Steinem’s op-ed can be read here.
From Angry Black Bitch:
After reading Steinem’s Op-Ed I felt invisible…as if black and woman can’t exist in the same body. I felt undocumented…as if the history of blacks and the history of women have nothing to do with the history of black women.
When I read “Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).” I felt both attacked and ignored at the same time.
I think of the women and men in my family who were not extended the protected vote until 1965. I wince at the lack of acknowledgment for the black women of Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery who had to march with their brothers in the 1960s to attain the vote because the suffrage movement abandoned them in a Southern strategy to get the vote in 1920.
And there it is again…that invisibility; like a brutal weight that I am so bloody tired of carrying.
When I consider Steinem’s “So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” I’m left confused.
What country does Gloria live in where race barriers are taken seriously? I’d love to know…shit, maybe I’ll move there. But I’m a black woman and this is America where none of my barriers are given more than a token consideration and I’ll present this Op-Ed as exhibit A in that argument.
From A Woman’s Ecdysis:
Look, I’m not going to go head to head with Steinem and argue what is most pressing for womyn in America – race or gender. What I do know is that as a US womyn of color living in this country is that the two are so inexplicably interlaced that I resist ANY individual that pitts once against the other, especially a White mainstream feminist. What I find most often, too, is women like Steinem (White liberal women) call gender over race. Let’s rally all the women together once more because we’re all being denied the right to vote and the men of color are making it into the boardroom before any of us are.
There’s a reason why I use the word gender/ace as one entity. I cannot separate the two.
More folks posting on this subject: Reappropriate, The Debate Link, Diary of an Anxious Black Woman, Pandagon, Feminist Law Professors, Jack and Jill Politics, Tiny Cat Pants, and Silence Isn’t Golden. And Side Notes and Detours. (If you’ve posted about this, or know of a post about this you think is good, feel free to leave the link in the comments.)
UPDATE: This isn’t the first time Steinem has discussed race during a presidential election — one of her “top ten” reasons for opposing Ralph Nader was Nader asking an American Indian, Wyona LaDuke, to be his running mate. Steinem bizarrely saw this choice as an anti-Indian move on Nader’s part.
Something I found funny (and mostly just points out how completely unrepresentative of people of any group the super-elite are, no matter their race or gender) is that Steinem asks us to imagine a woman with Obama’s background and asks us to imagine if she could have been elected to the Senate, much less have made a respectable run for the presidency, with the implicit answer of “of course not.”
That woman’s name is Carol Mosley-Braun, a lawyer with a child (Obama has two children) who served 8 years in the Illinois legislature (exactly the same as Obama) before being elected to the US senate for a single term (like Obama), and who then ran (with the additional experience of 2 years as ambassador to New Zealand and 3 years as a college professor) a respectable if unsuccessful presidential campaign (as respectable as Biden or Dodd ran this year).
I don’t think Mosley-Braun’s experience proves anything much about race or gender, but it is a bit funny and a bit embarrassing that Steinem wrote as though Mosley-Braun didn’t exist.
Only tangentially related, I thought this diary on dailykos about the ways in which Obama is required to be a deracinated candidate very interesting. It seems to me that it relates to what Steinem was writing about in the sense that Clinton is premitted to talk about gender in a way that Obama is not permitted to talk about race, which is an interesting flip side to the degree to which Clinton is openly mistreated by the press in explicitly sexist ways to a degree that Obama is not openly mistreated by the press in explicitly racist ways.
That’s an awesome cartoon. It’s been good that the condemnation of Steinem has been quite swift and universal in the feminist blogsphere, or at least the parts I read. I would have blogged about myself, but I’ve decided that for the rest of 2008 I’m only going to post about electoral politics on Fridays.
Dude! We did the same cartoon! That’s awesome!
Well, more specifically, we did different cartoons with slightly different takes on the same issue. But we had the same take on Steinem’s oneupmanship of suffering argument.
Good one, Charles: I too thought “Carol Mosley Braun, anyone?” I will give Steinem credit for recognizing that had Obama been a black woman, his chances would have been greatly diminished; but Steinem seems to think that the “woman” part is more significant here than the “black” part, utterly dismissing the numerous privileges Hillary Clinton has had access to by virtue of her race and class. Clinton, Obama and Mosley Braun are all exceptions to the main rule that funding and recruitment of politicians at both the local and national levels focuses heavily on white men.
Oh, and: Had either Obama or Clinton been gay, then what would their chances have been?
Yet what ultimately unnerves me is that Steinem’s column plays into a larger trend by media elites to pit white women against black men as a war of oppressed classes – the point of my cartoon.
Oh, and: Had either Obama or Clinton been gay, then what would their chances have been?
