SATURDAY EVENING REPLIES TO YOUR COMMENTS
As my daddy used to say, “That’s what makes horse races.”
The many and multi-textured responses with varied opinions I received to my comments in the AP story last week which I link to in “Saturday Morning Coffee Questions on Women and Voting Power” below came via e-mail rather than on this site and warrant a post of their own. (Note to readers—I always love to hear from you, but I would appreciate your posting comments here on Heartfelt so other readers can have the benefit of them too.) Excerpts from two e-mails that especially touched me are below; I’ll introduce each one and share my reactions.
First from Lakeisha, whose depth of feeling about Obama’s candidacy is so compelling, it brought me to tears:
In my mother’s womb she had to wonder whether I would be male or female; she’s known…that her children would be black and face terrible situations because of it. In our community it was a fantasy, almost ignorant to think that a black individual could even seriously think about running for president; then actually have a real chance. I never thought in my life time that I would see a black man be taken seriously as a presidential nominee. For the first time in my 28 years, I’m proud to be an American. I am a singer and I’ve sung the national Anthem a million times and felt nothing moving about it; now when I sing it genuine tears flow and I tremble as I feel the true freedom that I have only heard about from my white teachers. For the first time I feel like someone will see me as equal, just as intelligent, just as trustworthy, and just as beautiful. If Sen. Obama wins and does what he promises to do, maybe, for that big promotion, I won’t get looked over and it be given to the less educated, less experienced white person…You see, black people struggle daily, we have to work twice as hard and twice as long to be seen as just as good as white people.
Please don’t get me wrong, if I felt that Obama would not be the best person for the job, I wouldn’t vote for him, because if he fails we fail, I would be embarrassed if he was not a success president. You must understand this will not be just an Obama victory, this will be an American victory. America, a country with a history of violence and a hatred for black people, a country that stole us from our land and brought us here, where we spoke no English and had no idea of how to get home, where they beat us to submission. I was born in 1980 and still have felt, everyday of my life, the wrath of racism and inequality. Obama’s victory will began the healing process and show us that America is ready to live up to it’s promise and that it understands that all men are created equal.
I feel the same pride and gladness about Obama’s ascendancy. I have wished from the start that they two of them would form the American dream team and run together. I started my path to a life committed to social justice in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. Working for integration and against the South’s Jim Crow laws awakened me to the injustices women have suffered from time immemorial, injustices so deeply ingrained in the culture that hardly anyone noticed them, including the men who led the Civil Rights Movement. That’s why my feelings about Clinton’s candidacy mirror almost exactly Lakeisha’s feelings about Obama’s candidacy, and why I understand and empathize. As one of the few Jewish kids growing up in small Texas towns, I also experienced personally the stings of prejudice (and a history of enslavement and genocide). I am white so often people would then and still sometimes now say things without knowing they were hurting me. It’s not worse or better than what Lakeisha deals with; it simply is. And unfortunately we can’t have both of these great candidates as co-president so each of us has to decide who we think is better qualified. For me, that’s Hillary. But I empathize with any African American who decides to support Obama. Racism and sexism are joined at the head, two sides of the same coin, and I prefer to say all people are created equal.
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Next, Linda took issue with my suggestion that women should support Hillary for our daughters:
I am a white woman the same age as Hillary. Is there a generation gap in the women’s movement? You bet there is. All the young women in America watched as NOW and other ‘feminist’ organizations rallied to defend Bill Clinton when it became apparent that he had acted improperly with a very young student intern, one of our daughters. They saw you all helping to sacrifice our daughter Monica Lewinsky to save Bill Clinton. No one reached out to Monica. The young women weren’t as surprised as I was, or as outraged. They already viewed NOW as hopelessly out of touch with the lives of young women. I fought all the same battles as other women my age working in professional positions. But if you can explain to me how saving the Clinton’s helped me or our daughters, I’d be grateful and surprised. From what I’m told by the young women, sexual harassment is viewed as being much more acceptable after the Clinton debacle. What I see in the young women is that they are much better equipped to handle that kind of incident than we were. Hillary has made an amazing journey and I respect her for that because I know how hard it was. But she is still mired in the anger, still in the mental frame that allowed blaming Newt Gingrich for Bill’s behavior. She does not have the resources to unite Americans and we desperately need that effort to be made at this time in our history. Most of us have passed the mental frame where women’s issues are our paramount concern. The problems of global warming and the horrible state of things in the Middle East are life-threatening, not status-threatening. Young women are reaching out to their sisters throughout the world, and that is what all women should be doing. The future can be saved if women have basic human rights and a few tools to move forward. The glass ceiling that held me and others down has become largely irrelevant in the face of so many women struggling for basic survival. The world has changed, and Hillary has not changed with it.
