Thought That Came Unbidden

$257.29…this is the amount of the last payment due on my mortgage.

By this time tomorrow, my house will be paid for, owned free and clear. OK…so it will take the mortgage company 30 days to cough up the documents but still.

Just the idea makes me dizzy.

Even with the wealth of material provided by electoral politics some pundits have in the waning days of his presidency been heard wondering what George W. Bush’s lasting legacy will be. Will it be the outcome, or continuation, of the war in Iraq, the war on terror struggle against violent extremism, the abdication of responsibility for social programs, the mixing of religion and government, the response to hurricane Katrina, or the culture of fear he has encouraged in America that will stand the most lasting legacy of Dubya’s terms as president?

While all of these are important and worthy candidates for the top honor I put forth the idea that none of these, regardless of how long they take to unravel or set right, will have as big a short or long term impact on America as a whole as will the total and utter destruction of political discourse that has become the norm in the U.S. in the past eight years. And to put my proverbial money where my actual mouth is I’m going to do something whose very absence from the realm of political discussion simply proves my point: I’m going to admit I was wrong.

I took the wrong approach in analyzing Barack Obama’s speech about race in America. Rather than looking at the speech with even a modicum of objectivity as Mickey Kaus does in his excellent piece from March 18, 2008 in his Kausfiles blog on Slate.com (you’ll have to scroll a bit to get to the relevant entry) I reacted emotionally to what even in objective reflection is a valid complaint about a huge void in Obama’s speech. We live in a society that is designed to promulgate both racism and sexism and if you truly intend on changing that society, that culture, you can not ignore one at the expense of another, and since he spent not one second, not one breath on sexism in his speech Obama did just that.

And as I thought about this mistake I’d made, as I talked with a lot of different people I realized why the next several years, and possibly decades, in America are truly going to suck: the Democrats now have the same problem that the Republicans have had all along.

DC is a city overly concerned with politics. We have to be; we are in very many ways a one-industry town. Without the presence of the Federal government most of the jobs in the DC-metro area would dry up. Among non-profit, private consultancy, direct contracting firms I would venture that 80% of the work that goes on in the region is connected to the government in some way. And because politics is so important it is rare to find someone who doesn’t have an opinion. So in the past week I’ve been doing something that I rather enjoy: I’ve been listening a lot. And what I’ve discovered is that no one is listening.

Political discourse in America has in the last eight years been characterized by selective deafness; people listen only to what agrees with the opinion they have already formed. If they believe something, like that homo sapiens existed simultaneously with dinosaurs, facts become irrelevant in the face of passion. Factual evidence of statements made about the same issue become completely meaningless (check this video from The Daily Show starting at about 03:10 for a particularly relevant example of this behavior from Vice President Cheney). And it used to be that this selective deafness was a quality expressed mostly by extreme conservatives, by the Rush Limbaughs and the Sean Hannitys of the world. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

Whether it was in response to the heat generated by Charlotte Allen’s article “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” about women voters swooning over Barack Obama or whether it was in response to genuine concerns about the charges that not only is sexism being ignored as an issue in the presidential campaign but that, indeed, it is being reenforced by the campaign coverage itself, The Washington Post ran an article about women, race, and voting last Monday. Naturally it ran in the Style section (aka: the women’s page). It was this article that convinced me that true political discussion, the kind that involves the actual exchange of ideas rather than people with already fixed opinions simply shouting at each other, is well and truly dead.

DeNeen L. Brown writes in her article “A Vote of Allegiance? In the Obama-Clinton Battle, Race & Gender Pose Two Great Divides for Black Women” copiously about the clash between sex and race. But two quotes stood out to me as reflecting the subtle hypocrisy at work that, when pointed out, is completely ignored. Consider these two quotes:

Black women say the pangs they feel in this debate of the competing isms have been sharpened as the campaign rhetoric has intensified.

“White feminists reduce everything to their cultural experience,” says Arica Coleman, 46, a professor of black American studies at the University of Delaware. “We had a different battle. We are fighting a war on two fronts, being both female and being black. I know when I walk into any office or anywhere, people see my skin color first and automatically make assumptions.”

