Archive for the 'Race' Category

What *I* don’t get

Published at March 19, 2008 in Race, Political theater and Revising reality. 10 Comments

Ann at Feministing reposts a question she asked over at TAPPED:

WHAT I DON’T GET.Why, after Geraldine Ferraro’s comments, didn’t Hillary Clinton stand up and deliver a speech on how she sees race in America?

Ok, ok, of course I understand why Obama was the one expected to offer a definitive statement on race. I just don’t like it very much.

People of color are not the only people who have a racial identity, and are not the only people who deal with issues of race in this country. Just like women are not the only ones who deal with issues of gender.

Just had to say that again.

Here’s what I don’t get: Why is it that every time Obama has to deal with criticism, or when he faces a potentially problematic issue, someone has to ask — demand, even — why Hillary isn’t doing something about it as well?

Ferraro’s comments are not the equivalent of Wright’s. For one thing, they hardly play equivalent roles with the respective campaigns; Ferraro is a Democratic party elder with no official campaign role who shot her mouth off to an obscure newspaper in California — surely, some comments on page D4 of a local shopper in Torrance, California are the perfect forum for dogwhistling to the racists in Pennsylvania! — and Wright has been Obama’s spiritual advisor for 20 years, supported by his presence in the church, his donations, his thanks (the title of The Audacity of Hope is from one of Wright’s sermons, and Wright was the only person Obama thanked by name during his 2004 keynote speech at the DNC) and his study (when Obama went off to Harvard Law, he took tapes of Wright’s sermons with him to study).

For another, Hillary publicly disagreed with Ferraro’s comments* soon after they were brought to light, and Ferraro stepped down. Obama has shifted positions on Wright, probably because he can’t afford to denounce the man himself, given his position and given how close the relationship has been. So he’s issued denials that he’s ever heard any such comments in 20 years, or issued denials about having heard the comments in the tapes that ABC has run. And then he’s walked back from those denials.

But more to the point of why Obama had to give a speech on race and Clinton didn’t: because Obama chose to make this speech about race. Which was an interesting choice, given the nature of some of the statements that Wright made that were controversial. The most politically problematic were, perhaps, the ones such as “God damn America.” But Wright also made specific attacks on Hillary Clinton and made it very clear that he didn’t think women had it so bad — white women at least — and yet other than a reference to the glass ceiling, Obama didn’t address these at all.

And Obama had to make this speech about race (and not about perceptions of anti-Americanism, or misogyny) because he’s chosen to run as a post-racial candidate, one who doesn’t make people have to think icky thoughts about race (even as his campaign and his supporters gleefully smeared the Clintons as racist, in many cases just making shit up out of whole cloth, persisting in doing so even after that shit had been debunked (why, hello, Kos, I’m looking at you)). And here, suddenly, was a reminder that he does have a racial identity.

In short, Obama had to make this speech because this is specifically Obama’s problem.

And what *I* don’t get is why Clinton has to fix Obama’s problems.

____________

*Comments that, incidentally, were not so very different from ones that Obama has made about himself.

Holy. Crap.

Published at September 5, 2007 in Race and Dipshittery. 66 Comments

I can’t believe I just read this. From a thread on Feministing responding to a cute video of Jessica’s puppy Monty, in which several people excoriated Jessica for getting Monty from a breeder, and demanded she justify her decision because she’s a feminist and dog breeding is somehow a core feminist issue:

There is absolutely no need to breed animals for profit, be them for pets or meat. It’s slavery and it’s wrong.

I just — that’s offensive to me on so many levels; I simply can’t imagine how that feels to someone whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage only to be sold at auction and kept in bondage for the rest of their lives; someone whose relatives in living memory were denied civil rights, equal access to education, and subject to lynching for nothing more than looking at a white person funny.

That’s just so willfully blindly privileged, and tin-eared, and utterly cruel, and racist all at the same time. But I suppose, given PETA’s history of racist and anti-Semitic ads, where images of black slaves and Jewish inmates at extermination camps were set alongside images of cattle going down a chute or chickens in battery cages, that this is not so uncommon an attitude among the animal-rights set. From Steve’s* post about Ingrid Newkirk’s dismissive response to the objection of James Cameron, the director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum to PETA’s “Slavery” campaign: (my emphasis)

Remember, [Dr.] Cameron almost died at the hands of a lynch mob. They were screaming “get the nigger” and had yanked him out of his cell. Only the lone voice of a woman saying “leave that boy alone” saved his life. But this harrowing experience means nothing to Newkirk, his pain is irrelevant to her. I thought I had seen cruel responses to Mrs. Sheehan. But this tops them. By a mile.

It’s the same kind of ignorant cruelty Cindy Sheehan is facing. Newkirk is simply incapable, like most fanatics, of seeing any side but her own. And she is blind to the outrage this will cause. She has no idea of how her response is not going to go over with black people. Even her explaination is as tone deaf as George Bush. That may go over well with her donors and allies when she makes a mistake, but it will fall on deaf ears with black people. I dare her to defend this on any black radio show, or even Air America.

Now, not only is PETA refusing to apologize, as they did with the Holocaust ad, they intend to continue the tour, well until they’re denounced on Tom Joyner and from church pulpits. To compare black people to animals is the gravest insult a white person can do, and no matter how “liberal” PETA says it is, this will dog it until their tour is cancelled. Because she is fucking with something she does not understand in any way, shape or form. Angry isn’t the word. I’d be surprised if Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton aren’t outside PETA HQ at the end of the week.

So, given that this is the mentality of PETA’s leadership, do you think it’s fair to call them racist, now?

Somehow, it’s even crueler when the animal in question is not a steer being led to the slaughterhouse, but a well-loved puppy from a responsible breeder.

I’m just gobsmacked.

* God, I miss Steve.

Glamour: Being a black woman is so out

Published at August 14, 2007 in Race, Mirror mirror, Corporatocracy, work work work and Dipshittery. 21 Comments

At least, that’s what an unidentified Glamour editor told young attorneys (likely summer associates) at Cleary, Gottlieb in New York, according to Jezebel:

Well, a recent slide show by an unidentified Glamour editor on the “Dos and Don’ts of Corporate Fashion” at a New York law firm shed some light on the topic, according to this month’s American Lawyer magazine. [link unavailable, but see also Legal Week]

First slide up: an African American woman sporting an Afro. A real no-no, announced the ‘Glamour’ editor to the 40 or so lawyers in the room. As for dreadlocks: How truly dreadful! The style maven said it was ’shocking’ that some people still think it ‘appropriate’ to wear those hairstyles at the office. ‘No offense,’ she sniffed, but those ‘political’ hairstyles really have to go.

Um, hey, ‘no offense’ taken — my hair has been totally apolitical ever since I learned about the dangers of “Republican highlights” — but next time you tell a group of professionals they’ll need to submit to extensive regular treatments if they expect to survive in the corporate world, maybe try a crowd that isn’t so familiar with, like, the law?

Not to mention, Jesus, how behind the times are you? Even white-shoe firms have been okay with neat dreadlocks and neat Afros for quite some time now. Braids, which were once so! shocking! are old-hat. I mean, would you call this woman unprofessional-looking or political-looking?

gordon.JPG

Claudia Gordon, the first deaf African-American female attorney in the U.S.

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