racismreview.com

In mid-July Jessie did a post on the AMA apology, but I would like to add a bit more on this issue, especially about how racism works in US medicine. One good result from anti-racism efforts in the last decade may be that we are getting more serious apologies from white organizations about slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Harriet Washington reports in a late July 2008 New York Times article on one of the most institutionally racist sectors of our society, U.S. medical care institutions. Highly (photo of AMA building: Steve and Sara) and blatantly segregated until the late 1960s, she notes, the American Medical Association has recently apologized the National Medical Association, the country’s leading black medical association:

An apology to the nation’s black physicians, citing a century of ”past wrongs.”

From the beginning, U.S. medicine’s institutions have been racially and gender segregated, but Jim Crow and gender segregation increased in the early 1900s with the implementation of private and government “reforms” designed to get rid medical practitioners who were not officially licensed—which usually meant they were not from the more elite (almost all white) medical schools and often practiced various kinds of folk medicine (including midwives). These reforms did raise U.S. medical standards, at least for allopathic mainstream medicine, yet also effectively excluded many white women and practitioners of color from their traditional medical practices. And Jim Crow segregation became very central to this newly reformed medical system:

. . . black patients and doctors were often relegated to subterranean ”colored” or charity wards or banned from hospitals altogether; they had responded with their own hospitals and medical schools, at least seven of which existed in 1909. By 1938, the situation had grown so dire that Dr. Louis T. Wright of Harlem Hospital declared, ”The A.M.A. has demonstrated as much interest in the health of the Negro as Hitler has in the health of the Jew.”

Washington notes that the American Medical Association continued to be a problem until the end of the civil rights movement era:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed without active support from the A.M.A. Title VI of the act closed the Hill-Burton loophole: segregation within hospitals became illegal….But for African-American and other antisegregationist physicians, there remained a final bastion of racial exclusion to conquer: the A.M.A.

Demands by African American physicians and some white allies that the association desegregate were ignored by its leadership until the late 1960s. From 1963 to 1968 the association had to endure public protests against its racist practices. In 1968 the association finally took action to end legal segregation in its constituent state societies.

Still, today, the percentage of U.S. physicians who are African American (2.2 percent) is still smaller than it was in 1910 (2.5 percent). And our medical care system is riddled with numerous kinds of institutional racism, as recent research reports (see various chapters here and chapter 7 here) frequently make clear. There are some very good scholarly bloggers like U. Dayton’s Prof. Vernellia Randall (see her great website here) who have given even more details on how such institutionalized racism works and how it is a violation of international human rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Note: I have given more than 100 invited lectures over the years on my research on racism at many schools and colleges within our top universities and liberal arts colleges across the country, and I have only had one invited lecture cancelled–ever. This was after two faculty members saw at the xerox machine the handout (it had quotes from whites making various racist comments, from my research interviews) that I was going to talk about. This was a Florida medical school, which had invited me and other researchers to talk about racial matters because they had had racist graffitti in their medical school classrooms. They reportedly still have problems today.

News anchor Katie Couric has made news of her own recently with her analysis of the male-dominated news business (image from here). Couric didn’t stop there, though. She went on to suggest that there is sexism in the news business and beyond in the larger society, but that “sexism is worse than racism.” Here’s the full quote from Couric, via Politico:

“Unfortunately I have found out that many viewers are afraid of change. The glory days of TV news are over, and the media landscape has been dramatically changed. News is available now for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and everybody fights for the last pieces of the shrinking pie. The corporate pressure and the ratings terror are intensifying all the time, and the situation is not simple. I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary’s race are important steps in the right direction.”

With this assessment, Couric joins a long and growing list of white-women-who-don’t-get-it, when it comes to racism, such as Geraldine Ferraro. As Adia Harvey wrote here back in March, “Making the case that sexism is worse than racism or even that it is the primary source of women’s oppression ignores the experiences of minority and working-class women (who simultaneously contend with racism and capitalist exploitation) and ultimately alienates these women from feminism and feminist causes.” Couric, like Ferraro, is no doubt speaking from her own experience in which she certainly encounters sexism but doesn’t encounter racism. Why would she? Given her skin-and-class privilege, it’s almost certainly the case that the only kind of inequality Couric faces in gender inequality. And, she’s right to call it out for what it is. But this doesn’t mean that Couric is right about racism, or about sexism’s significance relative to racism.