“I wish people would stick to the issues, and the ultra-feminists would stop crying wolf because their girl is not winning,” Coleman says. “Obama is not crying racism.”

I had to read this multiple times at different points in the week to make sure that I wasn’t jerking my knee again, to make sure that I wasn’t reacting emotionally instead of with reason.

Why yes, white feminists do reduce everything to their cultural experience. So do black women, white men, conservatives, Muslims, Asian men, poor people, rich people, Catholics, and everybody else. It’s called point of view and each person carries their own unique perspective on any event. It is why eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable.

But let’s analyze the rest of Professor Coleman’s quote, shall we?

“I wish people would stick to the issues, and the ultra-feminists would stop crying wolf because their girl is not winning,” Coleman says.

“I wish people would stick to the issues…” implies that charges by feminists that press coverage of Hillary Clinton has been sexist or that sexism is a valid complaint about American culture are not part of “the issues.” The issues, of course, being defined as what concerns Ms. Coleman, that is, race.

Now for the second part: “…and the ultra-feminists would stop crying wolf because their girl is not winning,’ Coleman says.” Crying wolf, again, diminishes sexism as a valid complaint about American society while the use of the word “girl” diminishes women regardless of their color on the national stage.

Think I’m wrong? Come with me to a world where Barack Obama doesn’t lead in the delegate count. Come to with me to that world and you tell me just what the reaction would be if a white, male professor of history had made the comment that Obama’s supporters should stop talking about racism because “their boy is not winning” and tell me you don’t see a shit storm of epic proportions.

If that same hypothetical professor said that those supporters should stop talking about racism because “their guy isn’t winning” there would be no racial undertone to his statement. Sexism, then, is coded into the very language with which we have available to talk about women yet you have to reach hard to say the same about racism. After all, in age parity “boy” and “girl” are the same yet there is no easy linguistic equivalent for “guy.”

Of course, the qualifier of “ultra” in front of feminists makes me want to look Professor Coleman up and ask her if in her world there are degrees of feminism; is feminism like gasoline, subject to varying octanes and degrees of righteousness? But I digress…

Brown goes on quote Robin Morgan, a white, feminist author and founder of the Women’s Media Center:

“Anything that can be interpreted as racist in the campaign is leapt upon and should be,” Morgan says. “Stuff that is blatantly sexist is not leapt upon. It’s often ignored, trivialized and laughed away.”

Only now has it been highlighted after “women said, ‘Excuse me!’ ” Morgan says the attacks on Clinton have ranged from trivialization to outright venom. “The Hillary Clinton nutcracker doll being sold in airports. They would not dare do that with a Stepin Fetchit doll in the image of Senator Obama. And they shouldn’t do that and there would be national outrage, and there should be national outrage.”

DeNeen Brown goes on to include these tidbits:

“Shirley Chisholm and I had long conversations about whether sexism or racism is a bigger barrier,” says [Mary Frances] Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “She said to me when she was running for president she found out how much sexism was a barrier. The reaction of men to the fact she was going to run for president almost floored her. Other black politicians couldn’t understand why she thought she could run for president. That campaign didn’t go anywhere.”

But Berry says it’s dangerous to raise questions pitting sexism against racism. “I think anytime people who have been in subordinated groups start debating about whose discrimination is the worst is a problem,” she says. “What they should do is reconcile the differences. Everybody has had something happen in their history. That’s why it’s called subordination.”

There is no way I am going to sit here and defends feminism or the feminist movement in America. True, feminism helped women make many gains in the workplace, the classroom, and in society in general but on balance feminism in America has been both a failure to women and a failure as a uniting movement.

By concentrating on abortion rights above all else feminism ignored the fundamental principle that money equals power. Thirty-eight years after the Second Congress to Unite Women wage disparity is exactly the same with women making 25% (or even less depending upon the woman’s race) than a comparably educated comparably experienced man makes in the same job.

As a uniting movement feminism failed first by literally throwing lesbians out of the movement in 1969 with the exclusion of the Daughters of Bilitis from the Second Congress and then by alienating women of color ignoring that racism and classism and sexism are inextricably bound together in American society. It was true in 1970 and it’s true now that if you’re brown and female in America your chances of being poor are extremely high.