There are so many intriguing aspects of this comment that I can’t address them all here though they suggest many future blogposts. To be brief: Bill Clinton’s actions were reprehensible. Politics is unfortunately more about the possible than the perfect, and Bill with all his imperfections was vastly better for policies that benefit women—from family leave to reproductive rights to the economy–than allowing the misogynist hard right wing of the Republican Party to take over the government. More important, anger at Bill is not a reason to punish Hillary! Ted Kennedy is a big Obama backer and nobody faults Obama for Teddy’s misbehavior. Yes, “the future can be saved if women have basic human rights and the tools to move forward”, but we are far from there. If the glass ceiling is irrelevant then why is Congress 84% male, why has America never had a woman president, and why has so much of the vitriol directed at Hillary been so blatantly gender-based? There’s a lot of unfinished business as far as simple justice for women is concerned.
Rather than go on, let me share an excerpt from gaypastor’s analysis in the comments section of the “Saturday Morning Coffee Questions” post, where you can read it in full:
I spent years engaged in academic research regarding the roles of gender in our society and I both attended and taught courses dealing with the various “isms” that curse our world… I often concluded that sexism appears to be our deepest divide. While men (often heterosexual men) spent much of human’s history fighting each other over differences of power, religion, economics, geography, ethnicity and race; women consistently remained their positions as domestic prisoners and/or second-class citizens. Whether “this group of men” won this battle or “this other group of men” won this war, women were subjected to the powers of the patriarchy and did not make significant advancements until the 20th century…
Today, and as we increasingly watch the opportunity for our first woman president slip by, we must ask ourselves why the issue of “race” has dominated campaign coverage and the issue of “gender” has become almost non-existent…
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Lakeisha certainly makes an excellent observation/reflection. One of my worries throughout this campaign is that the divisiveness that has reared its head between these historic candidates and their followers may cause harm to the Democratic party if we can’t ultimately rally around whoever the nominee is.
As for gaypastor’s comment, I have to say that I I agree overall with what he said. I think we have to recognize that racism and sexism go hand in hand and we have been long overdue for a real national discourse on both.
I also have to look around at the makeup of both the Senate and House and acknowlege a real racial divide- imagine the double impact of being a black female- we need to discuss both racism and sexism and how they work together.
But my point is I don’t think we can have the attitude of seeming to privilege one oppression over another or having resentment towards the fact that issues of race were very much on the radar- and very media-driven- much of the focus on race was very negative and pushed by the media itself- coverage about is Obama muslim?, is he anti-american and anti-white? Not to mention the Rev. Wright controversy that went on forever (which Obama didn’t handle well).
There should more focus on gender but the media didn’t want that because that would involve them looking at their OWN ROLE in the sexism surrounding the coverage of Hillary. I put a post up on my site about last night’s CNN Situation Room where a republican consultant basically called Hillary a bitch- it was unbelievable. Unfortunately, it’s up to us ‘common folk’ to push the dialogue on gender since the media certainly won’t.
Great post on your site, Cafe Politico, Stacy. Thanks for flagging it here. http://cafepolitico.us/blog/2008/05/21/women-and-power
if anybody wants to take a look, and better yet read the entire CNN transcript which is a lesson in how the angry vitriol overtakes the reasoned statement or question.
The oppression olympics doesn’t serve anyone too well to be sure, though somehow we need to tie the various oppressions together as a way to build common cause rather than divide people.
Why do you think Obama didn’t handle the Wright controversy well? Just curious…
I think that Obama’s initial speech on race was excellent and much-needed- he went where few politicians fear to tread and Hillary acknowledged as much. Props to her.
As I have said in the past, I think a good deal of the Wright controversy was media driven and I don’t believe Obama is un-American or anti-white or that he holds any of the nutty views of Rev. Wright. Unfortunately as the controversy progressed, Obama seemed to fumble the ball in my view. He became overly defensive, did not seem to foresee a lot of the obvious and predictable fall-out and was not able to clearly articulate exactly *why* the questions about race being asked by the media with respect to he and Rev. Wright, were not the *right* questions, and as a result making a meaningful discourse on race in America almost impossible. He let the media and the political ‘right’ define the issues and that was a big mistake.
I agree 100% with Gloria that we are stronger when we work together- sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism and others- while there may be different aspects of each oppression and prejudice, they all share a common root and a common goal- to maintain the elite position of the status quo, to keep members of the particular group down, silence their political voice and over-emphasize and denigrate characteristics of the given group that may be “different” from the status quo, thus creating a culture of fear rather than understanding and acceptance. Which is why we can’t have another Republican in office. And if progressives band together regardless of who the democratic nominee is, we should be able to defeat McCain. We simply cannot throw each other under the bus.
It’s disturbing how the media dealt with the racial and gender issues in this campaign- it’s like the largely white, male establishment media just couldn’t handle a black man and a white woman running for office- the reality of America’s discriminatory past (and present) or how race and gender discrimination can go hand in hand and the effect it might have on the Presidential race, was just lost on them and thus they focused on the most stereotypical, unenlightened aspects of race and gender discrimination in an almost gossipy way. In fact, instead of promoting any meaningful discourse on race or gender, the media seemed to simply reinforce to all of us that both are still very much alive today because the media itself was so obviously marred by it’s own racist and sexist skeletons in the closet.
Sorry, that was a bit long-winded.