The net gains for women and African Americans in the primaries
Rubin, Lillian B.
RACE AND GENDER—hot topics, even without the recent primary election that pitted a black man against a white woman. With it, they're incendiary. But even a brief look at the historical record...
...For they represented something new in American politics, something earlier generations never believed could happen if, that is, they ever even thought about it—and they are, therefore, symbols who stand for something much larger than themselves...
...And now again, we've seen race and gender cross swords in the most passionately contested political primary campaign in history...
...Clinton herself brought gender front and 46 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 center into her campaign, and neither she nor her staff or surrogates were shy about playing the gender card, whether in presenting herself as the gutsy, take-no-prisoners trailblazer fighting the cause of all women against great odds or as a victim with complaints about sexist bias, whether in the media, on the debate stage, or about "the boys" who were "piling it on...
...Yet even as I write those words, a "Yes, but . ." springs to mind as I recall some of the struggles of the early years—what we felt then, how it looks now...
...As he piled up victory after victory, scurrilous racist sniping appeared all over the Web...
...She's stuck with women's classic double bind that, despite the gains of the last few decades, remains very much in force...
...And as it became increasingly clear that Obama would be the nominee, campaign staffers and surrogates began to report a rising rate of ugly racist incidents in the field, the word assassination was DECISION ' 08 spoken aloud, and what was background became foreground, as many Americans, white and black, found themselves living with the fear that a white bullet would stop him...
...Certainly, gender and racial stereotypes are still with us and create real DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 45 DECISION ' 08 problems for those who would try to climb past the barriers put before them...
...DECISION ' 08 Never mind that we who had been struggling for gender equality didn't think the right to kill ourselves with cigarette smoke was great progress...
...The answer, I think, is a lot and a little...
...In language that reflected the heat of the issue, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been a strong and consistent voice for the abolition of slavery...
...But it's also true that gender cut both ways in this election...
...But the subtext of race lay just below the surface, waiting to explode...
...and he answered, "Excellent question...
...It's in this shadow, I believe, that we find some deeper understanding of Barack Obama's public presentation of self...
...It was only a little more than forty years ago—well within the living memory of many of us—that the U.S...
...It featured a smiling—and, of course, beautiful—young woman smoking a cigarette, with a tagline reading, "You've come a long way, baby...
...Never mind his white mother and grandparents, never mind his charismatic appeal or his own more complex biracial sense of identity...
...It's safe to say that he wouldn't have dared reply so cavalierly to a similar question about Obama that used the "n-word...
...and a video of words taken from various sermons given by Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, burst on the scene...
...It's at least partly why Hillary Clinton has such a hard time finding the balance between intellect and emotion, between the tough, hard-hitting fighter and the compassionate woman...
...But even a brief look at the historical record tells us how much the past is parent to the present...
...For it's nearly inevitable that, when those of different race, ethnic, or religious backgrounds are stereotyped, it's the most visible that defines the entire group...
...So, if some young black men commit crimes, or the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, all blacks and all Muslims are tarred with the brush...
...In that same decade, federal law, for the first time in history, prohibited discrimination in employment based on race and sex...
...Suddenly, white racial anxieties rose from the ashes of hope...
...The bind, then, is this: If he sticks with that public persona, as he has, he's characterized as an elitist, one who can't relate to ordinary people...
...In one of the most shameful incidents of that period, women were jeered off the stage at the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society with catcalls designed to keep them in their place, which, for the men, was on their backs, at the coffee machines, or ironing their shirts...
...It was gender that brought to Clinton large numbers of women who might well have been Obama supporters had he been in a contest against a man...
...His race was rarely mentioned openly in the national media, not even after his surprise win in Iowa one of the whitest states in the union...
...THIS ISN'T JUST a problem for American blacks...
...No matter who won, we lost something...
...Supreme Court declared the statutes banning mixed-race marriage (laws that had been on the books since 1661) unconstitutional...
