Flash: A Forward: A Letter From Feminists on the Election

A Forward: A Letter from Feminists on the Election

The Nation Posted February 27, 2008 (March 17, 2008)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080317/feminists
Two days after the Texas debate between Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama, a group of old friends
brought out the good china for a light breakfast of
strong coffee, blueberry muffins and fresh-squeezed
orange juice. We were there to hash out a split
that threatened our friendship and the various
movements with which we are affiliated. In some
ways it was a kaffeeklatch like a million others
across America early on a Saturday morning - but
for the fact that this particular group included
Gloria Steinem, a co-founder of the National
Women's Political Caucus; Beverly Guy-Sheftall,
director of the Women's Research and Resource Center
at Spelman College; Johnnetta Cole, chair of the
board of the JBC Global Diversity and Inclusion
Institute; British-born radio journalist Laura
Flanders; Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at
Columbia and UCLA; Carol Jenkins, head of the
Women's Media Center; Farah Griffin, professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia;
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority;
author Mab Segrest; Kenyan anthropologist Achola
Pala Okeyo; management consultant and policy
strategist Janet Dewart Bell; and Patricia
Williams, Columbia law professor and Nation
columnist.
It was a casual gathering, but one that settled down
to business quickly. We were all
progressives but diverse nonetheless. We differed
in our opinions of whether to vote for Hillary
Clinton or Barack Obama - our goal was not an
endorsement. Rather, the concern that united us all
was the "race-gender split" playing out nationally,
in which the one is relentlessly pitted against the
other. We did not want to see a repeat of the ugly
history of the nineteenth century, when the failure
of the women's movement to bring about universal
adult suffrage metastasized into racial resentment
and rift that weakened feminism throughout much of
the twentieth century. How, we wondered, did a
historic breakthrough moment for which we have all
longed and worked hard, suddenly risk becoming
marred by having to choose between "race cards" and
"gender cards"? By petty competitiveness about who
endures more slings and arrows? By media depictions
of white women as the sole inheritors of the
feminist movement and black men as the sole
beneficiaries of the civil rights movement? By
renderings of black women as having to split
themselves right down the center with Solomon's
sword in order to vote for either candidate? What
happened, we wondered, to the last four decades of
discussion about tokenism and multiple identities
and the complex intersections of race, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity and class? We all worried
that the feminist movement's real message is not
being heard, and we thought about how to redirect
attention to those coalitions that form the bedrock
of feminist concern: that wide range of civil
rights groups dedicated to fighting discrimination,
domestic violence, the disruptions of war,
international sex and labor trafficking, child
poverty and a tattered economy that threatens to
increase the number of homeless families
significantly. We thought of all that has
happened in just seven short but disastrous years
of the Bush Administration, and we asked: how might
we position ourselves so we're not fighting one
another? Our issues are greater than any
disagreement about either candidate. We all know
that there is simply too much at stake. On the
one hand, we celebrate the unprecedented moment in
which a black person and a female person have risen
to the lead in the Democratic race for President of
the United States. On the other hand, both of them
are constantly pressed to deny their race or
gender, to "transcend" it, to prove by their very
existence that misogyny and racism no longer exist.
This, even as both are popularly and reductively
caricatured in perniciously stereotypical ways.
Clinton as a woman with balls, Obama as
"unqualified" and "grandiose,"Chelsea Clinton
being "pimped" by her mother while Bill O'Reilly
declares that Michelle Obama should be "lynched."
How do we resist such a toxic Punch and Judy show
of embattled identity, to the degree that many
women feel that a vote for Obama "cheats" Clinton
of her chance to break the glass ceiling, and many
blacks feel that a vote for Clinton is a betrayal
of the chance to break the race barrier? We
agreed that everyone needs to refocus on the big
picture. All of us know that another Republican
presidency would effectively bury the gains of both
the civil rights and the feminist movements of the
past fifty years. Judicial nominations alone could
upend decades of hard work.How, therefore, to
reclaim a common purpose, a truly democratic "we":
we women of all races, we blacks of all genders, we
Americans of all languages, we immigrants of all
classes, we Latinas of all colors, we Southerners
of all regions, we families of all ages, we parents
working three jobs without healthcare, we poor who
sleep on the streets, we single mothers whose homes
are being repossessed, we displaced New Orleanians
whose neo-Arcadian epic of displacement has yet to
resolved. "Can't we all just get along?"
could have been the mantra of this power breakfast
though certainly not forever, nor for all
purposes. Just long enough to roust the Republican
rascals: the oil barons and Enron fraudsters and
pre-emptive warmongers and sadistic torture-masters
and trigger-happy antiabortionists and Blackwater
mercenaries and the tribal extremists of various
religious stripes who seem to look forward to
Armageddon finally segregating humanity into true
believers and recalcitrant, disposable trash. In
the confusion of this triumphalist but precarious
moment, therefore, it is important that the
alliance between a now global feminism and a now
global civil rights movement not be turned against
itself and ultimately defeated. Obama and Clinton,
each a complexly archetypal "role model,"
represent, at their best, a new kind of American
possibility. If we could get over our fixation on a
fantasy that many of us hoped to see realized in
our lifetimes, maybe we could finally turn to the
issues that each of them brings to the table. We
cannot remain tangled by stereotypes that demean
with their sweeping divisiveness and historical
cliché. As we gathered up the empty plates, we
recommitted ourselves to further joint discussions
about how to attain that collective better future,
however many early mornings, late nights and urns
of coffee into the future that may take. We hope
women across America will choose to do the same.