The Oppression Olympics

I find it incredibly ironic that since the loss of 2004, certain parts of the liberal blogosphere have complained forcefully about how the 'women studies' groups and "those whinny colored people" are destroying the Democratic Party [1] and yet, here we are, almost a general election later and guess what? The emotional [2] baby-eating feminazis [3] and those colored folks who don't STFU [4] are indeed destroying the Democratic Party we've grown to love and loathe.

I don't know if to to laugh or cry a little.

Oh, who am I kidding : Of course I am going to laugh!

Sure, when I started writing this article, I started out of the anger I felt after reading Gloria Steinem's now infamous "Hos Before Bros" editorial [5]. After all, the mother of the modern feminist movement basically says white women are entitled to have their day in the White House before a black man.

Yet the anger turned into more of an outraged amusement. A lot of people around me are absolutely astounded at the transparent viciousness of the Clintons and company. Yet there's those who are kind of sitting back saying, "We were right all along".

Everything in this country, no matter how you cut it, ends up being about race. There is no denying it. There is no escaping it.

To walk away from a discussion about Race is to walk away from the possibility of understanding better the madness that produces Influence, Power and Wealth in this country. To walk away from Race is to walk away from understanding the craziness that produces this set of rules, preferences and practices we call American 'culture'.

The craziness that, for example, makes it possible for white women to compare sexism to racism.

Ahhh ... hmmmmm ... no.

In the stunning Open Letter To My White Sisters [6], Maria Niles brings point up. In it she reminds white women that they can use the royal "we" of when talking about women wanting a woman in the White House because they don't have to think about race at all when addressing their minority status :

I love, adore and respect my white sisters but I am disappointed in some of them. A few have said that the power of seeing the first woman in the White House has put Clinton over the top as their candidate. I always point out that they can only say that because they are not black women [7]. That the face of racial equality is male and the face of gender equality is white is nothing new [8]. But to see the promise of Hillary Clinton in the White House without even acknowledging the promise of Barack Obama in the White House is a matter of privilege.

[...]

I do not begrudge you, my white sisters, of the awesome feelings of pride you felt when watching Hillary in the 90's. I respect deeply the message you want her election to send to your daughters. But I ask that you respect and at least acknowledge the feelings Barack inspires in me and the message I want my nephews to receive. And, please, please, please stop telling me that your dream is more important than mine.

Hillary, as part of the political elite of this country, has more privilege than most white women but most white women will score better in life than most black women and more so down the line if compared to black men or for that matter, Native Americans. Privilege is a matrix or a continuum of social, political and economic relationships in which life complicates the definition of disadvantage.

Yet there is Hillary milking her 'victimhood' for all what's worth :

Whatâ€™s most confounding about this latest turn into ugliness, though, is the Clintonsâ€™ remarkable capacity to cast themselves as the victims in every fight. And so here is Hillary Rodham Clinton accusing Barack Obama of somehow injecting race into the campaign, because she found herself in a world of trouble for her own comments about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson. Now, I really do think she was intending only to make a sensible point about the value of experience in the White House, but look, the Clintons embody the generation that invented identity politics and political correctness. If Mrs. Clinton couldnâ€™t guess at how that comment was going to land in the black community, then she must have been suffering amnesia.

Matt Bai, The Clintons and History [9]

That line, the Clintons embody the generation that invented identity politics and political correctness is truly significant.

Nothing better represents this truism than Ms. Gloria Steinem.

In what I have already described as one of the most offensively condescending "calls to action" I have ever read from anybody, Gloria Steinem defies women to not vote with their vaginas [10]. In La Gloria's world it would be mysogynistic for a Black man to get to the Oval Office before a White woman because white women had to suffer the "humiliation" of seeing Black men have the right to vote 50 years before them.

So she uses the ruse of a fictional black woman, "Achola Obama", to prove the point a woman would never get to the White House, yet fails to mention Carol Moseley Braun's 2004 Presidential run [11] (who was not endorsed by NOW or any other major feminist organization). And, by the way, some white folks are asking what about Angela Davis [12].

By not mentioning either Ms. Moseley Braun or Ms. Davis, Steinem once again proves that black women are invisible in the feminist movement. She throws salt on the wound of colored feminist women who know they are treated as mere figments of the imagination white feminist "leadership" who will only invoke "the sisters" to assert their entitled influence and power.

