printed by the legal blog abovethelaw.com. In that email, Grace wrote that she thought blacks might be genetically inferior to whites:  "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent," she said. (Grace's comment came following a private dinner conversation about affirmative action and race.)

As we all know, affirmative action is a hot-button issue. At a basic level, it's an attempt to take race, gender and ethnicity (to name only a few factors) into consideration to promote a level playing field for all. But the sub-text in all affirmative action debates is the fallacious belief that blacks selected to benefit from it are hopelessly and helplessly genetically inferior — that their DNA is chromosomally deficient, if not defective. 

The myth of genetic inferiority of people of African ancestry is centuries old, tracing back to when the first slave boat arrived on our shores in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. The myth of genetic inferiority of people of African ancestry not only legitimatized slavery, but also biblically sanctioned it. It was aided by people like Nobel Laureate William Shockley, who in 1956 voiced his theory of a genetic basis for racial inferiority. As part of his theory on the biology of ethnicity, Shockley stated that people of African ancestry belonged to a lower species of humanity, and deserved sterilization. 

For decades the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) was an unwelcome sight on Ivy League college campuses, like Harvard University, because of its ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) servicemembers.

But in February of this year, when the nation’s top two Defense officials, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated for a repeal of the 1993 "Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT)" policy, universities like Brown, Columbia and Harvard, to name a few, made the move to allow ROTC to march its way back on campus.

For example, while Harvard’s ROTCs participate in the program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they are commissioned as officers in Harvard Yard upon graduation.

But many Harvard LGBTQ students are not pleased by the sight of ROTC on campus, and feel that the school should wait in having the program until DADT is actually repealed.

And there is good reason for their distrust. President Obama has come up empty-handed on too many campaign promises to us. And especially this one.

Civil Rights activist Dorothy Irene Height died on April 20th at the age of 98. And when it comes to prominent African American civil rights allies to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community — Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, and John Lewis, to name a few — Height wasn’t profiled and honored enough.

But this unsung heroine was never concerned about accolades. In an interview with Gwen Ifill, an African American journalist and television newscaster for PBS, about her memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates, Height said: “If you worry about who is going to get credit, you don't get much work done.”

This grand dame of the civil rights era, however, got a lot of work done in her lifetime, exhibiting indefatigable energy in championing gay civil rights as she did eighty-plus years championing race and gender civil rights.

As president for forty years (1957-1997) of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an organization with the objective of advancing opportunities and the quality of life for African American women, their families and communities. With programs on issues like voting rights, poverty and, in later years, AIDS, Height understood that black families and communities could neither be whole nor healthy without championing gay civil rights.

The Catholic Church is in damage control. Pope Benedict XVI won’t resign and he can’t be defrocked. And Catholics worldwide are enraged. The Church now needs a quick out, an easy solution and a fall guy to tamp down our rage and to explain away its decades-long pedophilia problem.

And just recently the Vatican’s second-highest authority, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, belted out the solution. It’s us gays! Of course, linking homosexuality to pedophilia.

And why else would the Catholic Church be in the state that it is in?

But the highest-profile pedophiles cases in Bertone’s church in Chile involves priests having underage and non consensual sex with young girls, including a teenager who became pregnant.

The teenager told the Chilean newspaper La Nacion: "I thought it wasn't that bad to have sex with him because when I told priests about it at confession they just told me to pray and that was it. They knew, and some of them guessed that it was Father Tato. But everyone looked the other way. No one corrected or helped me."

But when the institutional Catholic Church looks for scapegoats they must be found. And the quick and easy answer coming from the Vatican will be to simply not ordain gay priests.

Sometime in the late hours of Saturday night the call will come in. Philbert (not his real name), like many of his Christian lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) buddies, wait anxiously for the call in order to know the time and place of the van pickup, and where it’ll drop them off to a safe and secluded place for Sunday worship. Last week’s worship service was in Montego Bay, just 50 miles from Negril’s Grand Lido, one of the flagship resorts in Jamaica, where Philbert works the night shift at the bar. This week Philbert hopes for a closer worship space, perhaps a safe space in Gales Valley, just 40 miles from work.

