Are you familiar with me? If so you know I talk incessantly about everything and nothing. Yackety, yack, yack, yack all the time.
But then I can be oddly silent. Sometimes it’s best (in my line of work) if I keep my thoughts to myself. No one wants to hear about politics, religion, gender, or race from their, … er,… playmate. 
It’s prefered among some, I know not all, that we remain fairly blank canvasses on which to project all manner of debauched fantasies.
For this reason I’m usually quiet. I don’t have the kind of views that are fit for public consumption, lol. But with all this talk of race during this fevered race for the democratic nomination I find one group being summarily ignored; black women. For the most part pundits are assuming black women will vote based on race. But if you’re making assumptions why not assume black women will vote based on gender?
I can think of a few reasons why historically it’s logical to assume that given the (simplifed for the sake of argument) choice between sex and race that black women might lean toward race but I still like this question and this issue has been very delightful.
I don’t want to share my political views so when I find an article, op/ed piece, or blog entry I like I may reprint it here. One it’s not wise of me to share my views. And two others are often far more eloquent than myself. I think I’ll search for some blogs/articles by bell hooks or Camille Paglia. I rarely agree with what they have to say but I like to read them anyway. In the meantime I thought these two links below worth mentioning. At least they acknowledge gender exisits in the democratic race.
Will race always trump gender? In the eyes of most in society, most probably. In my life? Definitely not.
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html Goodbye To All That (#2)
http://www.theroot.com/id/45321 I’m Black and For Hillary. Get Over It.
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Goodbye To All That (#2) by Robin Morgan
February 2, 2008
Goodbye To All That” was my (in)famous 1970 essay breaking free from a politics of accommodation especially affecting women (for an online version, see http://blog.fair-use.org/category/chicago/).
During my decades in civil-rights, anti-war, and contemporary women’s movements, I’ve avoided writing another specific “Goodbye . . .” But not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls. So.
Goodbye to the double standard . . .
—Hillary is too ballsy but too womanly, a Snow Maiden who’s emotional, and so much a politician as to be unfit for politics.
—She’s “ambitious” but he shows “fire in the belly.” (Ever had labor pains?)—When a sexist idiot screamed “Iron my shirt!” at HRC, it was considered amusing; if a racist idiot shouted “Shine my shoes!” at BO, it would’ve inspired hours of airtime and pages of newsprint analyzing our national dishonor.
—Young political Kennedys—Kathleen, Kerry, and Bobby Jr.—all endorsed Hillary. Senator Ted, age 76, endorsed Obama. If the situation were reversed, pundits would snort “See? Ted and establishment types back her, but the forward-looking generation backs him.” (Personally, I’m unimpressed with Caroline’s longing for the Return of the Fathers. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans have short memories. Me, I still recall Marilyn Monroe’s suicide, and a dead girl named Mary Jo Kopechne in Chappaquiddick.)
Goodbye to the toxic viciousness . . .
Carl Bernstein’s disgust at Hillary’s “thick ankles.” Nixon-trickster Roger Stone’s new Hillary-hating 527 group, “Citizens United Not Timid” (check the capital letters). John McCain answering “How do we beat the bitch?” with “Excellent question!” Would he have dared reply similarly to “How do we beat the black bastard?” For shame.
Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged—and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.
Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.
Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.
Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny. This is not “Clinton hating,” not “Hillary hating.” This is sociopathic woman-hating. If it were about Jews, we would recognize it instantly as anti-Semitic propaganda; if about race, as KKK poison. Hell, PETA would go ballistic if such vomitous spew were directed at animals. Where is our sense of outrage—as citizens, voters, Americans?
Goodbye to the news-coverage target-practice . . .
The women’s movement and Media Matters wrung an apology from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews for relentless misogynistic comments (http://www.womensmediacenter.com/). But what about NBC’s Tim Russert’s continual sexist asides and his all-white-male panels pontificating on race and gender? Or CNN’s Tony Harris chuckling at “the chromosome thing” while interviewing a woman from The White House Project? And that’s not even mentioning Fox News.
Goodbye to pretending the black community is entirely male and all women are white . . .
Surprise! Women exist in all opinions, pigmentations, ethnicities, abilities, sexual preferences, and ages—not only African American and European American but Latina and Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Arab American and—hey, every group, because a group wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t given birth to it. A few non-racist countries may exist—but sexism is everywhere. No matter how many ways a woman breaks free from other discriminations, she remains a female human being in a world still so patriarchal that it’s the “norm.”
