The XX Factor: What women really think.

What I'm Learning from Skip Gates' Arrest

That's a really upsetting litany of stories, Marjorie, about the cops accosting you and your relatives. The confluence of Skip Gates' arrest and the Obama presidency are making white people, at least some of us, take in these stories differently. We've heard them before, but now maybe we're absorbing them. Obama's election has both raised expectations of a post-racial America and given us a lens through which to see clearly how we still fall short. (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)

Authentically Fake

Dahlia,

I also agree with you about Sarah Palin being a divider not a uniter. Over the last few days she has been going after Obama in racially coded language in her attempts to link him to '60s-era radical Bill Ayers. I find this dismaying and dangerous. When she says Obama "is not like us," or that he doesn't "share our values," she is signaling to her mostly white audiences that they should be worried and fearful of this guy, who is not only black but also a closet Muslim who hangs out with domestic terrorists. (Read: unpatriotic black militant.) For someone who can't speak with any intelligence, or in a coherent sentence, on the substantive issues, she sure is well-versed in the politics of personal destruction.

As for Rachael's view that Palin's experience might not scream "heartland," but her personality does, I must say I'm doubtful her down home, aw-shucks personality is real. It screams shtick and feels forced. It reminds me of someone who is faking authenticity. I was also amused by how she cited soccer moms like herself worrying about the economy and feeling "fear regarding the few investment that some of us have in the stock market," making it sound as if she is of modest means. And the next day we learn that she and the first dude are worth $1.5 million. Real authenticity does not need to be announced and showcased at every turn. Palin is wearing a flashing neon light saying: "I'm authentic! I'm authentic!"   

As for her now suddenly remembering that golly gee, jiminy cricket she does actually read newspapers, specifically the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist,  I guess that would explain her wide-ranging expertise on foreign policy issues.  

John's Race Card Question

Evidence today of the persistent nature of the significance of race in the campaign: The percentage of young people who say they're unwilling to vote for a black candidate is 22 percent, according to one poll, and not dropping. Get it together, 18- to 29-year-olds! But Obama's comment is still problematic. He raised race not in terms of voters' attitudes, but in terms of Bush and McCain's—when, John as you say, they haven't given him call to. I suppose the Obama camp could argue that McCain's supporters are doing it for him. But the ellision seems like a bad idea. For one thing, if McCain is going to be accused of race-baiting whether he actually does it or not, doesn't that give him less incentive to muzzle the 527s that might do this? And for another, we expect Obama to be America's leading sensitive spokesman on racial politics. If he's careless about who he tags as a bigot, that gives the rest of us license to be.

Is Obama Playing the Race Card?

A guest post from Slate's John Dickerson:

"Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama said this week. "You know, he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name, you know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

I'll give Obama "scared," and he's got a good case on the patriotism charge, too, but race? Wouldn't the world have gone nuts if Hillary had said something similar about being a woman? They would have said she's playing the gender card. Despite the reckless McCain attacks, about which I've already written, there's no evidence that he's ever made Obama's race an issue. In fact, he's done the opposite -- he called out one of his supporters for doing so at a public event. Immediately, without it becoming a flap. McCain's "black" daughter (she's actually Bangladeshi), we also might remember, was used in an attack against him. So, why isn't Obama going too far here? I suppose one response is that if McCain can completely make up things about Obama then Obama can make up things about McCain. Of course, yelling racism is taking it one step beyond making up his positions on oil, energy taxes, and his visit to the troops in Germany.

Ich Bin ein Womanist

Bonnie, thanks for your response. These are very complicated and delicate issues, which is why so often we'd all prefer to just sip our lattes and talk about something else. One problem is that we don't even have a common language for discussion. We can't even agree on what race is, let alone what words such as racism, exclusion, feminism, womanism mean and should mean to each of us.

Can we all be womanists? Um, I'm not sure we can. Walker's full definition of the term (laid out in her book In Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose) and the reason for its creation (because early feminist movements, led by white, middle-class women, ignored oppression based on race or class to focus solely on sexism, and thus denied the dual reality of a black woman's experience) leaves room for debate. Do you have to actually be a woman of color—or just "get" that women of color experience a substantially different kind of oppression than white women? But Alice Walker doesn't need me to speak for her, so I won't. I'll just say that her statement about Clinton carrying  "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person" reads to me as just that—statement, not accusation. The statement strikes me as a pretty obvious one, but even if one disagrees, the distinction between statement and accusation is critical. I am so uninterested in blame or shame or apologies as to be nearly comatose when these words float up. Distractions, every one of them. Utterly without use. (The last time I made my son apologize to his sister for whacking her in the head with a Frisbee he grudgingly muttered, "Sorry." Then whacked her again.)

Whenever I travel abroad and encounter anti-American anger or, more often, plain old bewilderment, I ask myself: How should I handle this? I did not ask to be born American. I certainly didn't vote for the current administration. It would be easy to disassociate myself from it all, except for one thing—I'm a little too busy racking up the benefits. Benefits from being born in this country, and from actions taken on its behalf long before I was a sparkle in my father's eye. Many years ago, I visited Germany and felt, at one point in a restaurant, that the waitress was condescending toward me. Suddenly, the thought popped into my head: "Hey, we kicked your butts!" And though none of the kicking was my own, I felt much, much better after that. 

