Robin Morgan had her secretary respond to my recent letter and from the letter I gather that Ms. Morgan hasn’t changed her mind. I’m a worse misogynist than the men in the Pentagon, and those who passed Clinton’s welfare reform bill. I guess that bell hooks, another black feminist, who won’t be invited by the men who run the Times to respond to Ms. Steinem, was right when she wrote in her book, Outlaw Culture, that white feminists are harder on black men than white men, but like other black feminists, from the nineteenth century to the present day, her point has been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when they view feminism, and just about every other subject, all they can see is white! (Except when it’s crime, athletics, and having babies out of wedlock!)
Feminists are harder on Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison (yes, him too), and even James Baldwin, that gentle soul, than on Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Harder on Barack Obama than on Bill Clinton, to whom Gloria Steinem, a harsh critic of Clarence Thomas, gave a free pass when he was charged with sexual indiscretions by various women. She said that Bubba was O.K. because when he placed Kathleen Wiley’s hand on his penis and she said no, he withdrew it. That when other women said no, he also halted his sexual advances. A letter writer to the Times challenged Ms. Steinem’s double standard for white and black men:
Bob Herbert (column, January 29) writes that Gloria Steinem said that even though Paula Jones has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, Ms. Jones has not claimed that the president had forced himself on her. “He takes no for an answer,” Ms. Steinem intones.
Lest we forget, Anita Hill said no to Clarence Thomas. And her accusations nearly derailed his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Patricia Schroeder, the former Congresswoman, did not claim that “somebody may be overstating the case” when Ms. Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual misconduct, but Ms. Schroeder claims that now in Mr. Herbert’s column. Again the left inadvertently exposes its sliding scale of moral indignation.
RAYMOND BATZ
San Rafael, California, January 29, 1998
Black feminists also charge that white feminists deserted them during the fight against Proposition 209, which ended racial and gender hiring in the state of California, even though affirmative action has benefited white women the most!
They charge that white women were missing in action during the fight against the welfare reform bill. It seems that the cheapest form of solidarity they can express toward their minority sisters is to join in on the attack on Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, and Clarence Thomas and Mr. _______, a character in The Color Purple, who, for them, represents all black men.
Though Steinem accuses men of being mean to Mrs. Clinton, she expressed no outrage about surrogate Bill Shaheen painting Obama as drug dealer, or the innuendo promoted by Senator Bob Kerrey. Senator Bob Kerrey, who, apparently having made up with the Clintons, was recruited to associate Obama with what the right refers to as “Islamo fascists.”
He said, “His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and his father was a Muslim and his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.” He added that Obama “spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.”
You’d think that the New School of Social Research would have fired Kerrey when he admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Now this.
All of these attacks must be what Hillary Clinton meant when she warned her opponents “now the fun begins.”
One of the charges made by some black feminists is that white women middle-class movement figures embezzle their oppression. In The New York Times, Gloria Steinem’s using a hypothetical black woman to do a house cleaning on Obama was what these women must have had in mind. (Philip Roth does the same thing; uses his black maid characters to denounce black history and black studies: “Missa Roth, dese Black Studies ain’t doin’ nothin’ but worrying folks. Whew!”) Her using a black woman as a prop must have annoyed Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison who made blistering comments about Ms. Steinem during an interview conducted by novelist Cecil Brown and carried in the University of Massachusetts Review, where Ms. Morrison made the harshest comments about Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple to date, even harsher than those made by black feminist Professor Trudier Harris, who, as a result of her essay, published in African American Review, faced such a hostile backlash from white feminist scholars that she stopped commenting about the novel, which has become a sacred text among white feminists, who are silent about how women are treated among their ethnic groups. Steinem said that had Obama been a black woman, he would not have made as much progress as a presidential candidate and added that white men would prefer voting for a black man over a white woman because they perceived black men as being more masculine than they.
I wrote a response to the Times on January 8, 2008:
Dear Times,
Even Dr. Phil would probably snicker at the level of pop psychology employed by Gloria Steinem to explain the attraction of many voters to Senator Barack Obama. For example, she believes that the preference for a black male candidate over a white woman by some white males is based upon their admiration for the black male’s “masculine” superiority. “Masculine superiority?” All four of the current heavyweight champions are white as well as last year’s MVPs of the NBA were white men.
Moreover, Ms. Steinem is a long time critic of black men as a group. She said that the book, The Color Purple, in which one black man commits incest, told “the truth” about black men, the kind of collective blame that’s been used against her ethnic group since the time of the Romans.
I also made a reference to her abandonment of a tearful Shirley Chisholm’s presidential candidacy after supporting it. If she’s so concerned about the political fate of a black woman’s presidential bid, why did she desert Ms. Chisholm in favor of the man?
She also said “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.” The fact that when white women received the vote they experienced little of the violence that accompanied black men being awarded the right to vote, fifty years earlier, suggests that some groups, black men, black women, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians, face more restrictions than white women, whose college enrollment is far higher even than that of white men. (Steinem said that women are never “front runners.” How many white women senators are there? How many black?)
Cecil Brown, author of the bestselling Hey, Dude Where’s My Black Studies Department, wrote:
I grew up in North Carolina, where I often heard my mother and my aunts speak of the racism of white women against them. Their experience is that of millions of black women who were and are discriminated by white women.
In the Bay Area, where I now live, a professor friend told me, recently, that a white female student told him that she found the use of the expression, “white woman” in his lectures offensive, and asked that he not use it.
Like this student, Ms. Steinem avoids the phrase “white woman,” because it historicizes their gender. While she lectures to us about black men, white men, and black women, she can only think of her white women as women.