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Melonyce, I don't know if you are the only one who "finds RNC Chairman Michael Steele's dorky grasp at urban credibility a little endearing." but I surely do not. Why does Steele even need urban credibility? To relate to that large and growing GOP demographic of young black men who wear baggy pants and listen to Jay-Z, Lil' Wayne, and T.I.? I'd be willing to wager they aren't lining up outside the RNC's headquarters, and neither Michael Steele's election as chairman nor his urban-cool, or should I say urban-fool, way of speaking is going to change this.
In what way is Steele more sincere than his predecessors? Ken Mehlman went on listening tours before black organizations and black journalists and publicly acknowledged GOP mistakes and apologized for playing racial politics in the past. He courted black voters and didn't talk down to them. His efforts may not have gained the GOP tons of new black voters, but it earned Melhman some respect. Steele, by comparison, wants to give the GOP "a hip-hop makeover"? (I'm rolling my eyes here because I have no idea what that even means) and has banned the word outreach.
If it's the golf shirt set—whether black or white—that Steele is after, then why not speak to them in their own language, like a serious-minded adult? Given Steele's many missteps that have already led members of his party to call on him to step down, I don't think anyone could argue that he has made the GOP look looser or more dazzling. If anything, he looks just as befuddled and grapsing as his discredited party as it tries to change its image overnight after having been soundly rejected by voters in November.
If Steele really wants to shake up his party he should take a page from Colin Powell, an unapologetic black Republican who was not afraid to criticize the GOP or take positions against party dogma on such things as affirmative action. Black Americans may not have voted with Powell or agreed with his support for the Bush administration, but they respected him. Steele is losing fast what little respect he has with black folks, and with white folks, too, for that matter, and it has nothing to do with whether "he's black enough." It has everything to do with whether he's credible enough. He isn't.
Steele would be more defensible if he would just embrace his inner geek and stop trying to sound hip by using outdated hip-hop terms. I mean is it really necessary for him to sprinkle "off the hook" throughout every conversation? We get it, Mike; you know black slang, congratulations. Bling, bling for you and all that. But trying so hard to showcase your skills in black vernacular makes you seem like you're trying way too hard. It's called pandering, and as a black independent voter who tries to keep an open mind about black Republicans (as hard as that is), I find it deeply insulting. I don't want to be talked down to, or patronized, by a Republican of any color who is stupid enough to think I can be persuaded to give the GOP some love if he slings silly slang my way. This is just as transparent as reluctantly selecting a black man to lead the Republican Party soon after a black Democrat is elected to the White House and selecting an Indian-American to give the Republican response to the new black president's address to Congress and selecting a black Republican carpetbagger and perpetual candidate from Maryland to run against a popular black Democratic candidate from Illinois for the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The same Democrat who would become president four years later.) It reeks of rank desperation and recalls the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia when the genius organizers of that pseudo-diversity fest bused in black preachers and black church choirs to perform at the convention. That party leaders actually believed this would ensure their big-tent, we-are-the-world bona fides, was the subject of many late-night talk-show jokes.
The GOP would do better to simply try to address some of the issues important to black voters, such as racial inequities in the criminal justice system and the warehousing of black men in prison and on death row. How about they tone down their hypocritical hostility to social programs (Republicans prefer the term "entitlement programs") that help lift black families out of entrenched poverty? How about they at least pretend to be just as outraged over the level of corporate welfare that took place under the last administration and that enriched Republican fat cats and contributed to the economic morass we now find ourselves in? How about if Michael Steele got a clue?
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Last night I woke my 9-month-old baby—fast asleep in her Obama shirt—to watch the acceptance speech. My computer cord shorted out in a giant tumbler of champagne. I wept, and then wept again, and then wept again; Jesse Jackson's tears jerked my own the hardest. For the first time in my life, people took to the streets in celebration of something good, something I believe. If the adage is true that we get the government we deserve, then we have made ourselves, finally, to be something deserving, after all. It is the first time in my life I believe in my country. Barack Obama made me, and millions of us, do that.
"It's been a long time coming," he said last night. Those words lead off the refrain to Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," which has been playing in my head since, as I check and recheck the headlines to convince myself that this is history, not reverie. The song has sounded like a dream ever-deferred. Today, it feels more like a lyrical journey to what led us here and a reminder that just as we've crossed that distance, so we might advance more, after all this time moving backward. Holding my baby on my lap last night, I was most particularly moved, like Dahlia, by Obama's account of the century Ann Nixon Cooper has witnessed in her 106-year march to yesterday's vote.