Instead, Couric’s comments simply reveal that she’s clueless about the pervasiveness of racism in this society because she’s never encountered it herself.

She’s not alone. Another white woman in the news recently who has revealed her lack of recognition about racism is Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a celebrity co-host on the television show “The View.” In an exchange with Whoopi Goldberg last week about the use of the “N-word” and the fact that racism is pervasive in our society, Goldberg asserted that she and Hasselbeck live in “different societies” at which point Hasselbeck broke down in tears. This isn’t the first time that Whoopi and Elisabeth have gotten into in about racism on the show. Back in March of this year, when Hasselbeck said she was “offended” by the fact that Barack Obama referred to his grandmother a “typical white woman” who would be fearful if she saw a group of African-Americans on the street. Elisabeth explained that she is a “typical white woman” herself and would never be afraid of a group of black kids on the street. Whoopi, however, didn’t buy it, and called her on it. At the end of the exchange, Hasselbeck pleaded with Whoopi for a “rule book on racism,” basically admitting that she didn’t get racism.

I think it’s understandable, really, that the privileged white women like Couric, Ferraro and Hasselbeck don’t get racism given how little analysis of it there is in our society.

Written by Yanick St. Jean and Pedro Marius Egounleti (posted from Benin, Africa)

Docteur Conceptia Denis Ouinsou was born in Haiti, September 21, 1942 in Grande Saline, a city whose name indicates its main activity – the harvest and sale of marine salt. Her mother thought it best to send her to the capital for schooling. She attended the Soeurs de la Ste Trinité and Collège St. Pierre, schools guided by the American Anglican values of obedience. Then she entered the Université d’Etat d’Haiti earning a Licence in Social studies and Administration, and another in Legal Studies.

Valedictorian of her Law School class, Conceptia Denis earned a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in France, which she completed. She married a Beninese, came to the country in 1977 and, immediately, joined the faculty of Law at the University of Abomey-Calavi. She has lived in Benin 31 years.

Aggregated in 1985, she became the departmental Chair of the School of Law, then director of Academic Affairs and, later, Minister of Higher Education and Social Research. From this post she was named Counsel of the Constitutional Court then, in 1998 President of the Court (Chief Supreme Court Justice). In the exercise of her function, she met no resistance: « Je n’ai pas peur. Je continue toujours mon chemin». For her success, Docteur Ouinsou credits her mother:

There is nobility of character that can be found everywhere. My mother had natural nobility. She demanded excellence. Nothing was ever good enough for her. I always feared her nitpicking ‘you are first in your class, but your grade average decreased; such and such grade decreased in comparison with last month.’ She pushed me to produce my maximum, and I believe it is what shaped me. This may be why some people think I am too stiff, too stern. One should always be in quest of the excellence. Today, it is not sufficient to be good.

Being a Professor of Law has been her goal:

In our system, teaching full-time in the School of Law requires an aggregation, which is very difficult to obtain. I was determined. It was the only objective of my life which I reached in 1985. Everything that happened after that was sheer luck.

She recognizes limitations placed on women’s achievements, but also wants women to sweat.

From the start, women meet many obstacles that restrict progress and are hard to surmount. I remember in the amphitheater male students saying all women must have a husband always. I would ask them to bring me the chapter that says so. To them, a woman who doesn’t have a husband is a prostitute, regardless of her life. These myths do not encourage the development of women who feel obliged to conform to the mold, find a husband, and open themselves to additional constraints of married life.

Solving the problem requires education and hard work.

If girls can have sufficient education, I believe they are capable of major accomplishments. But I also think it is necessary that women work hard. I would not take an incompetent woman over a competent man only because she is a woman. At equal competence, I take the woman. I am sorry to say it, but I think each person must be able to “mouiller le maillot” (sweat) before receiving anything. And it is why my leitmotif is, a woman must work to be able to receive what she asks. Women should not count entirely on the law for promotion.

Beninese journalist Abdul-Wahab Bakary described Docteur Ouinsou as

une femme qui ne se laisse pas faire. She is a high-caliber lawyer, a prominent figure with the capacity to address issues and give her opinion based on the law. She has nothing to envy from a man.

Graduate student Florence Megninou agrees that “in the political sphere, Madame Ouinsou does not let herself be intimidated by men.”

New members of the Court took the oath on Saturday June 8. Before she left office in June, Docteur Ouinsou received many decorations from governments of Germany, Haiti and Benin. On Friday June 6, she was enthroned Princess of the Royal Court of Allada by the King of Allada.

