Northern suffragists had no qualms about the expediency of black women when it came to the sensibilities of their Southern sisters. Black women were asked to choose: race or gender. It was during the debate surrounding the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that Sojourner Truth, a former slave, asked her famous question, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Yet, when all the women are white and all the men are black, black women are brave (the title of an edited volume describing precisely this conundrum) and have found ways to bridge this divide. I ask, therefore, where black women fall when polls and vote tallies are simply divided on the basis of “race” (African-American) and “gender” (woman)? If Clinton received a majority of the women’s vote in New Hampshire, did this tally include African-American women? Or, do white women speak for all women?
At this historical moment we witness a white woman claiming the symbolic mantle of all women, a symbolic mantle not given to Michelle Obama. There are those who will argue that Michelle Obama is not running for President and that she is running for “First Lady” and thus her status is derivative of Obama’s. Yet, Clinton’s famed 35 years of “experience” came not from her own fight and from being elected but from her access as Bill Clinton’s wife first to both a governor’s mansion and the White House and now to his dynastic political machinery. Clinton went to law school at a time when there were very few women, especially in the cloistered world of an Ivy League institution where change comes slowly. If things were hard for Clinton, who had all the privileges of class and race, as well as the benefits of Affirmative Action, of which white women are the greatest beneficiaries, how hard do you think they were for Michelle who also went to law school at an Ivy League institution? In Clinton, we have a candidate who would like to have it both ways: as a woman but also as a candidate to be judged on her merits. Yet, she is also white, but somehow not responsible for being white. Is this not her “race card”? Isn’t part of the reason why she’s the first “viable female candidate” the fact that she’s a white woman?
Do you not think that this is precisely the bluff that Obama called during that infamous moment in the New Hampshire debate when he stated, matter-of-factly, to Clinton that she is likeable enough? What did Clinton do at the moment when it most mattered for her to be a presidential candidate in the face of a question that was meant to trip her up precisely because she is a woman? Instead of responding as a presidential candidate, as someone who has made it this far and can and should be able to take it and beat it, and who has had all the privileges in the world that most people on the planet can only dream of, she plays the coy and helpless victim albeit for cheap laughs: that hurts my feelings. Her campaign continued to exploit this debate as “piling on,” a phrase that evokes a form of sexual assault, if not rape. This form of emotional blackmail led to embarrassing over-compensation by the “liberal” and the “progressive” media for ostensibly ungentlemanly behavior towards a lady and thus to the absurdity of a sexist critique of alleged sexism rectified with yet more sexism. Clinton, however, could have responded to this question of likeability by saying that she didn’t realize we were having a contest for a prom queen instead of having a presidential election. Obama, who unlike many “successful” black men, Clarence Thomas comes to mind, did not marry a white woman as a way to “cross over,” or as a sign of status, asked Clinton with his statement to have dignity and grace and ultimately respect for the office she is running for. No, Clinton doesn’t get to pout and play coy, or get “emotional,” as if these are ostensibly natural ways of being a woman, because the same rules apply to everyone. Is being likened to Osama Bin Laden somehow less of an injustice? Is being ignored by the media because class is central to your campaign less of an injustice? And why is it that Obama is asked about drop-out rates for black men, even as he’s questioned about being “really” black, while we have yet to hear any serious and truly substantive discussion from Clinton about women’s issues (such as equal pay for equal work) or how US economic policies not only hurt the poorest women in the world in the global South (she should know because she could be Senator of Punjab as she said) but also poor women in the US (she should know because she’s on the board of Walmart)? Why does she not speak about how US economic and agricultural policies hurt women the most in the poorest parts of the world and it is these women who have to pick up the pieces and hold their families together? This point has been made to her at least since the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 where she spoke at a plenary session. Or, is being a woman reducible to “children” and “church”?
For those of you who question whether Obama is black enough: On what basis does an African-American get to claim “African,” no matter the generational distance, but an African (from his father’s side) does not get to claim “American,” even when he is born in America? Isn’t this stereotypical American xenophobia and sense of the world as an American entitlement? Or, is it only the father’s side that counts and not the mother’s?
