So I found a new blog:
Season of the Bitch She had a couple of excellent links and posts analyzing the race that Sen. Clinton ran. As for me, I need to add her to my blog links...
Hillary Clinton is white (woman)...it is crucial to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been so that the legacy she leaves does no more damage to a multi-racial, multi-class based feminism/womanism both here and abroad.
None of the pundits and journalists appears to be wondering and worrying about black women in this post-Indiana-North-Carolina-West-Virginia moment. Instead, all eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s are on the so-called “white-hard-working working class”. Hillary’s preoccupation with white voters is a dead give-a-way of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is black. Bill and Hillary Clinton have thrown African-Americans to the wind because they thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win.
And here lies the rub. Hillary Clinton presents herself to the electorate as a woman. She argues that she wants to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race, in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance white is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So she silently, inadvertently but knowingly, uses her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older white women and angry white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real power here is as white. Misogyny — the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination towards women — ensures that Hillary’s privilege is her whiteness.
Most often the term white is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is no need. One only specifies color when it is not white. Women are assumed to be white if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the fact that it was a group of black women that initially challenged the Supreme Court in the first sex discrimination case in this country years ago.
Hillary speaks of herself as a woman, and then speaks separately about race, as though she does not embody both at the same time. She has as much ‘race’ as Barack, but her race is not a problem for her. It is for him, even though it may not be as much as a problem as she is trying to make it. As such, Hillary, as a (white) woman pits herself against Barack (as black) with a race so to speak. So Hillary (as a woman) is falsely, wrongly, pitted against Barack (as black). Her whiteness privileges and pits gender against race. She encodes her whiteness as though it is central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. She re-awakens and rewrites the history of 19th century U.S. feminism that pitted black men getting the vote before white women had that right. More recently, women’s rights rhetoric was used to justify the bombing of the Taliban and brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue so this is nothing new. What is forgotten here is that women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors.
Barack Obama has said he wants to embrace the new notions of race and the racial progress that has occurred. He is not post-racist, but recognizes the newly raced relations as they exist at present. Nevertheless, he must give a speech on race although he says he does not want to be a racial candidate. He recognizes that the country has new-old racial hierarchies with complex identities and that he himself represents white and African blackness, whatever this might mean for him. Meanwhile Hillary says she is running as a woman, and never gives a speech on gender because white angry men and women, would not be pleased by this. So patriarchy, or sexual discrimination, or the structural hierarchy of masculinity with its racialized and class aspects is never mentioned in her campaign. She uses whiteness as her weapon and pretends to be speaking about gender. But she never once mentions the unacceptable misogyny of this country, or the sexual hierarchy of the labor force, or any of the great racial and class inequities that define women’s lives today. This is a misuse and abuse of her gender.
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Why experience was the wrong memeBecause Hillary Clinton’s “experience” that makes her “ready on day one” was not predicated upon her work as a lawyer or even really on her work in the Senate, but on her time as first lady doing diplomatic missions and the like, this doesn’t help the argument for any others who may come behind her.
We don’t want to argue that only women who have watched their husbands do something first are qualified. We don’t want to argue that women can only be president when they’re more “experienced” than the other candidates.
We want to argue that women can be president because they’re smart, have good policy ideas, and good judgment, not because they’ve served more time. Because most women in politics have served less time than the men. Most people of color have less time in politics than most white people. There are men in the Senate who were there when the Civil Rights movement happened, who were there when the “second wave” (see this link for some real dirt on the real “waves”) of the women’s movement happened and when women and people of color first started to get into positions of political power.
We haven’t had the opportunity to have as much experience. We have to fight to change that. Which means not more people with “experience,” because that claim is always going to favor the Ted Kennedys and Strom Thurmonds of this world. It means more new voices, more voices that have been historically excluded, more voices that do not have experience but have something more valid to consider: a different perspective.
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The Long-awited "Monster" postI’ve watched this primary campaign go from a spirited competition into a mess where each candidate’s supporters firmly believe the other candidate is a monster. We’ve looked at the actual reasons for that, and I believe that especially with Hillary Clinton, but with Obama as well, the press portrayal of the candidates can be looked at through these theses. And yes, there’s probably a much longer paper in this, but what the hell.
1. The monstrous body is a cultural body.
Both candidates reflect our culture. The older woman, past being seen as sexual…the old queen and the wicked witch, simultaneously, as I said in an earlier post. And the outsider, the younger black man. Both of them arise from categories we know well, but are breaking those rules just by running.
2. The monster always escapes.
Over and over again we’ve thought this horrendous campaign was over, only for one candidate to stage a comeback. We’ve thought Clinton was done after Iowa, then Obama after New Hampshire and Nevada, then Clinton again after Obama’s post-Super Tuesday wins, then Obama again after Clinton won Ohio and the Texas primary and then Pennsylvania, and now…
3. The monster is the harbinger of category crisis.
Of course, they’re bringing on category crisis just by being a white woman and a black man running for President, and certainly by having defeated more typical white male candidates. Hillary Clinton has always been disconcerting–at first she was too masculine a woman, then she was too feminine, standing by her man. Now she’s both uber-masculine–”obliterate,” “if she gave Obama one of her balls…”–and feminine, when her angry supporters accuse Obama and his camp of sexism.
Obama, of course, is both American and not-American, black and white, masculine and feminine (at least according to Carville), rich and poor, elitist and community activist, and if you’d believe the crazies, Christian and Muslim.
4. The monster dwells at the gates of difference.
You see the fear of difference much more with Obama, especially with the reports of overt racism and the repeated cries that he’s Muslim despite Rev. Wright’s best attempts to remain part of the media cycle. Hillary Clinton’s problem is more that she is not different enough. Obama supporters hate her as part of the culture that they despise and reject–not alien, but all too familiar. But Hillary Clinton is still a woman, and still different.
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