I have no doubt that Obama has the deepest regard for the shoulders that he stands upon today. But if this is going to be a true victory for all of us, he must summon that regard not just to the black America that has endured a painful journey, from slave auctions, to the bullets that ricocheted through the Audubon ballroom, to this day. He'll have to address the continued erosion of civil and human rights. In the same country that has elected this extraordinary man, African-Americans constitute 49 percent of our prison population (compared with 13 percent of our total population). More black men are incarcerated than are in college. The average black life expectancy has declined to what it was in 1970. A recent study on the housing crisis concludes that "the subprime lending debacle has caused the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history." Obama did not campaign on these issues, but to make good on the moral promise of his presidency and not just the symbolic one, he will need to focus on the specific challenges to African-Americans as well as all Americans.
The New York Times says today, "No Time for Laurels; Now the Hard Part"; I say this is a moment to bask in what we have delivered unto ourselves. I plan to keep crying and playing Sam Cooke for my baby for at least another few days. But in listening to Cooke's words, I must remember that this election hasn't closed the book. Rather, by turning the page, we're still pushing through the same narrative, chapter by chapter.
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Welcome, Lauren, and thanks to you and Nina for starting to puzzle over these identity implications of the campaign, which will be with us long after the polls close today. (Oh, what a glorious phrase: The polls will actually close.) If post-gender means that you don't run away from the female part of candidate but you don't lead with your mother or sexy librarian side, either, then I'm with Nina: Palin isn't there. For that matter, Hillary wasn't quite either, because at key moments she appealed to women by reminding us of her own victimhood. On the other hand, she did get us past the commander in chief bar. My own fear has been that Palin ran right back into it. But that's not because she's a woman or even because she winks and flirts with her audience. It's because she has shown us that she knows little where a vice-presidential candidate should know a lot. So maybe we are at the point at which the next woman with serious qualifications will indeed mount a post-gender candidacy. And maybe Palin helps bring that about, too, in the sense that Michael Kinsley writes about today: Because of her and Obama (and I'd add, Hillary), he argues, it's "hard to imagine" that future pictures of the two presidential candidates with their VP picks will show us four white men. Actually, that seems a bit aspirational to me: I can imagine plenty such pictures. But are they less likely than they were before? Yes.
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Lauren, your post about Palin and Obama got me thinking. As I’ve always understood the concept of “post-race,” it isn’t really about being past race. Race isn’t something you can transcend. But it is something you can bend and complicate—especially if you’re as charismatic and talented as Obama is.
I remember first hearing the term “post-black” in 2001, when Thelma Golden curated Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, featuring artists who were, in Golden’s words, “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.” That was the same year that Rolling Stone published the article “To Be Gay at Yale,” in which many of my classmates spoke about how their queer identity had become “backgrounded”—i.e., it was still an important part of how they conceived of themselves, but it was no longer necessarily the most important part. They were, in a word, post-gay.
Ever since then I’ve found the phrase “post-race” to be a useful one, personally. I’m a biracial woman who’s very attached to the immigrant communities I grew up in—someone who thinks about race a lot—but my skin color is not always in the forefront of my mind when I interact with the world.
So to me, Obama is absolutely a post-race candidate. He’s the quintessential post-race candidate, even! Here’s a man with roots in Kenya and Indonesia, in Hawaii and South Side Chicago, and though by all accounts his sense of himself has evolved over time (“struggled with his identity”—ick, I hate that phrase), he now seems totally at ease with his complicated self. Being post-race, to me, means wearing yourself a little more lightly.
So is Sarah Palin post-gender? I’m not entirely sure, but my instinct says no. Too much of her public persona seems to rotate between performances rooted in gender roles—the flirt with the high heels or the über-mom, as you point out, or the Ann Coulter-style mean girl or the sexy Puritan, as other Slate writers have noted. Is it the calculatedness I’m responding to? Her eagerness to put on a show for us? I was going to say that it’s because she was chosen for the ticket simply because she’s a woman, but that’s not quite right since she’s obviously proven to be a charismatic, electrifying politician, as well. I confess I’m stumped.
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My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) crowned party leader.
When John McCain chose his running mate, he was rightfully lambasted as cynical for passing over experienced insider men for an accessible outsider woman. In the end, he was right on one count: that a swath of the American public—though one which perhaps may not be wide enough to elect him tomorrow—felt so disenfranchised by the people who hold power in this country that they would line up behind someone who reflected and could articulate their own proud feelings of ordinariness. (This profound cultural conflict—rooted deep in issues of education and economics—will require far more systemic thinking than the fuzzy feeling of "unity" Obama hopes to usher in tomorrow and beyond.) Where McCain may have been wrong—and this is big—was in his perception of this election as a game of identity politics.
People have talked plenty about whether Obama is a post-race candidate for a post-race America. I've generally taken issue with that notion—and should he be elected, my heart positively swells with the notion of the descendant of slaves raising her children inside the White House. But by the same flawed token, did Sarah Palin become a post-gender candidate for a post-gender America? Of course, Palin has certainly worked her gender in this race: from that flirty wink and sky-high Manolos to her uber-mom positioning. But like Obama's race hasn't been the totalizing meta-narrative of his candidacy, neither has Palin's gender, and just as this hasn't been an election year for single issue voters, it hasn't been one for single-identity ones either, despite what pundits may have predicted from the outset. We entered this race all aflutter about our first female presidential candidate. We're ending it considering the next one with hardly a shrug about her gender.