So why should all women not be as justly proud of our womanhood and the centuries, even millennia, of struggle that got us this far, as black Americans, women and men, are justly proud of their struggles?
Goodbye to a campaign where he has to pass as white (which whites—especially wealthy ones—adore), while she has to pass as male (which both men and women demanded of her, and then found unforgivable). If she were blackor he were female we wouldn’t be having such problems, and I for one would be in heaven. But at present such a candidate wouldn’t stand a chance—even if she shared Condi Rice’s Bush-defending politics.
I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote—until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they’re being called “race traitors.”
So goodbye to conversations about this nation’s deepest scar—slavery—which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women.
Women have endured sex/race/ethnic/religious hatred, rape and battery, invasion of spirit and flesh, forced pregnancy; being the majority of the poor, the illiterate, the disabled, of refugees, caregivers, the HIV/AIDS afflicted, the powerless. We have survived invisibility, ridicule, religious fundamentalisms, polygamy, teargas, forced feedings, jails, asylums, sati, purdah, female genital mutilation, witch burnings, stonings, and attempted gynocides. We have tried reason, persuasion, reassurances, and being extra-qualified, only to learn it never was about qualifications after all. We know that at this historical moment women experience the world differently from men—though not all the same as one another—and can govern differently, from Elizabeth Tudor to Michele Bachelet and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
We remember when Shirley Chisholm and Patricia Schroeder ran for this high office and barely got past the gate—they showed too much passion, raised too little cash, were joke fodder. Goodbye to all that. (And goodbye to some feminists so famished for a female president they were even willing to abandon women’s rights in backing Elizabeth Dole.)
Goodbye, goodbye to . . .
—blaming anything Bill Clinton does on Hillary (even including his womanizing like the Kennedy guys—though unlike them, he got reported on). Let’s get real. If he hadn’t campaigned strongly for her everyone would cluck over what that meant. Enough of Bill and Teddy Kennedy locking their alpha male horns while Hillary pays for it.
—an era when parts of the populace feel so disaffected by politics that a comparative lack of knowledge, experience, and skill is actually seen as attractive, when celebrity-culture mania now infects our elections so that it’s “cooler” to glow with marquee charisma than to understand the vast global complexities of power on a nuclear, wounded planet.
—the notion that it’s fun to elect a handsome, cocky president who feels he can learn on the job, goodbye to George W. Bush and the destruction brought by his inexperience, ignorance, and arrogance. Goodbye to the accusation that HRC acts “entitled” when she’s worked intensely at everything she’s done—including being a nose-to-the-grindstone, first-rate senator from my state.
Goodbye to her being exploited as a Rorschach test by women who reduce her to a blank screen on which they project their own fears, failures, fantasies.
Goodbye to the phrase “polarizing figure” to describe someone who embodies the transitions women have made in the last century and are poised to make in this one. It was the women’s movement that quipped, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” She heard us, and she has.
Goodbye to some women letting history pass by while wringing their hands, because Hillary isn’t as “likeable” as they’ve been warned they must be, or because she didn’t leave him, couldn’t “control” him, kept her family together and raised a smart, sane daughter. (Think of the blame if Chelsea had ever acted in the alcoholic, neurotic manner of the Bush twins!) Goodbye to some women pouting because she didn’t bake cookies or she did, sniping because she learned the rules and then bent or broke them. Grow the hell up. She is not running for Ms.-perfect-pure-queen-icon of the feminist movement. She’s running to be president of the United States.
Goodbye to the shocking American ignorance of our own and other countries’ history. Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir rose through party ranks and war, positioning themselves as proto-male leaders. Almost all other female heads of government so far have been related to men of power—granddaughters, daughters, sisters, wives, widows: Gandhi, Bandaranike, Bhutto, Aquino, Chamorro, Wazed, Macapagal-Arroyo, Johnson Sirleaf, Bachelet, Kirchner, and more. Even in our “land of opportunity,” it’s mostly the first pathway “in” permitted to women: Representatives Doris Matsui and Mary Bono and Sala Burton; Senator Jean Carnahan . . . far too many to list here.
Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .
Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl” flaunting her bikini-clad ass online—then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.”
Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten thestatus quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?” or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.” Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”
I’d rather say a joyful Hello to all the glorious young women who do identifywith Hillary, and all the brave, smart men—of all ethnicities and any age—who get that it’s in their self-interest, too. She’s better qualified. (D’uh.) She’s a high-profile candidate with an enormous grasp of foreign- and domestic-policy nuance, dedication to detail, ability to absorb staggering insult and personal pain while retaining dignity, resolve, even humor, and keep on keeping on. (Also, yes, dammit, let’s hear it for her connections and funding and party-building background, too. Obama was awfully glad about those when she raised dough and campaigned for him to get to the Senate in the first place.)
I’d rather look forward to what a good president he might make in eight years, when his vision and spirit are seasoned by practical know-how—and he’ll be all of 54. Meanwhile, goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?
And goodbye to the ageism . . .
How dare anyone unilaterally decide when to turn the page on history, papering over real inequities and suffering constituencies in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S. youth from torpor it’s useful to triage the single largest demographic in this country’s history: the boomer generation—the majority of which is female?
Old woman are the one group that doesn’t grow more conservative with age—and we are the generation of radicals who said “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Goodbye to going gently into any goodnight any man prescribes for us. We are the women who changed the reality of the United States. And though we never went away, brace yourselves: we’re back!
We are the women who brought this country equal credit, better pay, affirmative action, the concept of a family-focused workplace; the women who established rape-crisis centers and battery shelters, marital-rape and date-rape laws; the women who defended lesbian custody rights, who fought for prison reform, founded the peace and environmental movements; who insisted that medical research include female anatomy; who inspired men to become more nurturing parents; who created women’s studies and Title IX so we all could cheer the WNBA stars and Mia Hamm. We are the women who reclaimed sexuality from violent pornography, who put childcare on the national agenda, who transformed demographics, artistic expression, language itself. We are the women who forged a worldwide movement. We are the proud successors of women who, though it took more than 50 years, won us the vote.
We are the women who now comprise the majority of U.S. voters.
Hillary said she found her own voice in New Hampshire. There’s not a woman alive who, if she’s honest, doesn’t recognize what she means. Then HRC got drowned out by campaign experts, Bill, and media’s obsession with everything Bill.
So listen to her voice:
“For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.
“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
“Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.”
That was Hillary Rodham Clinton defying the U.S. State Department and the Chinese Government at the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing (look here for the full, stunning speech).
And this voice, age 21, in “Commencement Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of Wellesley College Government Association, Class of 1969.”
“We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands. . . . searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living. . . . [for the] integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. . . . Fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it.”
She ended with the commitment “to practice, with all the skill of our being: the art of making possible.”
And for decades, she’s been learning how.
So goodbye to Hillary’s second-guessing herself. The real question is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?
“Our President, Ourselves!”
Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jiminez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.
As for the “woman thing”?
Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.
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I’m Black and For Hillary. Get Over It.
By Tara Roberts | TheRoot.com
Enough with the dirty looks. Race is not the overriding feature of my identity.
Hillary Clinton is greeted warmly at Temple University in Philadelphia last week.
March 18, 2008 — I am a Hillary Clinton supporter.
There, I said it.
And I’m tired of the dirty looks I get when I out myself. Why is it so surprising that someone like me – a black, educated, progressive chick – would put my support behind Hillary Clinton?
Oh, I know. I’m black, so, of course, I should support Barack Obama for the number one position in the country.
My good friend recently rolled her eyes in exasperation because she’d been patient with me, waiting for me to come to my senses, but suspected that I’d still not yet hopped over into the Obama camp.
Just before Super Tuesday, as I broke bread with another friend, she sucked her teeth and shot me an incredulous look when I admitted to backing Hillary.
The other day I attended a candlelight banquet for Morehouse College, where actor and MC of the evening Hill Harper took a few minutes to remind the distinguished crowd of Atlanta’s finest luminaries that he and Barack went to law school together and that he would be happy to accept money that anyone wanted to donate. He got laughter, resounding applause, and I imagine a few checks slipped into his open palm. Somehow, I suspected that if I got up on stage and offered to take checks for Hillary, I’d hear the crickets chirping in the background.
What’s funny to me, though, is that before Barack entered the race, many friends and family were excited about Hillary, thrilled, actually; they believed that she was our beacon of hope, that she represented profound change. But now that Barack has entered the building, these same people have turned against Hillary and put her down, even though her positions and beliefs have not changed.
Quite frankly, I’m tired of dealing with friends, family and co-workers who cannot believe that I’ve fallen for the supposed race lies of the Clinton machine, that I can’t see how they are manipulating this race and treating our brother – this bright light, this brilliant man – so poorly.
