I have not seen much in the mainstream press about this, and it is a wonder to me that Alice Walker's interesting analysis of the race and gender dynamic of this democratic primary is published on the relatively new black site, theroot.com, and Gloria Steinem's piece was published in the The New York Times.
Alice Walker is no intellectual lightweight and in the feminist movement she is as big as they come. She is not "in vogue" in academic settings as much as she used to be and she spends most of her time traveling and meditating. But the Pulitzer prize winning novelist of The Color Purple has long been a dominant figure in feminist studies and singlehandedly created another school of women-centered ideology, womanism.
When I read Gloria Steinem's inflammatory piece in the NYT, my first thought was of Alice Walker. She and Steinem are long time friends; they famously worked together on Ms. Magazine. I wondered if Alice Walker felt as Steinem did and what her response to the identity politics of this primary would be.
I have a long love affair with Walker. I love her work, have taught her, written about her, and see her very much as a kind of spiritual mother to me. I wish the essay she just published on TheRoot.com had come earlier, though. But better late than never.
Here are some highlights:
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would...During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.
Walker proceeds to make the point that growing up in the racist South, she was as much a victim of white women as she was of white men. By doing so, she implicitly undermines the victim vs. victim argument that Steinem put forth in her article. Walker is contradicting Steinem quite directly when Steinem wrote:
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.
It's not that Steinem is wrong about gender; it's just that this is only a partial view of the question of gender. Walker explicitly makes this point:
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
As Walker so astutely points out, so much has been made of Barack Obama's race, while Hillary's race has been completely forgotten. In its own flawed and heavy-handed way,the media has attempted to historicize Barack Obama's blackness--demonstrating his awareness of a black nationalist sentiment of the 1960's, for example. Even Obama's discussion of race in "A More Perfect Union" deconstructs for the American public complicated issues about emotion, race, class, and American history. But no one has talked about the implications tied up in a white woman's rise and desire for power--as if to do so is to undermine the ways in which white women have suffered from sexism.
As I was telling my students yesterday, we have a problem with complicated identities in America. It is hard for black men to understand that they can be simultaneously the victim and the victimizer; tell middle class heterosexual blacks about their sexual and class privilege and they will try to combat that with how racism affects them; it is hard for any group experiencing oppression to understand that there might be ways in which they also have power and privilege, which despite their status as "women" or "blacks" or "gay and/or lesbian" might mean they wield some power over others. The same is true of white women who undoubtedly experience gender oppression, but are also able to wield their whiteness as a weapon against both black men AND black women.
As Walker notes,
It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
She is clearly drawing a parallel between Miss May Montgomery and Hillary Clinton. And Clinton, whether she harbors racist thoughts or not, has shown herself willing to use race against Obama. The race-baiting has been written about ad-nauseum, so I won't repeat it here. But in our discussions of Clinton's race-baiting, we sometimes focus exclusively on the "subject" of race, i.e., blackness, and in this case, Barack Obama. We often forget that race is operating for Clinton too, in the form of white privilege.
Walker takes this racial discussion to a place that it has not gone before; she points out the ways in which we have viewed Clinton only through the "victim" lens of gender and not considered the full context of who she is. She cautions us against doing the same with Barack Obama.
She then goes on to contest Gloria Steinem's most inflammatory set-up in her NYT article:
THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.
Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?
This was Steinem's dismissal of Obama's experience. To that Walker responds:
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.
This perfectly captures what so many of us experience when we listen to Obama speak and when we interface with the campaign. I don't think Hillary is "all bad" and that Barack is "all good." Indeed, Walker goes on to talk about the ways in which she disagrees with Obama. I think both have some privilege (he has gender privilege, she has race privilege) and each of those things carry historical weight. Whichever of them ends up being the nominee, either one will see the aspect of their identity that is perceived as a "flaw," (his blackness, her female-ness) used against them and we mustn't tolerate it at all with either of them.
But what Walker calls us to realize is that we cannot allow a script of gendered victimhood to erase all of the historical and institutional power to which Hillary Clinton has access.
And finally, Walker makes a welcome suggestion for this Democrat and Obama-supporter who has been mentally on the ropes over this roller-coaster primary season:
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Do not stress over its outcome???? Ok. I'll try. Yes. That is sage advice. I also love how she points out Obama's quoting of the feminists Jordan and Sweet Honey in his slogan "We are the change we have been waiting for," bringing him back to a feminist sensibility, demonstrating his fluency in the feminist language and songs of liberation.
I know that Walker's open letter endorsing Barack Obama might not get a lot of play in the MSM, but it is an important rebuttal to the opening identity politics salvo by Steinem, published way back in January. Steinem's piece debuted the race v. gender conversation. Perhaps Walker's piece will be the swan song on a comparison that will get neither a (white) woman or a black (man) to the White House.
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