The Audacity of Entitlement: Feminists and The Devolving Clinton Campaigning
Whomever you may support in this coming election, you have got to be appalled with how the Clintons and their surrogates, including many old guard feminists, have shat upon Black people and manipulated feminist ideals and societal criticisms. Diversity, equality and justice, it is now crystal clear, are only laudable when they vault white women to the echelons of power and Black folks of any gender can't get ours until a white woman gets hers. How else to explain their nonsensical suggestion that Obama should wait 8 years for Hillary Clinton two serve two terms before he assumes the reigns he improbably rassled from Clinton. Of course, this is old news to long time Black feminists like myself. I have been suffering the hypocritical yin yang some of these white feminists stay talking since I was a teen emissary at the Northwest International Women's Conference and feminist tomes have been vomit worthy at best, their world view and interests so narrow and normalized. Let us not assume that all white feminists are lovers of freedom, the social justice movement has always been stratified. Everyone wants their due but few want everyone to get their due. The shameless SNL stumping Tina Fey's, "Bitch is the new black" is just "all the women are white, all the blacks are men" in snazzier get up. What about us?
Groundbreaking former Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro is the most recent desperate entitled white woman to exhibit her true colors (which I should add are not beautiful, or inclusive, like a rainbow). Her misreading of the nomination race as documented in this article by Jim Farber is abominable:
"I'm on Hillary's finance committee. I've done a fundraiser for her here at my firm. And I went and worked the phone banks before Super Tuesday. I have to tell you, this is a very emotional campaign for me," Ferraro said.
When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton's rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro's comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.
"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.
"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.
So Obama's ascent is attributable to luck? Think being born black/bi-racial in '61 gave Obama a leg up? Really, think he became the first black/bi-racial president of the Harvard Law Review on account of luck? You think he ascended to the senate, challenged the inevitable 'coronation' of Ferraro ace Hillary Rodham Clinton on account of luck? You think he took whitebread Iowa on account of luck? You think he's won he majority of states and the majority of pledged delegates on account of luck? If Obama is to Ferraro the Affirmative Action candidate, purportedly handicapped for success, than she has a false impression of Affirmative Action's primary beneficiaries who are, altogether now, white women. Obama undoubtedly benefits from male privilege, a privilege that is cut by his Blackness and Clinton undoubtedly benefits from white privilege, a privilege that is cut by her gender. But America's peculiar institution, although a century and half ago abolished, begat some pesky satellites, Jim Crow for one and whatever you want to call what makes Black life so invaluable to all races that cops would shoot Diallo 41 times, Bell 50 and the mainstream media not give a good cot damn whether Black female kidnapping victims see their family's faces again. This institutionalized racism, germinal to this nation--and on account of imperialism and colonialism, the world--embedded in its politics and cultural production makes it all the more difficult for Black people to secure power, and makes life for me living at the intersection of race and gender challenging.* Unlike straight white women who although hampered by the global scourge of sexism, can often derive power from their empowered white husbands regardless of intellect or achievement, which Clinton does boast. Their whiny tearful complaints are so typical of them in that their purported fragility restricts them but also, when wielded timely, enables them! And this attempt to turn the Democratic horse race into the oppression Olympics evinces the hollowness of their claims for equality. Those of us who work sincerely for a day when people are unhindered by racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia and other ills, don't soap box bollocks to advance our careers.
*But still, to paraphrase my former professor Gloria Wade Gayles, every day I thank God I was born both woman and black!
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato
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Comments
1.
professorf says:
jb
I'm with on the searing sense of entitlement emanating out of Cinton's campaign and they have admittedly maliciously played on people's racial anxieties and messages before. That said, I think the uproar about Ferraro's comments are overstated, and do not serve Obama all that well. Ferraro's comments were no more misguided and ahistorical than Gloria Steinem's NYTimes editorial prior to Super Tuesday. Those comments were roundly debated in the blogosphere and did not distract Obama from the mission at hand. However, this Ferraro incident is playing out differently. Obama's camp seems to be replying more at an attempt of getting back at Clinton for having lost Samantha Power last week. Power should never have resigned, and Ferraro's comments should not be getting blown out of proportion, because the question that Obama supporters must ask is whether this is the kind of issue to use his racial capital? I would say it's not. If we go back to the South Carolina debate and listened to his comments on mass incarceration we find a great example of a substantive commentary on racial politics or racial inequality in this country. No one wins anything at this point for giving Geraldine Ferraro a racial insensitivity timeout.
au plus tard...
03/13/2008 at 9:39 AM