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Little lord baltimore, thank you for your response. I came by Salon to see if Greenwald has posted anything, and I made the horrific mistake of clicking open Walsh's latest bit of what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness," a version of truth peddled by Papa O'Reilly and his ilk.
One of the reasons why I have left Salon (I haven't really left because I come back for Greenwald, and occasionally for Farhad) was because Walsh's feminist posturing (yes, I said 'posturing')--made worse by her obdurate and narrow-minded view of gender and sex(ism)--was actually making me sick to my stomach. Why? Because I am an immigrant, a Muslim, and a woman, and I have come across women like Joan Walsh throughout my years in this country. The Joan Walshes (and her kind of women, who also happen to support Clinton) have always
a) pitied me b/c I was less fortunate (for the color of my skin; my religious background, nose ring, who the hell knows)
b) felt angry with me b/c I was not back in my homeland fighting for my women's rights
c) felt annoyed because I didn't walk around acting like a victim
d) felt incensed that I didn't show gratitude for the white women's movement that now gave me the right to walk around in mini-skirts and pick up free condoms (even though I did neither in college)
e) made sure, overtly, that I was being granted a space among her own--a space granted in the most condescending way imaginable (unasked, of course).
I remember professors like her; I remember bosses like her.
In "real" life, I avoid like the plague the Joan Walshes of this country. Why? Because reasons a) through e) are institutionalized instances of racism and sexism.
I am not alone. I have spent most of my 25+ years in this country in the company of other "immigrant" women, especially those from South Asia, Japan, China, etc. And trust me, we all avoid Joan-Walsian women. Especially when we have dated white men. Oh boy. The looks we have gotten. We get white men because we are submissive, stay thin, look 20 when we are actually 40, etc. Everything is wrong with us because we are not white women.
The bottom line is that the language used by Joan and Hillary supporters on this site has undermined and demeaned minorities (by pitting us against each other or by creating false binaries of gender and race) and have demeaned women. Calling us members of a cult, a people of lesser or no intelligence, representatives of some vague concept of elitehood or yuppieness (i.e., new code words for the Orientalist "Other") reveal Joan and her supporters to be entitled, bitter women, who cannot understand why they are not worshipped for all that their sacrifices have given us ("us" being just about everyone in this world...talk about arrogance). It is, if you will, their White Woman's Burden, their Kurtzian heart of darkness.
I support Obama. I won't bother to explain why I do and I will not try to prove that I am actually intelligent and that I actually have given serious thought as to why I support him. I will not "defend" myself because doing so will remind me of, say, prof. Ulle L. (one of many examples), a bitter--yes, I said it, bitter--white woman, who, in response to my paper on music in Indian movies, told me imperiously that I should put my college education to better use and write papers on the dismal plight of women in India. She smiled, winced, scowled, and looked smug all at the same time as she said it. How could I--how dare I--analyze Bollywood movies when Indian and Chinese girls are being aborted, even as we spoke??? She had put me in my place.
I see that smile in Joan Walsh's writing. I see that smug smile in the Hillary supporters' responses. They are putting Obama in his place (who the hell does he think he is?). They are putting me in my place (who am I to support anyone, really. My people are dying in slums. Jeez.)
And succeeding, or so they think.
Anyway, blah, blah, what I really wanted to say to Joan Walsh was, where the fuck is Greenwald and his seriously cute (and I am using cute in a Hello Kitty way...OMG, tee hee ^_^) updates?