Yes, I took the wrong approach to looking at Barack Obama’s speech. Perhaps he isn’t crying racism and I’m overly sensitive, but anyone with a working brain can not deny that he isn’t addressing the whole picture. Maybe as a man he’s reducing everything to his cultural experience and in his cultural experience sexism isn’t an issue. But if he’s doing that, if he’s ignoring sexism because it’s not part of his cultural experience how is that any more acceptable than white feminists ignoring racism by reducing everything to their cultural experience? If it’s wrong for one group it must be wrong for another, right? Right? Or are there special rules for Sen. Obama because he’s (half)black?

And maybe Obama himself isn’t crying racism, but his supporters sure don’t sound like they’re open to his message of change and inclusion. And if the people supporting the candidate who supposedly stands for unity can’t admit that anything but exactly what they think is a valid perspective what is the point of even trying to have a discussion?

So, yes, thank George W. Bush for the coup de grace in the death of cogent political discourse in America: Democrats are now acting exactly like neo-conservative Republicans.

So everyone thinks that Barack Obama made a fabulous nearly 40 minute speech about the state of race in America (watch it yourself below if, like me, you actually had to be at your desk at work 11am on a Monday).

Thing of it is…I couldn’t get more than three minutes into it. I couldn’t get past the point where he says:

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded in our Constitution. The Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law. The Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, to provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.

Living as a I do in a city that is so racially divided that it is impossible to bring up race without being called a racist (FYI: I think it is possible to have an adult dialogue about race without being racist), I’m accutely interested in how the whole racism vs. sexism dynamic is playing out on the public stage.

In DC when we have a conflict between residents and church goers who come from outside the city, park illegally, and keep residents from getting to their cars the issue becomes not about the rights of people who pay taxes to access the streets but about race simply because the congregants are black and the complaining residents are white.

Consider carefully for a minute Geraldine Ferraro’s words, her actual quote rather than the media spun interpretation, about Obama:

“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.”

(Read the whole interview if you like)

Here’s the thing, when you remove the knee-jerk cries of racism she’s not entirely wrong.

Let’s admit that on a policy level Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were basically all the same politician. The differences in their health care plans, their stances on gay and lesbian marriage rights, on social security, and on the war are miniscule at best.

While I would argue that Ferraro goes too far in attributing all of Obama’s success to his race – he is, after all a U.S. Senator (for whatever that’s worth), a lawyer, and a former State Legislator in addition to being a very good public speaker – it’s specious to say that his race has not played a role in both his novelty on the public stage and in the way he has been marketed to voters. Take away Obama’s mixed race status, consider him as a white man, and then tell me what the material difference is between him and John Edwards. Both good speakers, both holding very similar policy positions, yet, one is the same type of face we have been seeing for decades on the political scene and one is novel, something voters haven’t had the chance to seriously experience before. Yes, race is a factor. Ferraro’s slight exaggeration aside, what is wrong with pointing out the obvious?

Perhaps it’s a judgement call as to whether or not coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been sexist. I don’t remember anyone writing about Obama’s laugh or making a nut cracker out of John Edwards (find that one yourself, it’s a simple Google search).

Basically, this boils down to an arguement about which is worse, racism or sexism. As a white woman it’s natural for me to think that sexism is worse but the reality of the power hierarchy in an America that only takes into account black and white looks something like this:

Whites oppress Blacks.

Yes, historically, white women have had more privileges in society than black men in many ways, access to facilities, ability to move about without being challenged. Except, even as I type that I know it’s not true, for women of every color are consistently hassled by men, subject to verbal and physical assults simply because of the fact that they are female.

Whites have historically had more advantages than blacks, yet women have been subject to harassment by men of both colors.

So in reality the power dynamic looks something like this:

• White men oppress everyone.
• White women, by virtue of their race, have access to more privileges than black men yet they are still subject to harassment from both white men and black men.
• Black men, by virtue of their sex, have access to more privileges than black women, whom they also have the ability to harass.
• Black women, in turn, get the short end of both the sex and race sticks.

So you tell me what’s worse, racism or sexism. Yeah, I thought so.