The XX Factor: What women really think.

Jason Whitlock Makes Don Draper Look Like a Feminist

It’s been a whole day since I first read Jason Whitlock’s Foxsports.com column defending ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, who was fired from the network after having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.

Whitlock’s main point is that “[a] little off-the-books nookie should not infringe on man's ability to discuss bats and balls in October.” I’m going to set aside the obvious fact that a job at ESPN is a privilege, not a right, and if an employee does something to embarrass the network, of course he can be fired ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

If You’re a Black Woman, You Could Get 15 Years in Prison for Cutting in Line

A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:

My jaw fell to the floor reading this story. Three years ago, a young black woman named Heather Ellis was shopping with her cousin in a Missouri Wal-Mart. As I’ve done more than once in my life, Ellis and her cousin split up into two different checkout lines to see which would go fastest. When her cousin’s line started moving quickly, she joined him. The clerk accused Ellis of cutting in line, an argument ignited, security was called, and lo and behold Ellis, a pre-med honor student, now faces up to 15 years in prison on charges of disturbing the peace, trespassing, and assaulting a police officer. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Joe Wilson Deserves No Sympathy

A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:

Hanna, I see what you're saying about how Joe Wilson is in the mainstream of South Carolina white culture, but that doesn't strike me as a reason to shy away from drawing the conclusion that he's a racist. If anything, that just seems to be more evidence that he is a racist. Whether we like to admit this about our fellow Americans or not, there are large parts of the country where the mainstream white culture is overtly racist. As a white person living in a red state, I'm sick of pretending that this doesn't create plenty of occasions where conservatives will say the most hair-curling racist things when they think they're out of the earshot of anyone who will confront them on it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Profits (and Race) Are What Health Care is All About

A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:

A couple of years ago, my very right-wing stepfather was giving me a ride from the airport, and he told me something I would have never thought he'd outright admit: He'd watched a documentary on TV that referenced a study that showed the inverse relationship between ethnic diversity and social welfare programs. "It seems," he mused, "that those little European nations with high taxes where everyone's on the dole are that way because everyone looks the same."

I didn't know how to respond, since I thought he was smart enough to see that this has personal implications—that he and everyone he knows that are opposed to social welfare spending might be, you know ... racist ... (Read more in DoubleX)

Critics of Sotomayor Aren't Guilty of Racism or Sexism. They're Guilty of Ageism!

Michelle, We Are on to Your Tricks

The Spiteful Vote

On Convictions, a thoughtful post from Rich Ford, in response to Kim and Melinda. Rich is the author of The Race Card (much more here). In thinking about whether Clinton supporters who say they'll back McCain are motivated by racism, he writes:

Of course there are a lot of explanations that don’t involve racism. Maybe some Democrats for McCain really buy into the experience line; maybe some voted for Clinton mainly due to gender solidarity and actually prefer many of McCain’s policy positions. Personally, I suspect most Democrats for McCain are driven not by racism but a much more widespread, simpler, and more primal motivation: spite.  

I suspect a lot of the reason Obama supporters want to tar every Democrat gone over to McCain as a racist is that they suspect that some unsavory motivation underlies this strange shift in political alliances and jump to the most uncharitable conclusion: racism. Juries are apt to do this in discrimination cases, too: If the employer is acting out of favoritism, vindictiveness, or spite, they figure he’s probably a racist, too. But in fact the likelihood of another unsavory motivation, sufficient in itself to explain the decision, cuts against the inference of racism: If Clintonites could be motivated to support McCain by spite alone, then we have less of a reason to suspect them of racism.  

Oh, by the way, before the hate mail from Clinton supporters pours in: I have no doubt that many Obama supporters would have succumbed to a spiteful solidarity with McCain had Obama lost to Clinton. (Oh, oh: Is that just going to get me more hate mail?) Crushing disappointment and a resultant spiteful backlash has been a real risk in this primary of potential 'historic firsts': Someone had to come in second, and some profound symbolic triumph over bigotry and oppression had to be delayed. That’s hard to take, and we can expect the McCain campaign to try to capitalize on the resentment of the losing faction. I think Obama could probably win the election without the racist vote, but he may have a hard time winning without the spiteful vote. Let's hope those liberals for McCain decide they like their faces enough not separate them from their noses.

Twister

Melinda, I'm sorry your friend's son got tagged as a racist for supporting Hillary. But please: Let's not get it twisted. 

