The recent spate of articles on sexism vs. racism in the 2008 Presidential Race - especially Gloria Steinem's op-ed in The New York Times, Women Were Never Front Runners, and Erica Jong's Huffington Post article, Seeing Sexism, have sent me running back to three of my favorite books, seminal scholarship pertaining to the history of Black women in America. The books are When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894-1994 by Deborah Gray White, All The Women Are White, All The Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith.
I firmly believe that Black History is American History and I am constantly disappointed to see that many so called "progressive" people don't feel the same way. I want to encourage anyone reading this to read all of these books to get a more complete picture on sexism vs. racism, especially from the perspective of people who are not only women and not only black.
In Steinem's op-ed, this paragraph was especially ridiculous:
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).
What Ms. Steinem does not mention is that there are currently 16 female U.S. Senators (35 have served to date) and 9 current female governors. There is currently one black governor and one black U.S. Senator (you know who - ha!). Both are male of course. There has been one black female U.S. Senator and one black female Lieutenant Governor. Steinem also fails to mention that Black men were rarely able to exercise that vote and often risked their lives - or lost it -trying to vote. An example is the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. This excerpt is from The Black Past, Remembered and Reclaimed, an excellent online reference guide to African American History:
A politically motivated attack by whites against the city’s leading African American citizens, the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 documents the lengths to which Southern White Democrats went to regain political domination of the South after Reconstruction. The violence began on Thursday, November 10th in the predominately African American city of Wilmington, North Carolina, at that time the state’s largest metropolis. Statewide election returns had recently signaled a shift in power with Democrats taking over the North Carolina State Legislature. The city of Wilmington, however, remained in Republican hands primarily because of its solid base of African American voters. On November 10th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist, led a group of townsmen to force the ouster of Wilmington’s city officials.
While doing some blog reading unrelated to this post, I happened upon this W.E.B. Du Bois quote from Mirror On America.
Preface from The Nation.com
In the October 20, 1956, issue, W. E. B. Du Bois delivers this eloquent indictment of US politics while explaining to Nation readers why he won't vote in the upcoming Presidential election. Du Bois condemns both Democrats and Republicans for their indifferent positions on the influence of corporate wealth, racial inequality, arms proliferation (war) and unaffordable health care.
I Won't Vote
Since I was twenty-one in 1889, I have in theory followed the voting plan strongly advocated by Sidney Lens in The Nation of August 4, i.e., voting for a third party even when its chances were hopeless, if the main parties were unsatisfactory; or, in absence of a third choice, voting for the lesser of two evils. My action, however, had to be limited by the candidates' attitude toward Negroes. Of my adult life, I have spent twenty-three years living and teaching in the South, where my voting choice was not asked. I was disfranchised by law or administration.
In her evocation of a fictional "Achola Obama", the black female counterpart to Barack Obama, Gloria Steinem fails to mention the how white suffragists and some second wave feminists worked against black women fighting for equal treatment that included black women over the years. Instead, she freely states that she is supporting Hillary because she is a woman:
This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”
Erica Jong also thinks - and openly states - that women should vote for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman. On the heels of Steinem's glaring omission, Jong throws in a token preemptive line about black women and the possibility of a "multiracial president".
"We could acknowledge that a multiracial male president with a fierce feminist wife would be great for America, but maybe we should break the invisible gender barrier first. Yes, blacks have been hideously oppressed, but so have women--and black women know this better than white women do. We have been tokens for so long that most of us just take it for granted."
Who is "we" Erica? Why don't you ask some black feminists of your generation about being tokens back in the 60s and 70s. Ask them about the violent threats and isolation they felt in the black community for daring to identify as feminists, only to experience racism within the women's movement.
There is no way that both Steinem and Jong don't know these things and yet, they choose to ignore it. Jong continues:
"Youth has come in the person of Barack. Male? Not really. Think of his wife. Two for the price of one--like Billary in 1992. But will Ms. Obama be the prez? Not really. Power behind the throne. Same old, same old. We seem to have forgotten that we did this all before."
Well Erica, if you really believe that to be the case, are you encouraging Hillary Clinton to erase her eight years as First Lady off of her 35 years of experience? What about her years as Arkansas First Lady?
To top it off, she magnanimously tosses off this gem:
"Obama is a good man who will only get better. Youth is on his side. Perhaps Hillary will appoint him to the Supreme Court where he can counter that embarrassing Clarence Thomas. Perhaps he will be President in 2016 or perhaps, even better, Michelle Obama will be. They have nothing but time."