The ever savvy Tim Wise has a sharp new piece called “Your Whiteness is Showing: An Open Letter to Certain White Women Who are Threatening to Withhold Support From Barack Obama in November,” in which he raises the key counter arguments to some of Senator Hillary Clinton’s supporters who say they plan to vote for John McCain or sit out the November election because of the way Cinton was treated by the sexist white commentators in the mass media, and by some of Senator Obama’s scattered supporters. Tim makes clear the distinctively white-framed thinking involved in much of this reaction:

You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point–the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny–you couldn’t be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation–the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity–you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap….Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding. 

He then adds: 

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women–you know, the ones who aren’t white like you and most of your friends–but rather, like white men! 

And then nails the lid shut on his argument by pointing out a plausible way to protest that no Clinton supporters have suggested: 

You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she’s progressive, and she’s a feminist. But that isn’t your threat is it? No. You’re not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton’s birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? . . . See, I told you your whiteness was showing. 

The comment is right on target. McKinney would make a great president. (And why do we not know more about her, and her platform? Notice the racism and sexism in the media, in ignoring her candidacy. If she were white and male, like Ralph Nader, she would indeed get attention.) Then Wise wisely concludes with this key action point: 

. . . you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. 

Sexism is systemic in this society and much in need of as direct attack as systemic racism does. But voting against Obama does not advance the anti-sexism agenda. Indeed, it does just the opposite. John McCain is infamous for his patriarchal views, his sexism, such as in his treatment of his first wife, and his view of women’s rights and women’s choices, such as his hard-right commitment to put more patriarchal theorists and activists on the Supreme Court such as Roberts and Alito. Electing the clearly patriarchal and right-wing McCain will likely mean justices who will cut back the rights of women, in numerous ways–as well as the rights of Americans of color, and thus ultimately, all Americans.

In a Boston Globe article (HT, Mordy), “Healing … Democrats’ sexism,” Geraldine Ferraro, former vice-presidential candidate (I worked for her) and strong Senator Clinton supporter, has decided again that she should accent a white-framed perspective without much self-reflection. She begins with a view that many of us can agree with:

Here we are at the end of the primary season, and the effects of racism and sexism on the campaign have resulted in a split within the Democratic Party that will not be easy to heal before election day.

Then she moves into more troubling territory, trying to accent sexism and at the same time pander to racist white Democrats:

Perhaps it’s because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom sexism isn’t an issue, but reverse racism is.

She is right that the media and some in Senator Obama’s campaign do not see the importance and impact of the extensive, often vicious, sexism directed at Senator Clinton mainly by the same media and by lesser figures in Obama’s campaign. If she had pursued this very important theme, she would have been right on target. The research on everyday sexism is too limited, and US sexism certainly does not get enough public attention. (see here)

But Ferraro quickly moves into white-framed comments on “Reagan Democrats” concerns about “reverse racism.” “Reagan Democrats” is a codeword for “white Democrats” disproportionately from the South/rural areas, and working or lower middle class. And “reverse racism” is a racist-right term created by conservative whites to attack remedial programs after the 1960s that attempted to change the racially discriminatory barriers of this society. Is she saying it is OK for white Reagan Democrats to push the mythological racist frame of “reverse racism”? (To exist, so-called “reverse racism” would mean centuries of black-on-white oppression and disproportionate black power over whites in all major institutions today. A white fairy tale.)

Then Ferraro moves back to some good points about the sexism against Senator Clinton and what it means:

The truth is that tens of thousands of women have watched how Clinton has been treated and are not happy. We feel that if society can allow sexism to impact a woman’s candidacy to deny her the presidency, it sends a direct signal that sexism is OK in all of society. In response, a group of women - from corporate executives to academics to members of the media - have requested that the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University and others conduct a study . . . to determine . . . whether either the Clinton or Obama campaign engaged in sexism and racism; [and] second, whether the media treated Clinton fairly or unfairly.

Here is a major research strategy that makes sense. It is well past time for this society’s powerful white male elite—which, oddly, she does not name–to be pressured to pay attention to and eradicate sexism and racism in media and politics.