...I N CONTRAST, from the beginning Obama, mindful of the racial tensions awaiting a black man reaching for the presidency, emphasized his biracial background and quite consciously presented himself as a person who transcends racial categories...
...and exchanges his $2,000 suit, crisp white shirt, and perfectly knotted tie for a more casual look, he risks becoming a reminder of those other black men, those guys who speak black English and before whom women clutch their purses more tightlyto their sides...
...We can argue about whether her complaints were valid, were pumped up to suit the politics of the moment, or both...
...Yes, four decades is a long time to wait, and for Hillary Clinton's supporters who dreamed of a woman in the White House next year, it has been maddening to find that the wait will be even longer...
...Clinton's gender both helped and hindered her, just as race played a role in Obama's campaign for good and ill...
...And it's even more true now than it was then...
...48 n DISSENT / Fall 2008...
...The silence was deafening when someone from a right-wing, Clinton-hating organization asked John McCain, "How do we beat the bitch...
...if she doesn't, she's not strong enough to be commander-in-chief...
...In offering a vision of a people united by a shared identity and the common bonds that are our heritage, he mesmerized a nation...
...told her followers that it was "a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see `Sambo' walk into the kingdom first...
...Race led equal numbers of blacks and many whites to Obama who surely would have been Clinton supporters against almost any white man...
...If he softens the image, leaves behind his contained manner (Some call it uptight or arrogant, but would it look like that if he were white...
...Such sexist episodes and comments are infuriating, and there's no excusing them...
...We had come a long way from where we started, just as the civil rights struggle brought important, if not fully realized, gains for black Americans...
...But the influence of race and racial definitions isn't limited to white sensibilities...
...Indeed, it's likely that no matter what the questioner's feelings about the possibility of a black man as president, he wouldn't have spoken them with such ease and assurance that he would give no offense...
...At the very moment when Americans—their economic, social, and cultural nerves rubbed raw by a half-century of identity politics and nearly eight years of a failed and divisive administration—were yearning for a different future, the Clinton campaign kept asking them to look back...
...After a lifetime of creating a public presence and identity that defies the stereotypic images of black men, he's caught between competing demands—the internal need to maintain the distance between himself and the shadow and the political need to present himself as "everyman...
...Clinton and her supporters complained that the media were tougher on her than on Obama because the overt expression of sexism is more socially acceptable than racism—a charge that has some merit...
...But it also may not be too far off to suggest, as Geraldine Ferraro did rather clumsily about Barack Obama, that neither he nor Hillary Clinton would have been contenders if it weren't for their race and gender...
...Others may interpret it differently, but one thing is certain: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the living embodiment of our success in conquering some of the worst aspects of gender and racial bias, while their campaigns— the fears, the biases, the anger, the prejudices they have evoked—remind us of what has yet to be done...
...Into that longing for something new, something that would bring back some sense of hope, of unity, something that would call to us to end the angry divisiveness and forge another way, stepped Barack Obama—a young, charismatic, biracial, post–baby boomer newcomer who spoke the language of change and sang a song that told us we were all one, and that together we could reach the mountaintop...
...The conflicting claims of race and gender, the arguments about who has been this society's greatest victim, whose issues are most immediately in need of redress, have been going on for a long time, most notably dating back to the post–Civil War era when the Suffragists confronted this question: Should they support passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S...
...HOWEVER DIFFERENTLY others may see and analyze the trajectory of these two campaigns, it seems undeniable that the role of race and gender in politics today is a far cry from the simple and brutal sexism and racism we knew in the past...
...Barack Obama became a black man who tapped responses ranging from wariness to outright racial hostility an effect that holds steady months later, with polls showing that somewhere around three in ten whites say that his skin color makes a difference in whether they can vote for him...
...Now, looking back, I can see that there was a certain truth to the line...
...Each side has some legitimate complaints, but together they have blazed a trail that will make it easier for those who will surely come after them...
...Constitution that would give black men the right to vote while leaving women out...