My kids' school is almost a 50-50 split between black students (African-American, Haitians, Jamaicans, etc.) and white, with a smattering of Asians and Latinos, a good cultural diversity program and all the required social studies curriculum about "teaching tolerance" (a phrase I detest, by the way). Yet we've had incidents of name-calling and teasing and grief that involve race, perceived sexual orientation, body size, academic ability, religion (my friend's Muslim daughter was asked quite casually if she was carrying a bomb in her backpack), etc., etc. Is every other school in America such a bastion of maturity and civic-mindedness and tolerance (that word again!) and acceptance and understanding and full-throttle multiculturalism that these things do not occur? Wow! To pretend that this particular incident is a problem by and/or of Obama or his supporters and not instead another symptom of a far larger and far older American (and indeed human) problem is ridiculous on its face. 

The problem is not this campaign. The problem is that we, all of us, remain essentially segregated in this society, not only by race but by class and religion and political views. We live in our own little enclaves, all of us, segregated and self-righteous and increasingly entrenched. The Age of Entrenchment, I call it, when for all the millions of people like me blathering on across the Internet, no one ever really changes her or his mind about anything, or indeed even hears any statement or argument or evidence or passionate plea except that which confirms what they already believe. Any surprise our children are picking up on this nastiness?

As for flirting with McCain, I have two things to say. One of them is this essay—and forgive me for always dragging Tim Wise (a man!) into this forum, but the dude speaks with such fearless clarity it makes no sense to try to replicate. 

The second is this: Please, please, please, by all means, go ahead and vote for whomever you want, and let the chips fall where they may. Just stop threatening us already. In this heat it's tiresome.

It's OK To Flirt. Really.

Waiting for the Singing To Begin

So here we all sit, waiting for the lady in the pantsuit to go ahead and sing. It's going to be hard for anyone who cares about equality and multiculturalism and common ground and all that jazz to feel joy at the end of this slugfest, regardless of where they stand. For a long time, I felt bruised by the Clinton/Obama wars, but now I just feel numb, and that worries me more. 

Reading Geraldine Ferraro's irrational screed in the Boston Globe this weekend, which Marjorie so brilliantly deconstructs today on The Root, did not make me bewildered or angry or chagrined. It made me tired. I just shrugged and turned the page. Whatever, Geraldine. Keep on raging against the dying of that light.

For the life of me ,I simply cannot see this rampant, bludgeoning sexism that Ferraro and her ilk keep spewing about. Sexist incidents, yes. Sexist columnists and sexist commentators and some idiot with a shirt - yes. But some kind of wholesale, bloodthirsty sexist take down of Clinton? No. One condoned, snickeringly, by Obama and his crew? No, no, no.  (And I won't even address Ferraro's laughable charge that white working-class folks can't relate to Obama and his wife because of their education but somehow can relate to Bill and Hillary, who apparently attended community college on 4-H scholarships. As far as I know.) And so, not seeing it, my inclination is to brush the dirt off my shoulders and say to Ferraro and all those other Angry White Women out there: Get a frickin' grip.

What stops me is only this: Too often I have stood in that painful place where all around you people (white people, mostly, in my case) insist that your interpretation of your own experience is incorrect. You're too sensitive, you're overreacting, yeah, that's what I said, but it's not what I meant, you just don't understand.  I know as well as anyone that just because a huge and particular swath of humanity does not "see" something doesn't mean it does not exist. As Tim Wise points out, in this point-by-point essay on white denial, even in the early 1960s—a time at which America still operated under homegrown apartheid—most white Americans insisted racism did not exist or was not a major factor in the lives of black folks. Gallup polls show that nearly two-thirds claimed to believe blacks were treated the same as whites in their communities, while 85 percent said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education.

The power of human beings to block out what they do not wish to see is astonishing.

So I want to be careful here.

Still, I just don't see it.

And, heartbreakingly, I'm so numb I just don't care.
   
  

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?

The Dangerous Precedent of Eliot Spitzer

I was glad to see the New York Times raise questions about the aggressiveness and anomalous nature of the Spitzer investigation and prosecution, but I was very taken aback by the answers, especially those given by the federal prosecutors. They sounded like they were trying to wriggle out of being held responsible. There are two aspects of the case that worry me, and that I think should worry anyone who would like to prevent the collapse of our civil liberties: first, whether Spitzer should have been investigated at all, and second, whether his situation warranted him being followed and staked out by large teams of FBI agents. The pat answer to all this is that, hey, he would have done it, but a version of the old childhood saying comes to mind here: His being wrong wouldn't have made it right.