Ferraro also does not call out that white male elite for its racism and gendered racism (for example, against Michelle Obama) during this campaign. She never names whites as discriminators or racist actors once. “Whites” disappear by name except in two places as racial victims! And the unhappy “women” she seems to have in mind are white women. Reading her piece, one wants to ask about that overwhelming majority of black women (and other women of color) who are missinghere. They face racism and sexism every day, yet most probably do not share her views about “Reagan Democrats” or the Obama campaign.

Then Ferraro returns to “Reagan Democrats,” who in her view:

are more concerned with how they have been treated. Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama’s historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you’re white you can’t open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama’s playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They’re not upset with Obama because he’s black; they’re upset because they don’t expect to be treated fairly because they’re white. It’s not racism that is driving them, it’s racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don’t believe he understands them and their problems.

Well, here are some white-framed clichés straight out of white racist frame. That phrase, “If you’re white you can’t open your mouth without being accused of being racist” is a classic extreme white exaggeration whites often use to take the focus off widespread racial discrimination and, often, to defend their openly racist comments. This racist framing tries to hide the empirical fact that a majority of whites still think and act in racist ways. The data are clear, and Ferraro needs to become better educated, perhaps in Racism 101 course, and learn that racial discrimination is a very serious problem.

Then Ferraro uses another racist-right code phrase, “playing the race card,” which racist whites invented to put down African Americans fighting the oppression whites created. Who does she think created the racial oppression on which this country was founded, and which has lasted now for four centuries? That line about they are not upset “because he’s black” is naïve. There is much evidence that many whites will not vote for a black person for state or national offices. She takes many whites off the hook for their racism and blames black Americans for creating “racial resentment.” This paragraph is so obviously white-framed that I can use it to illustrate in my classes the way in which many educated whites cannot think straight about racial matters in this still-racist country. It is a clear example of how normalized the white racial frame is.

And then Ferraro has an odd concluding critique of Obama for elitism and being a graduate of elite universities:

They [Reagan Democrats] don’t identify with someone who has gone to Columbia and Harvard Law School and is married to a Princeton-Harvard Law graduate.

One can put “Yale University” in key places in this sentence and she could be talking about Senator Clinton! I guess the elite position of the Clintons did not cross her mind when she wrote that “Reagan Democrats” are having trouble feeling a connection to such a presidential candidate. It is time for those in the white political elite, like Ferraro, to become better educated on matters of systemic racism and to try to move away from that old racist frame–and toward creating a society where there really is liberty and justice for all.

As I have been reading a lot about “race” matters and U.S. elections, including the views and discussions of Dr. Wright and Senator Obama, I have also been working on a book on the white racial frame and its long history. This makes me think a lot about the roots and foundations underlying today’s issues of racism. For this project, I have been doing a lot of research on the history of slavery and legal segregation. Clearly, these are the foundation of this country, with huge continuing significance.

One reason that the bloody realities of slavery, and later the near slavery of legal segregation, have shaped this society so fundamentally is because from their first decades they were legitimated by a dominant racial framing, firmly imbedded in private and state bureaucracies, and firmly legalized under North American laws. The development of the systemic oppression of Africans and indigenous peoples was made possible by the increasing organizational power of bureaucratized European and colonial companies and states. The norms of such military and other state and private bureaucracies accented stability, discipline, calculability of results, and impersonality. Mass killings and attacks were possible without bureaucracy, but recurring wars on Indians and a large-scale system of African American enslavement were not. Then, as in more recent times, extensive oppression requires complex organization and organizational agents and actors. Central to this bureaucratization and legitimation of slavery was the English and North American legal system. The legal system was, and still is, much more than just laws for by means of judges and other government actors, it enshrines and protects the elite-controlled hierarchical structure of society. In the North American case the legal system enshrined the views and values of the governing elite and, thus, a highly inegalitarian social structure for the new society.

The foundation of this legal and government-bureaucratic system is the U.S. Constitution. In 1787, in Philadelphia, fifty-five white men met and created a constitution for what has been called the “first democratic nation.” They were of European origin, mostly well-off for their day, and or had been slaveowners. Many others profited as merchants, shippers, lawyers, bankers from the trade in slaves, commerce in slave-produced agricultural products, or supplying provisions to slaveholders and slave-traders. In the preamble the founders cite “We the People,” but this did encompass those enslaved–one fifth of the population. As I show in Racist America, slavery was central to the making of this U.S. Constitution. At least seven sections of the Constitution protected the 140-year-old system of slavery: (1) Article 1, Section 2 counts slaves as three fifths of a person; (2) Article 1, Sections 2 and 9 apportion taxes using the three-fifths formula; (3) Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress authority to suppress slave insurrections; (4) Article 1, Section 9 prevents abolishing the slave trade before 1808; (5) Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 exempt slave-made goods from export duties; (6) Article 4, Section 2 requires the return of fugitive slaves; and (7) Article 4, Section 4 stipulates that the federal government must help states put down domestic violence, including slave uprisings. This is the same Constitution (and the same founders like GW) that so many people today say we should treasure and look back to as our model for equality, liberty, and justice as we deal with racism and other troubling issues today (?).

