The Out People of Color Political Action Club: giving a voice to the voiceless.

On March 18, in response to the repeated broadcasting of clips of an incendiary speech by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama gave a speech on race in America in Philadelphia. Obama’s Philadelphia address on race in America was widely hailed by observers as a historic speech that would be remembered long after the 2008 presidential campaign was over.

“It was as thoughtful as King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ with the added dimension that it was in a political context, in which [Obama] showed courage rather than merely doing the safe denunciation,” said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and biographer of several American historical figures, including Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. “He wrestled with the most important issue we have faced throughout our history, and he did it in a way that wasn’t politically calculating, but was intensely personal as well as insightful.”

Walter Earl Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College, called the speech “truly historic,” and said of Obama that, “Like King in the past, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, he spoke directly to the complexity of the issue at hand, and translated it so it’s part of our nation’s story.” The speech was so well received that even the Clinton campaign refrained from criticizing the speech, at least directly.

What is especially interesting to me is the response that the speech has garnered within in the LGBT community. Gay City News — the largest circulation LGBT weekly in New York City — called the speech “a remarkable achievement.” Paul Schindler wrote of the March 18 address, “The brilliance of the speech instead was evidenced by the way he leveraged the issue of Wright’s comments to examine not only the reality of African-American life, particularly for those of the minister’s generation, but also the fears, resentments, and anger that the issue of race has spawned within the nation’s white majority.”

In the March 20 editorial in GCN, entitled “Distraction and Transcendence,” the paper’s editor continued, “Probably the most estimable thing Obama did in his speech was to not throw Wright under the bus,” adding that Obama “did not pretend as though a 20-year relationship in which the minister had been his pastor, the officiant at his wedding, and the baptizer of his children suddenly meant nothing or could be renounced in an act of political expedience,” despite intense pressure to do so.

Gay City News endorsed Obama for president in an editorial in its January 31 issue, criticizing the Clintons for racially divisive comments and tactics, which the paper declared ‘unacceptable.’ “We ought to think about the message our choice sends about a fundamental question — what our politics should be all about,” the editor wrote in that editorial, published just days before the New York primary. “Judged by that measure and taking full stock of how the Democratic nomination contest has unfolded, we believe the choice is clear,” the Janurary 31 editorial concluded. “Gay City News endorses Barack Obama.”

Doug Robinson, co-president of the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC), commended Gay City News for the GCN editorial on Obama’s March 18 speech on race. “Senator Obama’s speech in Philadelphia spoke brilliantly on the larger issues of race in America, and though there are those who missed the eloquence of his words, they accurately portray the need for our country to face the issue of race in an honest and forthright manner, Robinson wrote in a letter to the editor in response to the March 20 GCN editorial.

“The fear of racial pain and misunderstanding weighs heavily on all Americans, and Senator Obama’s challenge to Americans to engage in this discussion, reminds me of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa,” Robinson continued. “I have said many times before that this issue of race pervades even our own lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and two-spirit (LGBTTS) communities, and I believe that Senator Obama’s call to action has given us a real window of opportunity to begin a process of not only self-examination, but of communal examination.”

A non-partisan political club, OutPOCPAC was formed in April 2001 to give LGBT people of color a voice in New York City politics. Founding members of the group felt that the white-led LGBT Democratic clubs in the city were not open to considering people of color who were candidates for city-wide office, especially Fernando Ferrer, then-Bronx Borough President, who was the only person of color in the mayoral race in 2001 and again in 2005. By way of full disclosure, I should mention that I was one of those founding members and I participated in the candidate endorsement meeting last month in which the club’s members voted to endorse Obama for president.

The debate and the voting procedures in the white-led LGBT Democratic clubs in New York City were scrupulously democratic. But all of the leading LGBT Democratic clubs in the city have close ties to the Clinton campaign, and a Clinton endorsement was a foregone conclusion in two of the three clubs and an overwhelming likelihood in the third. The rush to endorse Hillary Clinton on the part of the big LGBT Democratic political clubs has only reinforced my conviction that there is a role for organizations such as OutPOCPAC that give a voice to those who otherwise would have no voice in the politics of our city.