Yesterday Randi Rhodes had a caller that made me want to stick an icepick in my forehead. Given that Randi has been known to descent into screaming at far lesser offenders, her patience with this woman was inexplicable.
The woman's premise was that because black people got the vote before women did, that a woman should be elected president before a black man.
When I was in high school in Westfield, New Jersey in the early 1970's, there was a certain breed of white, middle to upper-middle class woman that either ran or went to "consciousness raising" groups. Most of these women either had husbands with good jobs, or ex-husbands with good jobs along with generous support payments. These were not the waitresses at the Lido Diner out on Route 22; these were women in big early 20th century center-hall colonials who never once worried how to pay the bills. And these were the women who gave the National Organization for Women a bad name.
Between the New York State chapter of NOW issuing a statement that Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama was "the greatest betrayal" and Gloria Steinem's preposterous claim in a recent New York Times op-ed piece that "Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life", it is evident, over thirty years after the women's movement started, that the movement is still about the concerns of white middle class women.
That we have two "firsts" running on the Democratic side made all this "Who suffered more" nonsense inevitable. But just as we saw with the schism between black Americans and Jewish Americans in the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots of 1991, we're now seeing identity politics deteriorate once again into a question of relative degrees of group suffering.
I don't know what this thing is that we have in America about ranking everything by degree. Perhaps it's our obsession with team sports and standings. But one of the reasons we are unable to even mention possible differences between men and women and between races, is because we have this need to rank everything. And since white guys decide the relative merits of assets and liabilities, the things that white guys do well will always rank higher than the things at which other groups might excel.
But when this unfortunate tendency of ours makes an affluent white woman like Gloria Steinem, or like Randi Rhodes' caller, claim that white women like her are more beleaguered than people whose sons are pulled over by police more often than white men, who are steered towards specific neighborhoods when they buy a house, and who are overrepresented in America's prisons, the notion that women somehow have a patent on suffering becomes ridiculous.
After the Crown Hights riots, I found myself thinking of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman -- two Jewish guys and a black guy -- civil rights workers who had worked together in common cause until they were murdered by bigots in Mississippi in 1964. And I wondered what on earth had brought us to this point, where we had this argument about which was worse: slavery or the Holocaust -- as if bragging rights to suffering was at stake, instead of slavery and the Holocaust being more alike than different. And so today, as we have the first viable black candidate and the first viable woman candidate running for president, we have callers like Randi Rhodes' caller yesterday trying to find some way to justify voting for their candidate by trying to create exclusive rights to suffering.
Many young progressive women are finding themselves in a conundrum about whom to support. To vote for Hillary Clinton may seem somehow inconsistent with progressivism, while voting for Barack Obama may seem inconsistent with feminism.
I have a suggestion: Why not take a look at their policy differences, however small they may be. Then decide which of those differences are most important -- yes, rank them if you must -- and make your decision that way? After all, isn't what we want a society free of gender and racial bias? Then why not start here?
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