The bureaucratization and legalization of the oppression of Indians and African Americans made it easier for the European colonists and their descendants to rationalize that oppression. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (The Way We Think) have noted how in the human mind the bloody killing of groups of people–such as Native Americans, or later, European Jews—sometimes gets blended with “ordinary bureaucratic frames to produce a blended concept of genocide as an everyday organizational operation. Because the projection to the blend is only partial, certain people who could not bring themselves to operate in the frame of genocide may find themselves operating comfortably in the blend.” For the most part, systems of oppression like Native American genocide and African American slavery are not carried out by human “monsters” with extreme psychological disorders. Most European Americans, including the majority who did not hold people in slavery, supported the “normal” slavery system with their indifference or various forms of collaboration, such as buying and selling slave-produced products in markets. As Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989) has argued in analyzing the recent oppression of European Jews, “Evil can do its dirty work, hoping that most people most of the time will refrain from doing rash, reckless things – and resisting evil is rash and reckless. Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience – the instinct of self-preservation will do.

These ideas of Fauconnier, Turner, and Bauman do help make sense out of how “normal,” bureaucratic, and everyday the foundational system of racism has become. Evils, like the highly racist attacks (the white racial framing, again) on Senator Obama and Dr. Wright, now in the several millions on the Internet, or the highly sexist attacks on Senator Clinton, only require most people to stand by passively on the sidelines. And these attacks and the racial/gender framing behind them will help account for the likely loss of either of them to McCain in November. Our centuries- long racist and sexist history makes this quite clear.

I welcome your thoughts and comments on this train of thought.

Recently I was involved with putting together a special issue of the journal Gender & Society that focused on what we now call “intersectionality” and what, in sociology, we started out calling “the intersection of race, class and gender” back in the late-1980s.  I mention that less out of shameless self-promotion, and more as just an indication that I’m someone who’s been in the field and thinking about the connections between these dimensions of oppression for some time.  And, like anyone in a particular field for awhile, the domain assumptions of that field begin appear self-evident.    It’s sometimes easy to think,“well, obviously, race, class and gender are inseparable and must be considered in relation to each other.”  And, even, after awhile, “everyone knows this by now, there’s nothing new to say here….” and then something like this Op-Ed appears.   Apparently, this 25 year old meme in academia hasn’t quite reached Nicholas Kristof (NB: thanks to careful readers Greg & JJ for catching my mistake!) at the New York Times, who  writes:

At first glance, it may seem that Barack Obama would face a stronger impediment than Hillary Clinton. Experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex. And evolutionary psychologists believe we’re hard-wired to be suspicious of people outside our own group, to save our ancestors from blithely greeting enemy tribes of cave men. In contrast, there’s no hard-wired hostility toward women, though men may have a hard-wired desire to control and impregnate them.


Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

It’s hard to know where to begin to unpack Kristof’s assumptions.  For today, I’m going to leave aside the drivel about what is, and is not,  “hard-wired” into human behavior and address the larger point Kristof is making here that “racism may be easier to override than sexism.”   To support this claim, he goes on to refer to (but not cite) an experiment involving “African American doctors,” to conclude something about the persistence of racism.  However, he doesn’t mention the gender of the doctors in this experiment.  My guess is that Kristol (and perhaps the experimenters?) presume that the doctors are men and thus, “only race” is relevant.   Kristof here is engaging in a common fallacy of “separate silos,” or parallel systems, of thinking about race, gender (and by extension, class, although he does not explicitly address this in his op-ed).   In this paradigm, race runs along one track, gender along another and class along a third, and they never coincide or overlap.  So, in this way of thinking, it’s possible to talk about “race” as if, “all the Blacks are men,” and to talk about gender as if “all the women are White” (with deep gratitude to this brave volume).     As if.     This is not only a facile, and flawed, way of thinking about race and gender, it actually obfuscates rather than illuminates the way these systems of domination work.  Let me offer a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Continue Reading »

While this presidential campaign promises to be the most interesting in a number of years because of the hope of a “first” (first woman, first black) victory, and the end to the Bush regime, the news about politics-as-usual strategies of the campaigns offers somewhat disappointing evidence to dampen that hope.   Bob Johnson, writing at Daily Kos, has an excellent post dissecting the Clinton campaign’s rather Machiavellian strategy to make race “THE issue” in the campaign.  And, Pam lays bare the racism in NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s comment about “shuckin’ and jivin’,” in reference to Barack Obama’s performance at a press conference.