And just to prove that this 'gender war' is really not, only in Steinemland would black men's right to vote be considered not only a privilege, but a privilege absent of such a thing as the Jim Crow Laws [13].

BrownFemiPower has a great round up of commentary [14] about that op/ed but there are two quotes that for the sake of this essay, need to be highlighted (although go and read ALL the linked bloggers, please) :

From Black Anxious Woman : [15]

... I take issue with Steinem using, as her historical analogy, the 14th Amendment - which granted black men the right to vote long before white women did - to suggest that â€œraceâ€ trumps â€œgenderâ€ every time!

Considering the way the womenâ€™s suffrage movement was immediately divided over this amendment - and then encouraged white supremacist women to argue that, to ensure white supremacy, white men must support the right of white women to vote - we may want to complicate our analysis of race and gender in this presidential race.

And Jenn Fang at Racialicious [16] (from whence the title of this article comes from):

Ultimately, however, Steinemâ€™s piece (intentionally or unintentionally) draws a line in the sand between people of colour and women, essentially disregarding the everyday racism faced by Black and Brown people, and claiming the Oppression Olympics gold medal for women.

Further, by casting the debate as between Black men and White women (despite her imperfect creation of Achola Obama), Steinem renders the woman of colour invisible, reaffirms the binary Black-White paradigm of race, and demands we take a side in the epic battle between race and gender. Is it no wonder, then, that women of colour have long felt alienated by feminists like Steinem? Where do we fit when weâ€™re being asked to choose between Obama and Clinton as a metaphor for race versus gender? And how are we supposed to react when an incorrect choice labels us as â€œless radicalâ€?

The identity card is not just played by Hillary. Bill Clinton sold himself as the first "black President" because he used the poverty in which he grew up along, his sexual prowess and his bad saxophone playing as cultural or identity symbols of blackness.

After all "White" is not a biological imperative but a cultural construction borne out of slavery. "White" is Privilege, Wealth and Power and it has all the social markers and trapping that come with them.

On the other side of the spectrum is "Black" : Thanks to slavery, with blackness comes all the markers of suffering, exploitation, deprivation, poverty, lack of opportunity, alienation. Or of course, rage, heightened sexuality, addiction, venality.

As the master politicians they are, the Clintons played the faux Class-for-Race card even through the President's impeachment. Allegedly Black people adored him for it.

How could this happen? How could Bill Clinton con his way into blackiness? I think the easy answer lies with 3 men : Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. Those were the voices of a Black America during the Clinton years : Afro-centric, sometimes questionably (in the case of Farrakhan, some even thought pathologically), and ready for every black oppression photo-op culminating in the Tawana Brawley case [17].

You almost forgot about that case, didn't you?

So the vacuum created by the lack of black and colored public figures that could speak to all segments of the country and not just one or two, that vacuum was filled with the fiction of a Black Clinton.

Then he screws Al Gore in 2000, the country gets 9/11nized and 2 subsequent Bush presidencies happen.

Yet not without an Obama moment.

In 2004, Barack Obama gives the speech of a lifetime at the Democratic National Convention, inadvertently throwing the whole identity politics industry in disarray.

Why?

With Obama we have the real deal.

With Obama we have a new identity politics.

With Obama we have the beacon of the emerging and new America.

Yet here's a less lyrical hint : With Obama we have a black politician who is not at the ready for a photo-op with Michael Jackson trying to convince us he is the victim of a racist court system. But more importantly, with Obama we have the first truly multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual US American leader.

One could say that Obama is a truly cosmopolitan man with a desire to end the segmented politics that has been trademark for the last 30 years. Yet, deep down what is most striking to me is how much he embraces his mulataje almost as a form of political tool against the evils of demographics, political gerrymandering and market segmentation.

Check out Imani's post over at Afro-netizen where she touches on the subject [18].

The thought of a mulatto in the White House is really powerful. The thought of a mulatto brokering peace in Central Africa or the Middle East is just mind blowing.

The thought of a multiethnic, multilingual, transnational brown man in the White House just throws me in a tizzy.

Barack Obama would be the embodiment of the United Nations in the White House. A horror to many a neo-con republican.

Cool enough to give him the gold [19].