Modern LGBTQ+ activism’s analogization of other struggles with anti-black struggles are part of a cycle that endlessly reproduces anti-black violence. The pursuit of rights in the legal sphere is a prime example of this – in making bids to inclusion with the language of “non-criminality”, the symbolic criminality of blackness is reaffirmed.

The ‘supplemental anti-blackness’ of the United States’ ‘junior partners’ – those whose grievances might be redressed, however incompletely, by ‘rights’, to which we might add non-black LGBTQ people – functions hand in hand with the systematic state and para-state violence targeted at black people. The tactics of ‘crowding out’ black claims (like we see in the poster) and the tactics of actively terrorizing black people are two wings of the same endeavour. Because ‘blackness’ and ‘criminality’ are wedded in the US lexicon, as Saidiya Hartman argues in her book Scenes of Subjection (Hartman 1997), any claims to not being a criminal – or on the flipside, to being a citizen – must literally be made on the backs of black people. When rights-seeking constituencies claim they are ‘not criminals’, they articulate their bid for inclusion through an implicit assertion that they are ‘not black’. Even if the articulation is made on behalf of a group that supposedly does not exclude black members, as Sexton and Wilderson argue, such an assertion enters a system of meaning that necessarily signifies the group as non-black and appeals for a chance to participate in anti-blackness. How might we bring these analyses to bear in our critiques of the ascendancy of neoliberal LGBT political and cultural practices? A growing number of critical thinkers such as Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar have worked to theorize ‘homonormativity’ and ‘homonationalism’ in the United States in an effort to disarticulate LGBT political claims from the absorptive thrall of late capital (Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira 2008; Duggan 2004; Puar 2007). Simultaneously, we are witnessing the proliferation and expansion of visionary racial and economic justice-focused LGBT activist formations challenging the status quo of state violence and structural adjustment, both in terms of what issues and constituencies are centred within LGBT political work as well as the ways in which the process of organizing and movement building replicates racial norms and domination.3 These critiques and organizing efforts offer a vital intervention into the frightening alignment of gayness (and increasingly transgenderness) with capital. They also invite us to continue exploring the ways in which non-black LGBT political claims are produced by and reproduce anti-blackness as a foundational structure of US Americanness. This exploration helps us to situate contemporary LGBT anti-black racism – evidenced in, for example, the blaming of black voters for the passage of Proposition 8, the prioritization of sentence-enhancing hate crimes laws as a solution to anti-LGBT hate violence or the failure of the largest LGBT organizations to oppose the rapid expansion of the prison police state – as a logical extension of the constitutive and enduring antagonisms of slavery and its mobilization of racial–sexual norms and terror. In the vein of critics such as Cathy Cohen and M. Jacqui Alexander (Alexander 2005; Cohen 1997: 437–465) who have persuasively theorized the ways in which both the white gay and lesbian rights framework and many strands of more progressive queer politics participate in white supremacy’s tactics of pitting ‘good gays’ (white, middle class, gender normative, able bodied) against ‘bad queers’ (black, brown, poor, and disabled, which necessarily mean gender non-normative), we want to understand how the basic assumptions, tactics, and epistemologies underlying contemporary queer political claims often unwittingly reproduce and are productive of the fundamental structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and permanent war undergirding the United States itself. In this chapter, we explore the implications of Sexton’s critique of anti-blackness within the domain of contemporary gay and lesbian rights politics within the US, as two white activist-scholars invested in advancing and centring anti-racism within queer and trans political work. Our work here is enabled in particular by Andy Smith’s foundational essay, ‘Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing’ (Smith: 2006) in which she suggests that white supremacy is not singular, but operates in differentiated ways to target different populations. She describes three pillars of white supremacy – the Orientalism/war pillar, the slavery/capitalism pillar and the genocide/colonialism pillar – arguing that white supremacy enacts different technologies of violence and produces different narratives and mythologies in each of these pillars. Her work encourages scholars and activists to analyse the specificity of particular forms of racism, and acknowledge that people targeted in one pillar can also be made complicit with another through promises of inclusion and recognition. In his article ‘People of Color Blindness’, Sexton (2010) argues that the failure to look at the specificity of anti-black racism in the United States, and the willingness of many movements and intellectuals to do two things – to analogize other struggles to anti-black racism generally and emancipation from slavery specifically, and to speak generally about ‘racism’ without attention to the specificities of anti-blackness – is anti-black. While there is a great deal to be said about how contemporary lesbian and gay rights advocacy participates in all three pillars Smith describes, as well as about how settler colonialism is indeed foundational along with slavery in the fabric of US Americanness, in this chapter we want to look at the specific ways that particular US anti-black logics, methods and institutional arrangements are mobilized by some recent campaigns and events that illustrate Sexton’s concerns about how movements that fail to contest anti-blackness participate in it. We look specifically at the focus on reproduction, legal redress, and analogy within gay and lesbian politics as three key sites that illustrate these investments. Critiques of anti-blackness, ultimately, are necessary to elucidate white supremacy’s ‘queer’ junior partnerships, the ‘contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves’ (Wilderson 2007: 33), the ghostly ‘continuities of slavery and freedom’ (Hartman 1997: 13), and the ways in which the unspeakable violences at the core of the US refuse to be subdued by the latest proclamation of their completion or replacement.