I've been wanting to blog about this since I heard about it last week, but Vivir Latino and illvox and Racewire and a bunch of other folks have gotten to it already… … Obstruction of justice and resisting arrest should really be renamed the Activist Charges, since they seem to be what all of us are threatened with whenever we're arrested for either protesting or observing the cops and holding them accountable for their actions. The latter seems to particularly piss the cops off. I know this from personal experience, having been pepper sprayed along with other community members and seeing two friends being violently arrested for doing just that - questioning police actions, asking for badge numbers, taking pictures of their activity. All the charges against the two people arrested were dropped. Three members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement's Cop Watch were arrested while videotaping an arrest in Brooklyn in 2005. All charges against them were later dropped. When the cops went on a bike-confiscating frenzy in the East Village last summer, two people who dared to observe and question them were arrested. It happens over and over again.

Lots of folks have been linking to this Frank Rich column, and rightly so:

But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.

Our new bogus narrative rose from the ashes of Mrs. Clinton’s concession to Mr. Obama, amid the raucous debate over what role misogyny played in her defeat. A few female Clinton supporters — or so they identified themselves — appeared on YouTube and Fox News to say they were so infuriated by sexism that they would vote for Mr. McCain.

Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.

That said, lots of feminists — and not only those who supported Clinton in the race — remain pissed off about the level of misogyny Clinton faced during the race. And rightly so.

And many anti-racist feminists and womanists remain pissed off at how many (not all) Clinton-supporting feminists — and Clinton herself — minimized or denied racism during the primary race. And rightly so.

We shouldn’t say that we have to heal these divisions before the election. Because, you know, that’s not going to happen. These divisions are deeper and more enduring than a single election cycle, and will take more than six months to heal.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t elect Obama rather than McCain in the meanwhile, of course. But that’s the sideshow, not the main focus. Fighting racism and sexism is important for its own sake, not because there’s an election coming up.

(Disclosure: In case folks are wondering, I will quite likely be voting for Cynthia McKinney — although I’d vote for Obama if I lived in a swing state.)

P.S. Check out Michelle Obama Watch, if you haven’t already.

Via Sweetmachine:

The inaugural Fat Women of Color Carnival will be held over at saskaia.livejournal.com on July 23. The theme is general and open to anything pertaining to being a fat woman of color and our experiences in our communities, experiences on how our fat and bodies are racialized, myths about fat women of color, and so on. Please link all entries here by July 20. Please promote as applicable and appropriate.

Via Ann at Feministing, I read a good Susan Faludi op-ed about gender and the campaign for the presidency:

…A Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.

The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched over her infant.

The question asked by this American Sphinx to all who dared enter the halls of leadership was, “Are you man enough?” This year, Senator Obama has notably refused to give the traditional answer.

I agree with what Ann, Faludi, Hilzoy and Dana said about gender, but what about that statue?

The statue is by Horatio Greenough, who has the unfortunate distinction of being the most embarrassing of America’s great sculptors. He produced two Great Works, and both of them are cringeworthy.

Greenough’s most famous statue depicts a musclebound, toga-clad George Washington (inspired by a famous sculpture of Zeus). From the moment it was installed in the Capitol Rotunda¹, the half-naked Washington was considered a scandal by those who didn’t consider it a joke. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “Did anybody ever see Washington naked! It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine, was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

According to one theory, Greenough originally designed the statue to be sitting on a chariot being drawn by six horses — the outstretched left hand was to be holding reigns reins — but Congress was unwilling to pay for all that. But looking at the statue now, I can see that the pose — which I find very awkward, with its slight backwards lean and the outstretched left foot — would have been better if Washington was leaning back against reigns reins.

I remember seeing this statue when I was a kid, in the Smithsonian in D.C., and being shushed because I broke out in giggles. But at least I got to see it. Greenough’s other great sculpture, described in Faludi’s op-ed, started life on the steps of the Capitol building. Now it’s hidden away in storage (except for one small piece of it, as we will see), and probably will never see daylight again.

And that’s for the best, because it would be hard to find a more blatant piece of racist, sexist propaganda. Take a look at this thing:

“The Rescue” brings two images from pop culture to my mind:

1) In one of the Harry Potter books, in the Ministry of Magic, there’s an enormous statue of a heroic Wizard, surrounded by lesser beings (witches, elves, giants, etc?), which Harry finds embarrassing to look at, because the self-aggrandizing racism is so transparent. In my mind, that atrocity was sculpted by Horatio Greenough.

2) In the climax of the movie True Lies, the hero, played by monument to unstoppable ambition Arnold Schwarzenegger, winds up facing the Evil Terrorist Mastermind, who is armed only with a knife clenched between his teeth. Arnold is armed with a Harrier Jet. Are we really supposed to find the guy with the frakkin’ Harrier Jet to be the brave one? Similarly, Greenough’s sculpture makes Boone so huge and dominating that the result looks like God wrestling a ten-year-old.

I imagine that when this statue was installed on the Capitol steps, Greenough thought he had achieved immortal fame. But, instead, it apparently became all too embarrassing by 1959, when it was taken down and put into permanent storage. Four decades later, the only part of this statue that wouldn’t make modern viewers cringe — the dog — was sent to Middlebury College to join an exhibit of Greenough’s drawings.

And as far as I can tell, that’s the closest “The Rescue” has come to a public showing in the last half-century.

1. It had to be moved just a few years later, when it was discovered that the twelve-ton marble statue was cracking the Rotunda floor. (back)

Let me start by asking a question. Did anyone see Clinton’s, McCain’s, and Obama’s Tuesday night speeches in their entirety?

