Homophobia and Jamaican Culture

I think Tanya Stephens has it right in this article: guys whose whole careers depend on "slackness" are moral arbiters of sexual behavior? Right, Jamaicans of African ancestry (like a lot of slave descendents, native Africans, and indigenous Americans) have been oppressed eight ways to Sunday for the past 400+ years. Right, the institution of slavery left a horrible imprint on generations whose families were ripped apart when they first arrived in the New World--an imprint that (along with the poverty born of deliberate dispossession of everything: education, property rights, civil rights, and the right to life) won't be washed away in two generations just 'cause Martin Luther King jr. has a holiday. And I'm all for cultural identity--right up to the point that it runs into the kind of universal human rights that our President so eloquently celebrates in the same speeches he uses to propose a Constitutional amendment to deny those rights. Unfairly or not, I believe that homophobia among the Jamaican underclass (and also among certain segments of African Americans) is kind of like the racism of poor Southern whites: no matter how low on the social and economic totem pole you are, there's always someone you can look down on, whether it's black people or gay people. And for people who've suffered as much as people in the African diaspora have, you'd think they'd have some sense of solidarity with people who have been equally oppressed, in different but equally appalling ways--for the "crime against God" of violating the Mosaic laws that don't have to do with diet or the wearing of multifabric clothing.