"Owning" Brown and Owning Analogies

Mark's post below about the Parents Involved case and the argument over the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education touches on issues I've been thinking about a bit lately.  Mark recounts the argument between what Chief Justice Roberts said in that case about color-blindness being at the heart of the arguments in Brown, and Judge Robert Carter's own argument that Roberts had misunderstood the meaning of the quote offered by Roberts--a quote from Carter himself back in the days of the Brown litigation--and used it to twist Brown on its head.  The opinions in Parents Involved, and much of the scholarship that followed, fixated on this question: What is the "true meaning" of Brown?  Who gets to claim the "mantle of legitimacy" of Brown, or to call themselves the "true heirs of the plaintiffs' lawyers" in Brown, to use some phrases from the scholarship?  There was a distinct sense in at least some of the public reactions to the majority opinion in Parents Involved, including Carter's reaction, that the majority had engaged in a kind of act of cultural and/or historical imperialism or appropriation.  

A similar debate is being fought over whether it is appropriate to use the civil rights struggle as an analogy in the gay rights struggle.  A famous quote from an abolitionist 19th century preacher, picked up by Martin Luther King and made a central trope in the civil rights struggle, says that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  The same phrase has become equally important to advocates of same-sex marriage and gay rights.  But do they get to "own" that phrase?  Many African Americans oppose same-sex marriage and other gay rights, and/or reject the analogy between the two, or argue that whatever the advocates of racial equality had in mind, they certainly didn't have issues of sexuality in mind.  Does this community have any special ownership over the historical meaning of their own experience?  Do they get some special say over whether the phrases, tropes, and language that sustained them in their own experience get to be applied elsewhere?  If current elite figures in the struggle for racial civil rights, as opposed to the laity, also favor equal rights in the area of sexuality, are they entitled to any special consideration in pressing this analogy?  To the extent that the gay rights movement is often led by cultural elites (which is not to say that, e.g., all gays and lesbians are wealthy or belong to the cultural elite), is the effort to claim the mantle of the racial civil rights movement any less an act of cultural and. sometimes, racial imperialism than Chief Justice Roberts's use of the Carter quote in Parents Involved?

I don't mean to press the likeness between these two issues too far.  Of course there are distinctions; there are always distinctions, and lawyers are fond of making them.  (But then, the Devil is fond of quoting Scriptures.)  I suppose I have three conclusions.  1) I can understand why debates over legacies, meanings, ownership, and so on have special emotional resonance for some people, even if I don't generally share that inclination.  2) There is still something somewhat odd and counter-productive about the whole debate.  No one owns history, or historical meaning.  Moreover, historical meaning is not fixed; it is constantly in flux, constantly a site of contestation.  There is never a final answer to the question who "owns" the mantle of some past set of events; ownership is necessarily contested and changes from generation to generation.  I don't think the whole debate is just about claiming the rhetorical or moral high ground, although obviously that's a large part of it.  More broadly, it represents a classic legal move, one that I think is unfortunate: the tendency to argue about substance in terms that represent anything other than substance itself--to argue over symbolism, or history, or meaning, or analogies, instead of arguing directly about the thing itself.  3) For those who do take these kinds of arguments over legacy seriously, and especially those who think that those involved in the movement for racial equality are entitled to some special say over, or ownership of, the "meaning" of Brown, there are reasons to think seriously about the analogy between racial civil rights and sexual equality.  I personally find the analogy persuasive; but then, I don't think Robert Carter has any greater entitlement than Chief Justice Roberts to tell us what Brown "meant," any more than I think the director of a movie has some special entitlement to tell us what her film "really" meant, and which readings of it are acceptable or unacceptable.  For those who think Roberts's use of Carter's words was an outrage, or who think the African-American community has a special claim to ownership of the historical meaning of Brown, there are good reasons to be cautious in pressing the analogy between the racial and sexual civil rights movements, or indeed to avoid using it altogether, lest they engage in the same kind of cultural imperialism they saw in Chief Justice Roberts.