Every Sunday Philbert and his friends have to worship in a different space. The risk is too high if it’s found out they’re queer.

"My experience as a gay man living in Jamaica is one which is marked by periodic incidences of abuse, both verbal and physical. I have lost count of the number of times I have been verbally abused, called 'battyman,' 'chi-chi,' 'sodomite,' 'dirty battybwoy,'" an unnamed gay man shares on the Jamaican Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-Flag) in 2003.

When Jamaica's leading gay rights activist, Brian Williamson, was murdered in his home in June 2004, multiple knife wounds savagely mutilated his body. A Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed the crime, reporting a crowd gathered after the killing, rejoicing and saying, "Battyman [Jamaican slang for homosexual], he get killed!" Others celebrated Williamson's murder, laughing and calling out, "Let's get them one at a time," "That's what you get for sin," and "Let's kill all of them." Some sang, "Boom bye bye," a line from renowned Jamaican reggae artist Buju Banton's then popular anti-gay song about killing and burning gay men. (Banton has a long history of advocating the killing of LGBTQ people in his lyrics, yet he was nominated for a Grammy this past year for his album “Rasta Got Soul”).

On this Valentine’s Day I am reminded of no greater challenge to marriage equality than same-sex marriage. However, the precedent for same-sex marriage was set by an African American woman named Mildred Loving.

Mildred Loving gained notoriety when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in her favor that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

Loving’s crime back then was this country’s racial and gender obsession -- interracial marriage.

Married to a white man, Mildred Loving and her husband were indicted by a Virginia grand jury in October 1958 for violating the state’s “Racial Integrity Act of 1924.” When they were found guilty, the trial judge said the decision was based on God's will.

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents," the judge said. "And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix."

February 1 began Black History Month, a national annual observance since 1926, honoring and celebrating the achievements of African-Americans.

And on February 1, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM) opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, honoring the courageous action of four African-American students. Their actions led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated desegregation of all public accommodations.

Fifty years ago on February 1,1960, the now ICRCM was a Woolworth's store and the site of the original sit-in where Ezell A. Blair Jr. (also known as Jibreel Khazan), David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and Franklin Eugene McCain from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NC A&T), a historically black college, sat at its lunch counter as a form of nonviolent direct action protesting the store's segregated seating policy. And as a result of their civil disobedience, sit-ins sprung up not only in Greensboro but throughout the South, challenging other forms of this nation's segregated public accommodations, including bathrooms, water fountains, parks, theaters, and swimming pools, to name a few.

If Dr. Carter Woodson, the Father of Black History, were alive today, he would be proud that the ICRCM opened this month.

However, for a younger generation of African-Americans as well as whites, whose ballots helped elect this country's first African-American president, celebrating Black History Month seems outdated.

Religion-based bigotry has been the mainstay of Rev. Pat Robertson’s bully pulpit. And he mounts this pulpit as an uber-God, possessed with an inherent omniscience in knowing not only the mundane and wicked thoughts and actions of man but also in knowing the cataclysmic actions of God’s wrath on man.

While scientists explain Haiti’s recent natural disaster as an earthquake due to a fault it sits on along the border between two large tectonic plates –- the North American plate to the north, and the Caribbean plate to the south that slowly slide horizontally past each other -- Robertson explains the disaster as “Something [that] happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.”

The something that happened a long time ago was an earthquake on the same fault line in 1860. And this fault is the same type as the San Andreas Fault in California –- a “strike-slip” fault.

During an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network the day after the earthquake, televangelist Robinson said “Many years ago, the island’s people ’swore a pact to the devil.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ They kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got themselves free. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

Haiti didn’t have much before the quake, and what little it had has now been taken away.