While I am hardly a Palin fan, and for myriad reasons shudder to imagine how she might develop with the next four years to study up, the fact that neither her supporters nor her detractors seemed to make a big deal about a female commander in chief (remember those days?) suggests that in unexpected ways, we've come a long way during this long march to Election Day.
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Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine in March. How can she say her comments were prompted in part by Kennedy's cancer diagnosis when she had already said the same thing a few months ago when there was no talk of Kennedy having cancer? Perhaps the fact that her original comments did not get wide notice explains why she wanted to re-telegraph those sentiments to a wider audience. She seems too smart and calculating to be making so many subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged remarks by mistake. Does anyone believe that it's not more effective to send these signals out and then say, "Oops. So sorry. Never mind," than it is to not say them at all? Once she has sown doubts, raised fears, and planted ideas in the minds of people who have racial fears and animosities, she has effectively turned those people against her opponent. In Obama's case, the threat of assassination has real resonance in the black community.
On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.
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Interesting report, released today by the American Association of University Women, which says that the idea of a boys' crisis in education is so much bull. Being one of those women who struggled in school with math (because it did not interest me, or because I was given the idea that, as a girl, I would not be good at it?), I always read these statistic-laced reports with a Twain-esque hairy eyeball. Still, I find compelling the conclusion that the "largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels." Likewise, I applaud the attempt by the AAUW to debunk the histrionic contention that academic gains made by girls in our schools have come at the expense of boys. But what to make of my visit yesterday to the Boston Day and Evening Academy, an amazing alternative high school in the city for kids who are overage for grade level and at high risk for dropping out. The school's enrollment is 55 percent girls, 45 percent boys—also 65 percent black and 27 percent Latino—despite the fact that boys drop out at much higher rates than girls. The gender discrepancy occurs across racial groups, but the gap between male and female dropout rates is higher for black students than for either whites or Latinos. (Not so for Asians, whose overall dropout rates are low). Boys in general may not be in crisis, but from my vantage point, black boys are. Girls didn't cause it. And, lord knows, girls still have their own battles to wage. But the more public schools I see, the heavier grows the plate of worry I carry around for my son. My daughter's plate pretty much stays the same.
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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.
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Rachael, Melinda,
1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech
I want her to make. As
Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around a speech that bluntly addresses these issues and is uplifting and unifying to boot. Nonetheless, these are (I believe) the fundamental issues: control over one's body and workplace policies that level the playing field for women, despite women's child-bearing and mothering functions. They seem essential if we're to achieve a truly egalitarian society. (Yes, I still think we should seek an egalitarian society, even though I also think that it's unlikely, for biological and possibly linked social reasons, that women will ever be able or even willing to give up certain primary caregiving functions. The job of feminism today, as I see it, is to create a world in which we get to remain members of society in equal standing while raising our children in a serious, loving, attentive way. In this possibly idiosyncratic sense of the term, then, feminism isn't just for women anymore. It's for fathers as well as mothers. Maybe it isn't even feminism any more.)
As for the presidential race: It also seems evident that a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin. Check out
Mike Kinsley's hilarious piece on the time-cost to a female candidate to meeting female standards of presentableness—roughly two-and-a-half weeks more spent primping during the average campaign cycle. Women operate under countless other double standards. You know which ones: They sound "overemotional" or they seem "calculating"; they're too sexy or not sexy enough; they made choices in the "Mommy Wars" that half of all American women disagree with, or else lack children and thus are't people American women can identify with. I don't see Obama taking any heat for having left the child-rearing to his wife. I wonder how a woman running for office would play to the public if she had left the child-rearing almost entirely to her husband.
In short, it seems as if we have arrived at something of a consensus, albeit a very rough one, about what racism is and why it's bad, whereas we still disagree about what sexism is and so don't agree on what's bad about it. That's why it's hard to imagine that speech.
2. Even though I see that it's hard to imagine, I don't think it is nearly as impossible to make as we think. The miracle of Obama's speech was that he made a number of thoughts that have long been unthinkable in America sound reasonable, even obvious--the notion that white America is suffused with casual racism; the idea that we need not demonize a man who says unacceptable things but does good in other ways. And so on. I put my list out there in a bald, unadorned way.
Emily suggested a way to wrap it up more elegantly. The speech would try to re-imagine family values. There might be other ways to give it. I'll admit that neither Kerry nor Clinton has found a way to do so. That doesn't mean that Obama couldn't, if he so chose; or that a female politician with similar levels of eloquence and courage wouldn't be able to put it across.
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