If there is one thing that can not be taken for granted it's time - time waits for no one! - so I'm going to say no thanks - I'll take Barack Obama NOW!
The "All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men" argument with the black woman rendered either invisible or as a convenient prop has astounding historic precedent that is constantly ignored and underreported today. It was not taken into account in an article in today's New York Times, Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course by Mark Leibovich.
Leibovich writes about the complex history of the civil rights movement and the women's movement and especially the 15th Amendment controversy with a focus on Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Once again, black women are missing in action, re-written out of history:
Blacks won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870; women won theirs with the 19th Amendment, in 1920, a half-century later. Each of their causes would stutter-step along at sometimes different paces, but usually in some loose if not formal concert.
No, Black men, not "blacks", won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870. Black women, like other women, could not vote until 1920. Black women are an afterthought in this article, even though they were very much involved in the 15th Amendment debate. No mention of the great Sojourner Truth, who was for the amendment or Frances Ellen Harper, who was against it. In When and Where I Enter, Paula Giddings explains the different positions. This brief excerpt is from Chapter 3 "To Choose Again, Freely", page 65 and 66 in the paperback edition:
Sojourner Truth took the position of not supporting the amendment. She was fearful that putting more power into the hands of men would add to the oppression of Black women. "There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women," she said in a famous speech, " ... and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before." To illustrate her statement she talked about the fate of many Black women who "go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the woman come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food." That perspective was often articulated by White feminists.
Also:
Frances Ellen Harper was no less aware of Black women's struggles. "I have heard... that often during the War men hired out their wives and drew their pay," she had written, desribing the situation to some of the Black women she saw in the South. As her writings reveal, she had much more faith in the abilities - and intelligence - of Black women, and Black men, than Sojourner Truth did. As Harper saw it, the greatest obstacle to the progress of Black women was not Black men but White racism, including the racism of her White sisters. At an 1869 convention, Harper expressed her support for the 15th Amendment. By that year she had reason to believe if the bill was defeated, Black women would be less, not more, secure.
As an officer of the AERA, the American Equal Rights Association (founded by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass), Harper may have suspected that the White feminists' sudden (and expedient concern for Black women was less than genuine.
Black women like Harper may have had their complaints against black men, but they must have looked down on White women using them as fodder to further their own selfish ends. That this was Anthony and Stanton's strategy became clear when they allied with a millionaire Democrat, George Train, who financed their feminist newspaper, The Revolution. Within its pages was venom of the worst kind. "While the dominant party have with one hand lifted up TWO MILLION BLACK MEN and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship," wrote Anthony (Susan B. Anthony!!!), with the other they have dethroned FIFTEEN MILLION WHITE WOMEN - their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters - and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood."
Stanton (Elizabeth Cady Stanton!!!) took the theme even further. She wrote of a Black man lynched in Tennessee for allegedly raping a White woman. The point of the story wasn't the awful injustice of lynching, but that giving Black men the vote was virtually a license to rape. "The Republican cry of 'Manhood Suffrage' creates an antagonism between black men and all women that will culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood, especially in the southern states," she railed.
... lowest orders of manhood
... fearful outrages on womanhood
What was that again about "sisterhood?"
Giddings also notes in Chapter 7, The Quest for Woman Suffrage (Before World War I) that Anthony later "dissuaded Helen Pitts, Frederick Douglass's second wife - who was White, and a suffragist in her own right - from addressing the plight of Black women in southern prison camps."
I would have loved to have seen Paula Giddings called upon as an expert in the New York Times article, however, Sara Evans, an historian at the University of Minnesota, is quoted. Evans remembers being a fourth-grader on the school playground and arguing with her playmates about which side should have won the Civil War. It was the 1950s South Carolina, and she recalled, "I was the only kid who thought it should have been the North, so I am going to make an educated guess here and say that she is a white woman. I am certain that her book, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, is excellent. However, I think this would have been the perfect opportunity to interview a black woman historian on this very issue. Whether it is the "nappy-headed ho" incident or the presidential race, the media seems to have a hard time finding black women to address issues in their fields of expertise - especially when it actually involves black women. Paula Giddings teaches at Smith. She is not hard to find. I'll bet that Deborah Gray White, Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and Elizabeth Alexander, professor of African-American Studies at Yale, have working phones and email addresses too.
Alice Walker, incidentally, supports Barack Obama:
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Ar'n't I a Woman?
All The Women Are White, All The Blacks Are Men, But Some Of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith:
Because of white women's racism and black men's sexism, there was no room in either area for a serious consideration of the lives of black women. And when they have considered black women, white women usually have not had the capacity to analyze racial politics and Black culture, and Black men have remained blind or resistant to the implications of sexual politics in Black women's lives.
Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894-1994 by Deborah Gray White. Excerpt from Chapter 7, Making a Way Out of No Way, pg 221-222.
When the woman's liberation movement blossomed in the late sixties, black women looked at it askance. Many could not identify with the white middle-class professional woman's demand for work and equal pay, or the white suburban housewife's revolt against leisure living. Although a few black women - Pauli Murray, Aileen Hernandez, and Shirley Chisholm, for example - joined the movement, and a few like Jane Galvin-Lewis tried forging alliances between black and white women, most black women stayed away. The white woman's demand for a more "meaningful" existence was not taken seriously by African-American women who had more experience as the domestic employees of these women than as political allies. African-American women were constantly found wanting when compared to white women, even by their own men; naturally they preferred membership in black organizations than in the likes of National Organization of Women (NOW), which had emerged in 1966 in the vanguard of women's drive for equal rights and equal pay. The fact that NOW women did not at first identify issues of poverty as women's issues was as alienating as their tendency to compare themselves to minorities and call themselves oppressed.
Gloria Steinem: Pitting Race Against Gender {Racialicious}. Guest contributor Jennifer Fang hits the nail on the head - several times:
Steinem’s argument that women were denied the vote for a half-century after Black men were made voting citizens ignores two truths: 1) had the right for women to vote been included in the 14th and 15th Amendments, those Amendments were unlikely to have passed, and 2) despite being granted the right to vote in the Constitution, it took nearly another century before the Voting Rights Act allowed the majority of African Americans to exercise that right in the face of profoundly institutionalized racism and apartheid. But Steinem essentially argues that these details are irrelevant: because women were not granted the vote when Black men were, Black men face fewer barriers today compared to White women, and thus are less deserving of affirmative action when it comes to the highest position in the country. By extension, Steinem suggests that if White women don’t benefit from a step towards civil rights, than no one should – which is why we need a female president before we need a Black president.
A commenter in the Racialicious article pointed out that Steinem sang a different tune in this February 7, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed, written in the heyday of Hillary Clinton "inevitability." Right Candidates, Wrong Question:
EVEN before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking which candidate are Americans more ready for, a white woman or a black man?
With all due respect to the journalistic dilemma of reporting two “firsts” at the same time — two viable presidential candidates who aren’t the usual white faces over collars and ties — I think this is a dumb and destructive question.
Jill Nelson "Call me Woman", a 2001 essay (Ms. Magazine Online): Unfortunately, what usually happens is that whatever hope there is of real conversation is dashed on the rock of white privilege, something that white women, even feminists, are sometimes loath to admit exists and not something that is solely reserved for white men. There is a refusal to hear women of color when we say that, for many of us, there is no need to call ourselves feminists. That in fact there is a danger in doing so if we want to live and work for a broad social change in our communities.
It seems to me that white women often have a difficult time understanding that for African-American women in particular, not naming ourselves sometimes works best. I think this is because, privileged by whiteness, they have no history of and do not comprehend the efficacy of stealth, of communicating indirectly and at the same time clearly. From the singing of spirituals that relayed escape plans of slaves to what is today known as slang, we are experts at dissembling, the amazing art of passing on information via metaphor.
UPDATE 1/15/08 - hat tip: MNC. A Debate Between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University hosted by Amy Goodman via Democracy Now (excerpt from transcript, audio links are available on the site.):
AMY GOODMAN: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, your thoughts on this discussion about race and gender?
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I mean, honestly, I’m appalled by the parallel that Ms. Steinem draws in the beginning part of the New York Times article. What she’s trying to do there is to make a claim towards sort of bringing in black women into a coalition around questions of gender and asking us to ignore the ways in which race and gender intersect. This is actually a standard problem of second-wave feminism, which, although there have been twenty-five years now—oh, going on forty years, actually, of African American women pushing back against this, have really failed to think about the ways in which trying to appropriate black women’s lives’ experience in that way is really offensive, actually.
AMY GOODMAN: Gloria Steinem?
GLORIA STEINEM:
Well, it’s very painful to hear her say that, because what I meant was
the opposite, you know, was to bring into the discussion the equal
treatment of these kinds of questions, because—I mean, I didn’t want to
write this. I was sitting there trying to do my own work and not do
this, but I got so alarmed at the way that Hillary Clinton was being
treated almost porno-–not just almost—pornographically, in ways that
you can’t even mention in the New York Times.
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