Zero. As would their chances have been if they were atheist. In fact, I think the U.S. will elect a gay man as President before it’ll elect an atheist. Certainly there are openly gay politicians at various levels, although none at a State- or nation-wide level that I know of (are there any openly gay Senators or Governors?), but I have no knowledge of any openly atheist politicians at any level. I imagine one could get elected in some constituencies in the country, but it would be harder.
What’s Steinem’s problem, anyway? Is she trying to put down Obama to help support Clinton? What’s this all about?
RonF: Not entirely true. Pete Stark is an atheist serving in the U.S. Congress. Granted, he hid that detail from voters until long after he had served his constituents in San Francisco.
But, again, an exception proving the rule.
Oh, and: Had either Obama or Clinton been gay, then what would their chances have been?
Depends. Out and gay, none. In the closet, ok, as long as they ran as Republicans on an anti-gay platform. Not that I’m thinking of any examples in particular.
Good one, Dianne, I had forgotten about the closet cases. :-)
Yep, there are always tons of closet gays around in political places, and probably even more closet atheists — or at least “I don’t really practice anything and just pay lip service to religion” types.
As for Steinem… she talks a good game about sexism, unsurprisingly, but she’s completely tone-deaf about race issues, which makes her totally unqualified and inept at trying to compare the two. I like how she does some hand-waving about how it’s not a competition, then basically spouts “racism is taken more seriously than sexism, here are all these sexist problems… I apparently know hardly anything about racism, but does it cause these problems? I don’t think so!”
I think the topic of how racism and sexism differ IS worth talking about and it’s a shame that Steinem did such a ludicrously bad job of it. It’s noteworthy that these two statements would be considered light-years apart in polite society:
“I don’t know about voting for Clinton. I’m just not sure a woman president is a good idea… what if she acted like a woman in office?”
“I don’t know about voting for Obama. I’m just not sure a black president is a good idea… what if he acted like a black guy in office?”
Analyzing that discrepancy could reveal all sorts of interesting things about how race and gender are perceived and talked about in society. Because there are undoubtedly big differences that you could discuss in a way that doesn’t make women of color vanish, or whine about who has it harder. But she had to go and declare that this means you should vote for Clinton, that Clinton has a harder time, and that racism is taken more seriously. Way to oversimplify an issue into oblivion.
LOL! Well, I guess it was a pretty obvious cartoon — but your Gloria was better drawn, needless to say. :-)
Maia, the condemnation of the racism implicit in this op-ed in the feminist blogosphere has been swift, but it hasn’t quite been universal.
Barney. Frank.
OK, not a “Senator” or “Governor,” but he is on the “national level,” and has been since 1981. He’s also a Committee Chair.
Actually, I voted for the man the first time he was elected to Congress; I lived in his district at the time and he even came over to our fraternity house to solicit our support.
But I discount Congressmen as national-level or State-level politicians in this context. Not because of a lack of influence at the State or national level, but because we are talking about electability. Only a relatively small group of people vote for a Congressman vs. vote for a Senator or a President. Attributes such as atheism or homosexuality may not matter in an urban district of more liberal cities (such as Boston), but I think it will be a while before either an openly gay or an openly atheist politician will be able to be elected by an entire State or the U. S. as a whole.
I fear the oppression olympics angle may be inevitable in the mainstream media (and mainstream blogs like Kos) when the discussion prompt is an election — since ultimately people have to vote for, and the election has to be won by, just one of the black man or the white woman (or the white men). It creates the all-or-nothing, have-to-tally-things-up-and-measure-them-against-each-other mentality.
This seems like an odd summary to me. The cartoon Steinem’s position does not actually contradict itself and in fact seems plausible (though I’m starting to doubt it). Had the real Steinem limited herself to a longer version of this and left out weird claims about suffrage, we’d have no good reason to condemn her.
Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the Atlantic website http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ has some very good items in support of your point. I have lost two days of my life ranting about the Steinem article and trying to inform everyone I know about her narrow, divisive, gender-trumps-everybody-else’s-pain editorial. I am convinced that this is the Clintons sending out a surrogate to say what they can’t say, though Bill almost said as much in NH.
I am convinced that this is the Clintons’ sending out a surrogate to say what they can’t say.
Wait – you think Gloria Steinem wrote this at the prompting of Hillary or Bill Clinton?
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I can never take the writings of Gloria Steinem seriously. She has written transphobic comments in her books and is a fan of the transphobic writer Janice Raymond. Now she reveals her racist attitudes about people of color. I for one hate Senator Obama being called a black guy. He is an African American senator not a ‘black guy’. How patronising and racist.
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