...I remember the outrage when the famous Virginia Slims cigarette ad appeared in the late 1960s...
...For those of us for whom the causes of gender and racial equality are inextricably linked, it has meant difficult and often painful choices...
...But there's not much doubt that together these images served to stir the passions and outrage that brought women to her side...
...In his book Shadows of Race and Class, Raymond S. Franklin argues that the respectable, educated, black middle class are forever "shadowed" by the dominant images of the behavior and stereotypes that define the black poor and underclass...
...She is a sociologist, psychologist, and author of numerous books, the latest of which is 60 on Up: The Truth about Aging in America (Beacon Press, 2007...
...That shadow, Franklin argues, follows blacks wherever they go as they're caught between their own black identity and their anxieties not to be seen as "them," those "others" who cast a shadow of discomfort, if not actual shame...
...None of us is wholly free from the shadows of the stereotypical images that have defined women for so long...
...we weren't in the mood to celebrate because we didn't think we'd come nearly far enough...
...And it seemed momentarily possible that he could pull it off, that America was ready to make peace with its agonizing racial history...
...For it's not only white racism that accounts for some of the difficulty he has had with white working-class voters, but his own internalized "shadow," his anxieties, not about who he is but about how he will be seen...
...And it was both gender and race—the historic nature of this election and these candidates—that fostered the media attention (some might say "frenzy") that helped give both candidacies such immediacy...
...Further, she argued, women voters of "wealth, 44 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 education, and refinement" were needed to counteract the effect of former slaves whose "pauperism, ignorance, and degradation" could prove a danger to the American political system...
...Civil rights workers were murdered, black Americans were still being denied the right to vote (still are in some places), a married woman couldn't get a credit card in her own name, and even for the young male revolutionaries of the time, equality and justice didn't mean the women with whom they worked, studied, and slept...
...The gains in the courts and the legislatures notwithstanding, racism and sexism were rampant...
...the Clintons vented their anxiety about the unexpected threat he posed with subtle and not-so-subtle racial references...
...It's the cost of wearing a stigmatized identity...
...A century later, when President Lyndon Johnson expanded an earlier affirmative action order to include women as well as men of color, women and blacks once again found themselves in competition for the jobs that were newly open to them...
...This, then, is one snapshot of our times and the complications and contradictions that infuse the issues of race and gender in politics today...
...LILLIAN B. RUBIN is with the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley...
...It was race and gender as embodied in these two particular people that generated the excitement...
...If she fights like a man for what she wants, she's too fueled by raw ambition...
...This simple calculation is itself a big statement about how far we've come on the issues of race and gender...
...The educated German Jews who immigrated in the mid-nineteenth century and assimilated fully into American culture found themselves shadowed and DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 47 shamed by the presence later of the alien culture and behavior of large and visible numbers of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe...
...So it's worth stepping back from the fray and widening the lens to ask, What impact have these two difficult and contentious areas of our social life had in this political season...
...Would the progressive politics of John Edwards have gotten so little attention from Democrats if he hadn't been up against a white woman and a black man...
...We can blame the media for turning them into superstars and drowning out other voices, but that could only happen because of the electrifying reality that one of these two was the likely candidate of the Democratic Party...
...We'll argue into eternity about just how much of a part misogyny played in Clinton's defeat—how much the irrational hatred she generates in some quarters is related to sexism, how much to what I think of as "Hillaryism," and how much the product of an early misguided campaign strategy that leaned so heavily on the past...
...The same is true for women...
...It takes nothing from Obama's or Clinton's talents, or their qualifications to wear the mantle of the presidency well, to suggest that it wasn't just a contest between two people that drove worldwide interest in this election and brought to the polls the largest number of voters in the history of American primary campaigns...
...Four decades later, we witnessed the extraordinary, exhilarating—and, yes, sometimes aggravating—spectacle of a black man and a white woman competing to carry the Democratic Party banner into the next presidential election...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