Of course, Clinton’s campaign gets accused of “playing the gender card”  for showing emotion in a public appearance.  Yet, there’s very little of her campaign rhetoric that seriously tries to draw attention to the overwhelming maleness of the power structure in this country, and God forbid anyone should use the word “patriarchy”  to describe how the system works.  I mean, that’s so 1983, right?


Yet, what enthusiasm I had for Obama’s candidacy suffered pretty serious damage with the whole McClurkin debacle back in November.    So, you want to be a “uniter” Sen. Obama?  How about calling up someone like Billy Porter, an out, proud, black gospel and Broadway performer to tour evangelical churches rather than someone who panders to homophobia?


What’s really so very retro- about both Hillary’s and Barack’s campaign’s are the old-school way of thinking about race / gender / sexuality as existing in separate containers, separate silos, if you will.   And that kind of thinking doesn’t work in the real world of lived experience and it doesn’t work in terms of thinking sociologically about the world.


In terms of lived experience, Jen over at Feministing, points out how thinking of “Obama = race” and “Clinton = gender” effectively excludes her experience as a black woman.     And, just to do the extended race/gender math here, Obama is still a (straight) man and Clinton is still heterosexual and white.   No one lives their lives as the embodiment of just one of these identity categories, as convenient as that might be for the mass media production of story lines.


And, in terms of thinking about these categories sociologically, the discipline of sociology has, until very recently, been part of the problem.   Traditionally, sociology as a discipline has been interested in class, race, gender and sexuality within separate and sequential silos of knowledge. The study of class and political economy can be traced to the origins of the discipline with Marx, Durkheim and Weber.  Almost as early, but rarely acknowledged, is the sociological research on race by pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois.   Much later to the sociological table was research about gender, such as Arlene Daniels (1975) and sexuality, such as Laud Humphreys (1975). The Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s for racial equality and women’s rights (and to some extent gay and lesbian rights movements) provided scholar-activists with the prerequisites for transforming the academy, and sociologists involved in these social movements worked to create new academic institutions, journals, courses and entire bodies of knowledge. Similarly, social movements of the early 1990s organized in response to the AIDS crisis, such as ACT UP and Queer Nation, galvanized the gay and lesbian social movement to recognize and be more inclusive of bisexual, transgender and queer people. Once again, scholar-activists involved in these social movements challenged the dominant discourses of sociology, in particular, feminist sociology. 


It has only been in the last twenty years that pioneers in sociology like Patricia Hill Collins, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Margaret Andersen and others have started asking difficult questions about precisely how race, class, gender and sexuality are interwoven.  Of course, some may argue that it’s necessary to pull out one dimension of oppression and domination to analyze, and that may well be necessary at strategic points in time.   However, I don’t see that kind of strategic necessity being deployed in the current political campaign.  Instead, what I see is a devolution into decades-old discredited debates about hierarchies of oppression, about “who has it worse” the blacks, or the women, or the gays?   None of this is useful or edifying, and informed citizenry should demand better from their so-called leaders.

It’s been 25 years since Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith published their groundbreaking But Some of Us are Brave, and yet it looks like the women are (still) all white and all the blacks are (still) men. Gloria Steinem wrote an Op-Ed that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times in which she argues that “the sex barrier” is “not taken as seriously as the racial one.” Then ponders this in the following passage:

Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.


I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.


…. what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.


What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.”

Curious, what do you think? Is Steinem correct here?


Of course, the underlying problem in Steinem’s logic here is the false-dichotomy of “racism” versus “sexism” which precludes thinking about the complicated ways these are interwoven, not just in the lives of women of color but in all our lives. The way the presidential politics are playing out in the media around a black (male) candidate and a white (woman) candidate fits rather seamlessly within the flawed logic that Hull, Bell-Scott and Smith pointed out years ago.