It’s interesting that these outraged critics rarely reference the gender lines that have been crossed, the attacks Hillary has endured from opponents and the press for the past 16 years. She’s been attacked for her hair, her clothes, her facial expressions, her mannerisms…John McCain even joked that she’d had sex with Janet Reno to produce Chelsea – what’s up with that??? And most of us remained silent at these barbs.
I would even dare say that some of us most likely agreed with the assessments and snickered behind our hands. It’s never okay to be racist in our world, but, unfortunately, it’s still ‘normal’ to be sexist. I don’t know how that level of unchallenged scrutiny and scathing criticism might develop into survival tactics when called to deal with the press and opponents now. Frankly, it amazes me that Hillary is still standing with her shoulders straight in the face of it all.
Now, in case you’re questioning, I do have race pride. No question about it. I am absolutely connected to the beautiful, soulful energy of African-American culture. But I hate that I just had to say that. I hate that all black Clinton supporters are somehow expected to qualify their blackness, as if we are naïve at best and traitors to the race at worst. Hillary’s national co-chair, Sheila Jackson Lee, had to do it, too. She said on the Tavis Smiley Show, “I did not leave my blackness at the door. I am still a sister. I shout in the church. I love the Lord. And I love my people.”
I’m tired of race being the overriding defining piece of my identity, of black women’s identities. Like Sojourner Truth said years ago, “Ain’t I a woman?” Doesn’t that side of me deserve attention too?
I’ve traveled this election’s campaign trail on assignment – Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina – and I’ve been moved, touched and inspired by the new fervor for politics everywhere, but I’ve also been saddened. I met two young gentlemen from George Washington University who’d volunteered for the Obama campaign in South Carolina. One, very eloquent and smart – the kind of guy you’d be proud to introduce to your parents, told me plainly that black women will always be seen as black before they are seen as women. He was a gender studies major with a concentration in black feminist theory; he shook his head and said gravely, “Race will always trumps gender.”
But why? Why am I asked to always put one before the other?
A few days ago, I had the good fortune to sit in Gloria Steinem’s living room. The small group included Spelman College VIPs Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Johnnetta Cole, television personality Judge Glenda Hatchett, actress Lisa Gay Hamilton, Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal and CosmoGIRL! Editor-in-Chief Susan Schulz. We had gathered to discuss strategies to raise money for Spelman’s Women’s Research & Resource Center.
Ironically enough, the center’s research focuses on the intersections and tensions between race and gender.
I can’t say that everyone there supported Hillary, but I can say there was some much-appreciated space and understanding for those of us who did. Here I was not considered naïve or misinformed, but rather I was acknowledged and applauded for taking into consideration the complex issues of gender that are still getting swept under the rug.
The truth is that the rape of, the violence against and the suppression of millions of beautiful souls just because they have ovaries is happening in every community all over the globe, and most people are not talking about it. Because my spirit swells with compassion for women’s causes and concerns, I gave my heart to Hillary long ago. To me, Hillary Clinton represents revolution and radical change for the often unnoticed and forgotten ‘other half’ of the world’s population.
If she inspires even a few of the millions of girls and women in this world to believe that they too could run for an impossible office and win, then she’s the harbinger of the kind of change I think the world needs. Until we have a balanced world leadership – with men and plenty of women, especially women of color, at the table – encouraging countries to disarm, creating coalitions, focusing on the environment and supporting the least among them, change will remain a pipe dream.
I envision a new world order that works inside of compassion rather than force and that includes women at every step.
I compared the voting records and positions of Hillary and Barack. She’s a bit more liberal on foreign policy and the war and he’s slightly more liberal on affirmative action. She’s more outspoken on women’s reproductive rights, but his voting record indicates that he too is a supporter. And so on. They match or they compliment each other on the major issues. The bottom line is that these two reside in the same political orbit. I have no quarrel with those of you who support Barack – he’s a fine choice – but I do get upset with those who begrudge me my choice and who dismiss Hillary because of these recent spats in the media (I know YOU know that CNN and Fox get higher ratings every time they fan the Clinton/ Obama race flames).
Hillary’s politics and global intentions are dead-on. And I believe that having a woman in the most powerful position in this country is a step in the right direction of creating the world I dream of. So, again I say this loudly and proudly, I’m a Hillary supporter – through and through.
Tara Roberts is the Senior Editor at CosmoGIRL! magazine.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26290833/
