Letters to the Editor
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Race v Gender
The issue is not in society in general so much as in the Media. The Press seems determined to protect Barack Obama from real scrutiny and criticism. Thus we have the spectacle of White journalists telling the Black Bob Johnson and Andrew Young their comments about Obama are racist.
On the other hand the sexism of the Media is palpable. Journalists seems to have no problem denigrating Clinton's career, and motives. Much of the snideness and commentary about her revolve around issues than never would be asked about a man, White or Black.
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What about Steinem's history?
I would better appreciate Kamiya's studied approach to Steinem's New York Times op-ed if only he had mentioned that Steinem started out her career by spending the better part of a decade working for the CIA at the Independent Research Service which financed people sent to international student festivals. All of this can be googled using "Steinem" "CIA" and "namebase".
If one studies Steinem's role as "feminist" (she moved to Ms. Magazine with another Independent Research Service/CIA asset, Clay Felker) one will notice that over the years she has tended to insert herself into debates in order to divide feminism and feminists from other social movements, so it was no surprise that her entrance into this debate would be to announce that women suffer more than black men. Ultimately, she serves neither women nor minorities, only the oligarchy.
I presume that asset Steinem is still functioning for the CIA, which itself has been at its core simply a covert unit to protect America's status quo, be it oil wells overseas or political offices here at home. As long as white women and black men are arguing over who's had it worse the American public doesn't have to address real issues like falling wages, healthcare and that damned war in Iraq. But, after all, any woman squired about by the likes of Henry Kissinger doesn't really care about those things. Remember, about half of the millions of people who's deaths are Kissinger's responsibility were women.
And so it goes.
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More of the Same
More aimless, trendy, vacuous psychologizing. I expected more from Salon, but then again, why should I? You publsh Camille Paglia, after all.
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"But this is what GS was arguing... that sexism is somehow worse than racism"
Nope. Go read the article and tell me where she says that. She says no such thing.
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"it was no surprise that her entrance into this debate would be to announce that women suffer more than black men"
@ Anonymous 1:25
Please quote from the original Steinem article where she actually says that. She says no such thing.
BTW, do you think Bush was behind 9/11? Do you think a plane really hit the Pentagon?
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By the way
By the way, the recent eruptions of Charles Rangel and Richard Cohen suggest that Clinton's campaign intends to continue this race war. We've seen these tricks before but we usually have to wait until after the conventions.
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AKA Smith wants to continue her white feminist privledged status on the souls of icons like MLk
she like Hillary and Gloria have no problem making excuses and seeking parity between gender and race such an equation leaves her as a privledged white female...
AKA Smith's pandering for Edwards by dismissing Hillary's race card on the soul of MLK and Gloria's vagina whine on the face of black males is the lowest of self interest games...
Black woman have never bonded with white privledged females becuase when they have victmized by the racism of white woman and the sexism of white woman. The notion that black voters should move on and forget the race/gender cards played of late is a option only white liberals are offering .
White liberals and white feminist have zero 'street cred' both have any clout with black voters except to create a division between black woman and black woman or offer up another white suspect leader(Edwards) as our option out of the mess they have in part created..
Black voters should ignore Kamiya's deflective advice and continue to define thier own agenda and options for the selection of our next president. One thing is quite certain none of the white liberal politics nor the white feminist politics have given us a Balck president..Never..
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Too Simplistic
Kamiya's evaluation of the Iraq votes are too simple: 'Clinton votes tough, like a man, because she is a woman' etc. We've had a lot of binary decision making in the US for the last several years. Perhaps everyone has bought into this sort of mindset, but such rigid thinking is not appropriate for anything but the most simple problems. While it appears inevitable that binary thinking is going to be pervasive during the election, assuming everyone thinks that way most of the time only validates the toddler-like mentality that has been the norm for the Bush administration.
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Black voters next moves to secure this historical moment... Continue to depart from Hillary's and Edwards camps...
1. Refuse to be silent about gender and race issues within the party
2. Continue to have Hillary and Edwards focused on how to stop the major shift in Black voters of late on the heels of the race card focus by Hillary, Bill and now Bob Johnson..
3.Push Obama to untie his hands and take off his handcuffs and start campaigning as a man and not an impotent one drop black male in the southern states for fear of offending white voters..
More to come..I shall return on a deadline..
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Let's Set the Agenda
I think its important to note that a day after the candidates have presumably called a moratorium on the politics of race for the time being, Salon chooses to run a front page article on the subject. Can we not let the candidates be the ones who fall off the wagon without pushing them off by keep echo-chambering the narrative?
In general, it seems that through our own lack of diligence to our duty as citizens to inform ourselves and research our choices, we are being infected by this tendency for the memes put out by the campaigns, media et. all to become our reality. We just blindly digest it and never consider our own negligence as voters.
For example, "Ethel M" states in these letter that she isn't a Hillary Clinton supporter. Yet the narrative of "Obama the empty suit" is still influential:
"I'm not supporting Obama because I seriously can't figure out what he stands for in practicality and he certainly didn't take his senatorial duties seriously when we elected him to them. "
This is within a few days of his release of a detailed economic stimulus proposal, in an age where the Internet she is using contains a website of his with detailed policy proposals, where "www.votesmart.org" has a voting record spanning his entire career, and YouTube provides video of the debates and interviews in which he lays out very specific policy proposals.
Are we doing our homework, or are we relying on spin, 30-second snippets of speeches made in victory or defeat, and articles such as this to shape the narrative?