“It’s time to take pride in breaking all the barriers,” Ms. Steinem ends her remarks. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting [Hillary] because she’ll be a great president and because she is a woman.” But do we dare say that we should support her because she is a white woman?
Our letters were not published, but one written by a black feminist exposed the divide between black and white feminists, one that is rarely aired since white feminists have more access to the media than black ones. White feminists, in their books, report, falsely, a solidarity between them and black women. Among letter writer Karin Kimbrough’s comments:
As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics.
She cites as evidence that “black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.” So what?
My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.
Camille Paglia also weighed in:
Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem’s fawning, gaseous New York Times Op-Ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the twenty-first century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.
An example of the problems that Barack faces as a result of there being few blacks having jobs in the old media occurred during an appearance by a white woman reporter on The Washington Journal (January 14, 2008). So pro-Hillary was this reporter, Beth Fouhy, that one woman called and said that she thought that this woman was a Hillary spokesperson, before noticing that she was from the Associated Press. Obviously the media have been infiltrated by Steinem’s legions.
Scathing comments about the white feminist movement by black feminists are included in The Feminist Memoir Project, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow. Times person Maureen Dowd also challenged Steinem, who is hard on black guys, but once confessed in the Times that she becomes embarrassed when a male of her ethnic group becomes involved in a scandal. Challenging Steinem’s argument that “she is supporting Hillary [because] she had no ‘masculinity to prove,’” Dowd wrote, “Empirically speaking, her masculinity is precisely what Hillary has been out to prove in her bid for the White House. What else was voting to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backing the White House’s bellicosity on Iran but proving her masculinity.”
Desperate, when the campaign moved into New Hampshire, the Clintons launched the brass knuckles attack on Obama that commentator William Bennett predicted would happen after Mrs. Clinton was upset in Iowa.
His voice shaking with rage, a livid Bill Clinton said that Obama’s positions on the war in Iraq were “a fairy tale,” and that nominating Obama was “a roll of the dice.”
Writing in The Washington Post on January 13, 2008, Marjorie Valbrun, voiced the reaction of many blacks to Clinton’s performance:
If anyone needed any proof that the mean Clinton machine is alive and well in this campaign, all they had to do was watch Bill Clinton deliver his angry diatribe against Obama in New Hampshire last week just before the primary. His red-faced anger was clear and a little scary, too. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it. His tone was contemptuous of his wife’s main challenger, whom he described as a political neophyte who for some reason was being granted a honeymoon with the national media.
This is the same Bill Clinton who took on Sister Souljah, a young and, at the time, controversial black rapper who made incendiary racial remarks after the Los Angeles race riots. Many people accused Clinton of using the rapper, and an appearance before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, as an opportunity to distance himself from Jackson, the ultimate race man. The move helped reinforce his white moderate bona fides.
On January 13, when Tim Russert interrogated Mrs. Clinton as to whether the attacks on Obama by her, her husband, and her surrogates were racist, she filibustered and dismissed such concerns as the one made by Ms. Valbrun and other blacks in a patronizing manner. She falsely accused Obama of comparing himself with JFK and MLK. He didn’t. He invoked their names to make a point about hope. How some hopes, considered false by cynics, can be fulfilled.
So offended by what he considered a black man getting “cocky” with his wife, Clinton blew his top. “Cocky” was the word that nuns-educated Bob Herbert used to admonish Obama. Herbert, one of three blacks whom the Times views as unlikely to alienate their readership, pointed to an exchange between Obama and Mrs. Clinton. When Mrs. Clinton, during a debate, commented that voters found Obama more “likeable” than Mrs. Clinton, Obama said that Mrs. Clinton was “likeable enough.” Obama’s reply prompted an Antebellum white man, Karl Rove, to refer to Obama as “a smarmy, prissy little guy taking a slap at her.” He said that this exchange threw the primary victory to Mrs. Clinton. Notwithstanding the irony of Karl Rove referring to someone as “smarmy,” if a reply as mild and innocuous as Obama’s leads to his being flogged by Clinton and reprimanded by one of the Establishment’s black tokens, Obama is going to be restricted in his ability to take on the political brawlers and hit persons aligned with Clinton, like Don Imus’s buddy, James Carville, a man who sneers at people who live in trailer parks, and who practices a no-holds-barred political strategy.
Both CNN and Carl Bernstein said that Clinton, in the midst of giving this uppity black the required flogging — Clinton’s a Jeffersonian and flogging blacks was Jefferson’s idea of recreation — had misrepresented Barack’s record. Also, those who commented about Hillary Clinton’s tearful breakdown missed the commentary that accompanied this calculated attempt at seeming human and personal, which occurred, as Jesse Jackson, Jr. noted in The Daily News, when her advisors told her that she should appear to be more human. “Why didn’t she cry for the victims of Katrina?” he added.
She said that she didn’t want to see the country “go backwards,” or “spin out of control,” the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full. (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post-election violence in Kenya, where Barack’s father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton’s Willie Horton moment.
Bill Clinton’s orchestrating his wife’s being more personal was a brilliant stroke: one that might doom Obama’s candidacy, but will doom the Democrats’ chances to win the 2008 election as well. As a Southern demagogue, Bill Clinton calculated that no black man can compete with a white woman’s tears, a left over from Old South thinking. Black men have been lynched as a result of the tears of white women. While Jesse Helms, another Southern demagogue, used a black man’s hand in an ad that criticized affirmative action, feminist Bill Clinton, who exploited a young woman who held him in awe — and cost Al Gore an election — used his wife’s tears, so desperate was he to achieve a third term and redeem his being impeached. But judging from angry black callers into C-Span’s The Washington Journal the day after the New Hampshire primary and the following day, and from my own non-scientific survey, many blacks finally get it. That they have been snookered by the Clintons. One angry man said that blacks supported Clinton during his marital problems and this is what they get for it. Another man said that he was going to vote for McCain as a way of protesting the Clintons’ treatment of Obama. On January 11, an irate black woman called in and said that she had been devoted to the Clintons since the 1990s, but after his attack on Obama, which she likened to “a knife in my chest,” and which she described as “low down,” she said that if Hillary were nominated, she’d either “vote Republican, or stay home.” Calling into the Journal on January 13, a black woman from Ohio said that many of her friends were upset with the “subliminally racist” campaign against Obama that the Clintons were conducting. These callers expressed the disgust that thousands of blacks feel about the Clintons’ dirty-tricks campaign against Obama, which included sending out mailers making false statements about his view about abortion, and deceptively attributing another mailer, critical of Obama, to John Edwards. This black backlash against the Clintons provides the Republican Party with a golden opportunity to recruit black voters for McCain, but I doubt whether they will seize upon it. After all, while Clinton might have an office in Harlem, McCain has a black daughter!