A Declaration of Independence

I hold these truths to be self-evident that I will not be entrapped by tacit questionnings of my gender politics in this election. I’ve already ranted like a lunatic with all the fury I had at that silly Gloria Steinem column in the NY Times But this line of argumentation persists and insists and will not be denied. Today a friend sent me this rant from the Women’s Media Center and Stanley Fish’s je ne sais pas, Feminist Manifesto?, which includes the brilliant line
"The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay."

Well cry me a motherfucking river. No seriously. The perversion of that paragraph almost has no bounds but I was floored by the hypocritical use of anti-Semitism. Was that a smart turn away from using racism as the most obvious term of analogy? Because if it was meant to be smart, it in fact was rather dumb. That said the two columns taken together triggered in me the need to stop dancing around this issues that rattles my cage so, and to engage. I don’t mean engage the arguments only as much as I mean to engage my own reasoning—find that place inside where my outrage is born. Most often and probably to more dramatic but not necessarily more productive effect, I tend to just voice my outrage like life depended on it. So here is some of what I am waging battle about.

Nobody talks about Hillary's power the same way nobody talks about white women's power whenever they feminist-monger us to death. This is an old (blood) sport and I find that engaging in it in this election is distracting from the point, for me at least, and very toxic. On an emotional level, the persistent inability to grant me the autonomy to say that I am not doing a "pick race over gender" thing when it comes to this election is profoundly dehumanizing. On an intellectual level I find it offensive. Of course, NOW, Women's Media Center, Gloria Steinem and all of Oprah's irate white female viewers can't really engage me on that point and they don't even need to do so to still call themselves feminists. And you know why? One way power is clearly made visible is by its having more options than the rest of us. Mainstream liberal America loves binary identity politics and hates those of us who complicate it--its most classic brand of feminism is no exception. But if I'm not their problem, shit they're not my problem either. And I'm talking about some, I'm not talking about genuinely powerful sisters in the struggle like these.

Alec Baldwin's blog on Huff Post has the Obama equivalent of "Beat the Bitch" t-shirts in a newspaper clipping he found. I can't even imagine what other shit is going around this country when so recently nooses were making a tour of campuses and schools... I will not be so naive as to think that because the racist vituperation that surely is out there against Obama is so foul in fact that it cannot be worn on stickers, that it is somehow more benign or less pervasive than the sexism that plagues Hillary. Just the way people say his middle name Hussein like it's the F word fully suggests to me what time it is, as if history plain and simple wasn't enough.
And yet all of the above is the sort of neither here nor there. It is precisely the sort of make-me-cringe-break-my-heart shit I am trying to avoid and ours is a society whose fundamental treatment of women of color has been to put us through this sort of a ringer time and time again. I for one would not be able to live with myself as a black woman if I engaged this with any seriousness and as they say, believed the hype. This can be a argument beyond myself: every time a certain insular brand of white liberal feminism put us to the question we would flounder if we answered on the simplistic terms presented. With them it is always about, "What is wrong with you that you find no empathy with Hillary's plight as strong, stoic, misunderstood powerful female leader!? At long last have you no decency, ma’am?”

My question whenever the Hillary gender victimization is paraded is to wonder why blatant sexism of the sort she's subjected to is always more potent to the general public than say, the daily racism against youth of color which I feel is pretty much this country's way of life and which I feel acutely as a mother of a black/Latino boy. Lets go back to the point about how Women’s Media or NOW or Steinem can't engage me: what use should I have for a feminism that doesn't understand what it is like to bear a child that's not worth the same as another child? Youth of color in this country have a crippling deficit of possibilities both real and imagined and are overwhelmingly educated in pipelines to penitentiaries or to the military--disproportionately boys like mine. Just because nobody wears "Beat the Black Kids" t-shirts don't make it okay or less hurtful and painful an experience. It doesn't make it okay to deploy a peddler of trash like BET founder Bob Johnson to trash an icon like Obama for pure, crass, political gain. Oh but look at me, playing that shitty race card, right? This is what triggers the anger.

The failure has always been in realizing that we did not cast ourselves in the periphery of peripheries as women of color (and I could say, specifically as black women)--we were cast off. It is therefore not our job to imagine a community--or a feminism--that includes us. It's their job and when I say they, I mean white feminists of the sort I'm bitching about and their surrogates not say, the cool NY Feminists for Peace and countless others who really schooled me and helped me become a woman that could find her own way. While Hillary surely has my empathy while she suffers the violence of the nasty Beat the Bitch movement, she also inflicts her own brand of violence. It makes no sense for me to entertain any argumentation about the woes of Hillary's struggles with sexism that does not critically engage her (recent) willful acquiescence to a viewer who called into the debate to scapegoat immigrants, to say nothing of the debacles of Nevada-South Carolina that we saw. I think I would be a bad mother to my son if I didn't twist my insides, complicate my sentences and daily, daily, give myself headaches, to avoide the easy answers, to find a path of good conscience, to find an independent voice that is really free to choose, and really think this shit through; we cannot afford to be bamboozled.