I watched Clinton and Obama both, but I missed McCain. One thing that struck me about Clinton and Obama is that I didn’t notice either one of them make note of the historic significance of having the first black nominee for President on a major party ticket. In contrast, both of them noted the groundbreaking campaign by Hillary Clinton, arguing that she was blazing a path for women, but I didn’t hear the same for Obama. Isn’t that an interesting distinction between racial politics and gender politics? The colorblind ideology silences almost any public discussion of racism by black candidates, who are vying for white votes. In contrast, we don’t have as much silence on the gender front (from the candidates). That has been a fairly consistent pattern in this Presidential election over the past few months. I’m not saying racism or sexism is a greater barrier to being elected President, but I think it is clear that they operate in different ways.

Furthermore, any complicated analysis that examines the interactions and intersections of race, gender, age, sexuality, and class are almost always missing from pundits and candidates analysis. I remember the point in the election when Hillary Clinton talked about getting pushed around by the boys (apparently it was on the Ellen DeGeneres show). While I can relate to being pushed around by the boys and having that make me stronger, I don’t believe for one minute that Hillary was being pushed around by any black boys. I know I sure wasn’t. I was getting pushed around by the whites boys who I went to school with. They were all white, presumably heterosexual¹, and from class backgrounds remarkably similar to my own. I never heard any TV pundits point this out–Clinton wasn’t being pushed around by black boys.

All that said, why do you think there is a difference in a candidate’s ability to talk about his or her groundbreaking accomplishments in relation to race and gender? Do you think the political realm is exceptional in this way? Or do you things may be different in other fields? Why do you think it is so difficult to have a discussion that captures the intersections and complexities of various forms of social inequality?

1. Some of them may not have been heterosexual, but I definitely could say that the boys that had the most normative gender presentations and were able to create a perceived heterosexual identity were the most likely to be the ones I argued with. (back)

From Ezra:

Towards the end of the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dr. John Wane Prentice, played by Sydney Poitier, sits down with his fiance’s white father, played by Spencer Tracy. “Have you given any thought to the problems your children will have?” Tracy asks. “Yes, and they’ll have some…[But] Joey feels that all of our children will be President of the United States,” replies Poitier. “How do you feel about that?” asks Tracy, looking skeptically at the black man in front of him. “I’d settle for Secretary of State,” Poitier laughs.

Written in the late-1960s, the exchange was, indeed, laughable. The Civil Rights Act had been passed three years prior. Two years before, the Watts riots had broken out, killing 35. Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated a year later. But here we are, almost exactly 40 years after theatergoers heard that exchange. The last two Secretaries of State were African-American and, as of tonight, the next president may well be a black man. John Prentice’s children would probably still be in their late-30s.

The rest of Ezra’s post is sometimes a little too hurrah-hurrah for me, since I think in many ways black and white Americans still are too often living in two nations. But I really liked the passage quoted above.

Hilzoy has written a great post responding to Ferraro’s latest, racist op-ed. Go check it out.

Hilzoy also points to this article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Slate:

There is peculiar bit of jujitsu that white public figures have employed recently whenever they’re called to account for saying something stupid about black people. When the hard questions start flying, said figure deflects them by claiming that any critical interrogation is tantamount to calling them a racist, which they most assuredly are not.

[List of various racist statements by public figures, who then said it was just crazy to use the “R” word, snipped.]

It gives me no joy to report that Geraldine Ferraro has now applied to join the ranks of the obviously nonracist. I was 8 when she ran for vice president and vaguely aware that a party that would promote a woman for an executive office might be a party that would one day give a kid like me a fair shake. Thus I’ve retched while watching Ferraro beeline to any television studio that would have her, flaunting her rainbow bona fides, and claiming that she’s being attacked “because she’s white” and demonized as a racist. […]

The bar for racism has been raised so high that one need be a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party to qualify. Had John McCain said that Hillary Clinton was only competitive in the presidential race because she was a woman, there’d be no dispute over whether the comment was sexist. And yet when the equivalent is said about a black person, it’s not only not racist, but any criticism of the statement is interpreted as an act of character assassination.

Aaargh!

Ta-Nehisi is one of my must-read bloggers, and the point about the raising of the bar for “racism” is right on target. It’s sucks that he detracted from his article with a single sentence of needless oppression olympics - especially since on his own blog, he’s frequently argued against such comparisons.

He continues:

In some measure, the narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that neither they nor anyone they’d ever met would do such a thing. But most racism—indeed, the worst racism—is quaint and banal. There’s nothing sensationalistic about redlining or job discrimination.

This is something I’ve seen more often than I can count. People’s logic goes like this:

1) Racists are monsters in their hearts.

2) I know that in my heart, I’m not a monster.

3) Therefore, I can’t be racist.

4) How dare you call me a racist!

You can pretty much replace “racist” with “sexist” or “homophobe” or any sort of bigot, and the above “logic” will continue to be played out in thousands of conversations every day.

For example, I recently read this painful exchange between two great Canadian cartoonists, Dave Sim and Chester Brown. I say it was painful because Sim was at one time an important role model for me. Since then, he’s become a belligerent misogynist, who argues (among other things) that women are intellectually inferior to men.

Brown — a Toronto cartoonist and friend of Sim’s who has stood by Sim for years — argued, as nicely as he possibly could, that Sim’s views meet “the common usage definition” of misogyny. Sim responded:

In other words you think I’m the gender equivalent of a racist. This is what I’ve come to realize: that people genuinely believe that I’m the worst imaginable thing (literally: a non-person, a sub-human) in our society. That being the case the only honorable thing is to withdraw from society completely and limit my contact with society to necessities (my rep at Diamond, people I buy food from). Would you associate with anyone who thought you were a subhuman? […]

RE: Visits to Toronto…Would you associate with anyone you thought were a subhuman?

Hard to imagine a clearer-cut case of “I can’t be a bigot, because I’m not a monster” logic.