Given all the rancor around here lately between Hillary Clinton partisans and Barack Obama partisans, and given the nasty way both race and gender have been deployed to fragment the electorate, we would all do well to read this thoughtful piece by Eric Foner, one of the most eminent historians of race and gender in the country.
Soon, we must all unite behind the Democratic nominee for victory in the Fall!
keep reading below the fold...
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The controversy inspired by Hillary Clinton's remark crediting Lyndon Johnson with the civil rights movement's successes seems to have subsided. Contrary to much recent punditry, this contretemps does not prove that the Democratic primary has been reduced to a zero-sum game of identity politics. Rather, it reveals the complexity of bringing together the aspirations of different social groups within a single political movement--something Americans have experienced before.
Foner goes back to the abolitionist movement, which was not only a great movement for racial justice but also the beginning of the feminist movement in America, and explores cooperation and conflict in that earlier period between African Americans and women, particularly over the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote, but continued to exclude women. Many white women broke with their Abolitionist allies after the 15th Amendment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others left the multi-racial coalition to form a gender specifc organization. Unfortunately, many white women then began to use a racist trope to argue for women's rights: that white women, as racially superior people, deserved the vote before black people. This is where the traditional emphasis of this story is placed, but Foner is quick to point out:
This episode has come down to us as the feminist-abolitionist split. But the story is more complicated. What actually happened was a split within the feminist movement. Nearly every black feminist supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. So did many white women. Supporters believed these measures were necessary to protect all African-Americans from oppression in the aftermath of slavery. They saw the enfranchisement of black men as a step toward universal suffrage, not a retreat from it.
He ultimately concludes:
The point is not that one position was right and one wrong--either in 1868 or 2008. One thing we can learn from their experience is that debating who is more oppressed is a fool's game. Advocates of the rights of African-Americans and women achieve more working together than fighting among themselves.
Again, I think we would do well for ourselves on the progressive/left to remember this complicated history and to continue to seek out ways to work together to overcome all injustice in society. The women's movement, the African American freedom movement, the movement to end poverty and economic inequality, the struggle for a humane immigration policy, the quest for gay liberation, environmentalism... and on down the line. We cannot see these efforts as parallel tracks, or competing, but as various tributaries flowing into a mighty river of social justice! We are stronger together. And the world WILL BE BETTER if we keep our eyes on the prize...
Here is the full article:
Eric Foner: Debating who is more oppressed, blacks or women, is a fool's game