We should fight sexism (the Washington Post cartoon depicting a child-like and overwhelmed Clinton before a crowd of recognizable foreign male leaders with their “foreign” features emphasized was pitiful and a national disgrace), as we should fight classism, racism, and homophobia. But, if we vote for Clinton because she is a woman we are being sexist (and simply replicating the identity politics that put white heterosexual men in power as the “natural” leaders) and ultimately disrespecting her.
This election is not about finding someone who looks like “you”; that’s narcissism. It’s about imagining how to create a new “us” and thus a new “you.”
Let us think this through: Clinton wins the nomination. She may or may not win the Presidency because of the hatred she evokes (rightly or wrongly) among Republicans, and the distrust she evokes for many Democrats. She is not good with winning over independents or swing voters. We may have a Republican President and in that case the Democratic Party may just as well quit (if it can’t win this cycle, then it’s useless). Or, Clinton wins by a small margin (politics as usual rather than a genuine shift and a genuine mandate). The Republicans get motivated by hate and become organized again. People vote Clinton out because they are just tired by the aura of bickering and “petty politics” that surrounds her. The United States blows an opportunity and god only knows when such an opportunity will appear again.
This moment is very clear. The United States is not just ravaging the world with its economic policies and its bombs. It is the worst polluter in the world and the biggest consumer of the world’s natural resources (6% of the world’s population consumes 35% of the world’s resources). This makes the United States a parasite on its host, the planet. The US can only change from below through a popular mandate and not by “getting back to business” and the fictitious wealth (i.e. consumption and “getting mine”) premised on ravaging the earth and other species and exploiting people. Yet, this popular mandate is allowing itself to turn into the worst form of identity politics precisely when we have what we want, a diverse field of candidates for the first time in history. We do not have time to be this self-indulgent and narcissistic. Or, is this what being an American is all about? Is that not ironic as well as a tragedy?
It is time to call Clinton’s bluff: if you are going to run “as a woman,” then it is fair to ask you to do the “womanly” thing and “sacrifice” your “personal” ambitions for the greater good. Sometimes, the most feminist thing a woman can do is not to self-aggrandize (“my voice”) but to get out of the way. In other words, the personal is not always political. Sometimes it’s just that—personal. This is the difference between winning the battle as opposed to winning the war. It is time for a different generation to hold the reins rather than a dynasty with obsolete paradigms and a record of failure when it mattered most (NAFTA, welfare, healthcare, prison reform, media consolidation, Kyoto, fair trade, landmines, and last but not least, the blood on Bill Clinton’s hands for Rwanda and for the Africans whose brutal deaths in a genocide seemed not to matter). If Mrs. Clinton is going to claim Bill Clinton’s “successes” and the access she has via one of the most patriarchal and heterosexist institutions, marriage, then she is also accountable for his failures.
So, I ask her “supporters”: if this candidacy is truly not about policies but about the symbolic value of gender, then is Michelle Obama not a woman? If this election were truly about women, then it would also be about Michelle. In the cult of personality that is Clinton, however, Michelle disappears. If this election is about the symbolic value of gender, then what about the symbolic value of having a black woman as the First Lady? Why is Michelle Obama not allowed to assume the symbolic mantle of all women? What about the symbolic value of having two little black girls in the White House?
Or, is this election not really about “women,” but about white women? Or, worse, is it about one white woman?
If Senator Clinton is running as a feminist, which is not the same as running as a woman, then she should do so as a serious candidate. She should bring feminist issues to the forefront, issues that pertain to all women and not just to the “liberal,” middle-aged, white, women who “see themselves” in her and thus find in her their own ostensible vindication. The stakes are too high. This election is not taking place in a 19th century Jane Austen novel and the story of this election is not her autobiography as an “exceptional” woman who by virtue of being “exceptional” somehow transcends the restrictions of her “womanhood.”
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