That America's influence has waned in the world does not diminish the benefit I've gained and continue to enjoy. For me I need to own that fact, to work to mediate the resulting inequities and to be clear that the past, as Faulkner said, is not dead. It's not even past. Tim Wise, a brilliant writer/lecturer on race, has a great take on it with his gumbo analogy. 

The Whole Race Deck

Welcome, Kim, and I’m glad you brought up Alice Walker's “womanist” position. Her Root essay last March, “Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave,” endorsing Barack Obama stayed with me a long time. Not just because I found Walker’s trademarked word womanism to describe only “feminist women of color” a little exclusionary. 

I do agree that Hillary Clinton is not, as Walker reminds us, "colorless, race-less, past-less," and she escapes racial scrutiny as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always "a black man." Furthermore, playing the race card (whether she then withdrew it or not) was inexcusable. But, although it is true that Hillary has benefited, as have I and other white women (particularly of our generation) from innumerable educational and economic advantages to being Caucasian in this country, I got a little uncomfortable when Walker wrote that Clinton carries "all the history of white womanhood in America in her person." Perhaps wrongly, until reading that, I had not personally considered myself an exploiter of racial inequality. To be clear, I am deeply ashamed of the abomination of slavery and the century of discrimination that followed. I just didn't think simply by being white and of a certain age, I was part of the problem.

I saw Florida recently joined the queue of states that have apologized for slavery. I posted a "Hot Document" a few months ago when New Jersey did the same thing. A lot of Slate readers Frayed for weeks declaiming the emptiness of that state’s gesture while many others wrote angrily that the official apology wasted resources and was not owed by the geographical descendants of New Jersey’s 19^th-century citizens. Personally, I think it’s never too late to apologize. In fact, I now want to apologize to Alice Walker on behalf of myself and all white women who believe in equality. Really. Can we be womanists now too?

As Lavender Is to Purple

Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Let's give credit where credit is due.

Hillary aside, though, what I've been wondering about more and more during this endless primary season is whether the damage done to black women/white women relationships will be permanent or not. That there has been damage to this ever-fragile sisterhood is clear to me, both in reading the millions of words flooding the Internet about this subject and in my own personal life. Problems seem to arise not when friends discover they stand on different sides of the Hillary/Barack divide, but when they discover that the very prisms through which they view this contest, and thus the relative importance of race and gender in this society, are—surprise, surprise—miles apart. More critically, the damage is deepened when one party insists that in failing to share her view, the other party is somehow less enlightened.

Just the other day I had a very awkward conversation with a white woman acquaintance who recalled aloud that infamous Gloria Steinem piece in the New York Times way back when. She recalled the article as refreshing and necessary and brave. I remembered it as the first rock tossed in what would become a battle of who-has-it-harder. Most of all, I remembered reading Steinem's line that gender was the most restricting force in America today and laughing aloud, because I was so sure that what she meant to say was that gender is the most restricting force in America today—if you happen to be white and middle-class. Having spent some time that week at a Boston public school that is visibly and painfully segregated—segregated and restricted by race and economic status and parental educational attainment and maybe some other things but certainly not by gender—and having looked up a number of statistics on the economic status of white women versus black men, including, by the way, the number of white women currently in the U.S. Senate (16) compared with the number of African-Americans (um, that would be one), found her view utterly unsupportable. My friend suggested that I was wrong. I said we might have to agree to disagree; she insisted that sexism and misogyny remain a more potent force than racism not only in America, but in my own life if I just had the good sense to realize it. And we were off on that ridiculous hamster wheel again. She quoted poor Barbara Jordan, who has been trotted out so endlessly this year by people who want to disavow the impact of race on a black woman's life that she must be begging to be allowed to rest in peace. I quoted Alice Walker, who famously wrote that womanist (feminist of color) is to feminist as lavender is to purple. In other words, our struggles are not the same. For a while there we seemed to be working together, though. Is that all over now?

Withdrawing the Race Card

Remember how Hillary said last week that Obama's support was weakening among "working, hardworking Americans, white Americans?" Not smart, some of us at Slate thought. Clinton may not have intended to, but her remark tiptoed up to the line of suggesting that black people aren't also hardworking, and also of playing the race card. She now agrees that she screwed up, John Dickerson alerts me. From an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

"On her reference to an AP story about Obama’s support among white voters
BLITZER: Now, your great friend and supporter Congressman Charlie Rangel said and I’m quoting now. 'It’s the dumbest thing you could have said.'
CLINTON: Well, he’s probably right."

The Race Card

However Obama's speech plays out, Hillary Clinton's No. 1 surrogate, Bill, has weighed in again on race. He said the idea that he has said anything racially insensitive during the campaign (particularly comparing Obama's win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's) is "a myth" (what, not a "fairy tale"?) and a "mugging" by Obama's campaign. (Does this mean Bill Clinton is suggesting he has been mugged by a black candidate?—not to play the race card or anything.) He further went on to say, in that self-pitying style he is so very good at reminding us of,  that he never played the race card against Obama, but that Obama's campaign played the race card against him. I hope Hillary will be asked to respond to this.