Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  5Dillard, A. D. (2001). Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? : Multicultural Conservativism in America. New York: New York University Press, p. 3.

  6http://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​wp-srv/​onpolitics/​elections/​ricetext080100.​htm.

  7http://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​wp-srv/​onpolitics/​elections/​ricetext080100.​htm.

  8https://​www.​nps.​gov/​articles/​sojourner-truth.​htm.

  © The Author(s) 2019

  Duchess HarrisBlack Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1_6

  6. The State of Black Women in Politics Under the First Black President

  Duchess Harris1

  (1)Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA

  Duchess Harris

  Email: harris@macalester.edu

  History was made in November 2008. Record-breaking numbers of voters lined up to vote the first African-American President into office, with Barack Obama handily beating Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and winning 52% of the electoral vote, a clear mandate for change.1 African-Americans made up 13% of the electorate, a two percent increase from the 2006 elections,2 and approximately 95% of black voters cast their ballots in favor of Obama.3 Within that 13%, black women had the highest voter turnout rate among all racial, gender, and ethnic groups.4

  As the election results were posted, the media and the president-elect himself made grand proclamations about the significance of the election, as well as what it portended for the country’s future. New York Times writer Adam Nagourney described voters’ election of Obama as “sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics,” continuing with a quote from Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago:If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer…. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.5

  It would be nice to think that Obama’s election was the positive endnote of over four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and institutionalized racism. That the promise stated by our founders, “all men are created equal,” had finally been realized. And there was a certain quintessence once a black family moved into the White House, a national monument primarily constructed with the use of slave labor. For a nation weary of its own racist history, the Obama administration was a historic marker that many, especially those on the Right, could point to and say, “See, it’s over.”

  But on closer examination, particularly with regard to the status of Black women in the political sphere, the early years of the Obama administration were a dismal replay of the mistakes made by the much-lauded Clinton (the “first black president ”) administration. Such a statement isn’t intended to dismiss President Obama’s many accomplishments. He constituted the most diverse Cabinet in history, captained the successful passage of a health care reform bill, and negotiated the military withdrawal from Iraq , all significant achievements. Nevertheless, President Obama and his administration continued to shy away from conversations about race. Many political commentators went so far as to say that America had entered a “post-racial” phase, with President Obama being the first “post-racial” President.

  Black women begged to differ. While the Obama presidency began positively, with several positions within the administration offered to Black women during the initial wave of change, there were two early incidents comparable to Bill Clinton’s betrayals of Lani Guinier and Dr. Joycelyn Elders . President Obama failed to stand up for press secretary Desiree Rogers; then, he left Shirley Sherrod (formerly of the USDA), to fend for herself in a crucial and very public incident in which his support could have changed the course of events. And remarkably, given the opportunity to appoint two Supreme Court Justices, not a single qualified Black woman moved from the nominee list to face-to-face interviews with the President in the nomination and review processes.

  These are just some examples that speak to why Obama was often a source of disappointment for Black women. Yes, there were numerous African-American women in his administration, but few of them were assigned to positions with true power. And for those chosen few, the new president seemed unwilling to defend them, even in the face of misconstrued or erroneous reports. It appeared that the price of having the first African-American President was that he could not, or would not, address issues of race beyond the vaguest allusions that construed slavery as just another immigrant story. Over the course of his administration, it became increasingly difficult to believe that change had come to America in a meaningful way, especially for Black women.

  The Obama Women

  The administration began with such promise. With the election of Obama came the appointment of the most diverse cabinet in history.6 According to Sam Ali, writing for Diversity Inc.com, 30% of Obama’s cabinet appointments were women and 39% were Black, Latino, and Asian. Among these appointments were many black women, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett (a Chicago colleague of the Obamas, who served as a top advisor on Obama’s campaign and then as co-chair of his transition team); US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice (Rice was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Clinton’s second term); social secretary Desiree Rogers (another Obama Chicago colleague); and Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection). Several of these women were the first black or biracial women in their positions: Jackson, Melody Barnes (Director of the Domestic Policy Council), Mona Sutphen (Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), and Margaret (Peggy) Hamburg (Food and Drug Administration Commissioner).7 Krissah Thompson, writing for The Washington Post, said African-American women occupied about seven of three dozen senior positions in Obama’s early administration and that the women who were new to the Washington, DC, environment found a supportive network extended by their predecessors. Those women included Donna Brazile, political strategist and the first African-American woman to direct a political campaign (Al Gore’s in 2000), and Cheryl Mills, who was the first black woman deputy White House council, during Clinton’s administration. Such a support network was—and remains—important in an arena that is still largely white and male.

  In addition to the appointment of a number of black women to his administration and staff, during his first months in office, Obama took several actions that showed solidarity and support for women. The first bill he signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for workers to sue their employers after discovering discriminatory payment practices, rather than having to report incidents within six months of the first occurrence. The bill changed the initial Supreme Court ruling of Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which denied Lilly Ledbetter the right to sue her employer of nearly 20 years after discovering men in her same position received more money than she, because she reported the discrimination more than 180 days after its first occurrence. Obama’s signing of the bill allowed workers who discover pay discrimination to sue within six months of learning of the discrimination, regardless of when it began.8

  Less than two months later, on March 11, President Obama signed an executive order to create the White House Council on Women and Girls, headed by Valerie Jarrett, with Tina Tchen, Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, serving as executive director. The Council consisted of heads of every Cabinet and Cabinet-level agency, and its purpose, according to Obama, was “to ensure that each of the agencies in which they’re charged takes into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support.”9 The White House Web site dedicated a section to the Council, where Tchen, Jarrett, and others posted regular updates about the effects of administration’s policies and actions on women. Obama declared August 26, 2010, “Wo
men’s Equality Day,” in commemoration of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote. In his proclamation, Obama reminded Americans of his administrations’ commitment to “…advancing women’s equality in all areas of our society and around the world.”10 These efforts—the bill, the Council, the proclamation—and the diversity of his administration, at least showed that Obama kept women, Black women included, in mind. But upon closer inspection, and as time passed, these acts appeared to be merely token gestures made to appease those who bought into the hope and change promised by the Obama campaign.

  In November 2009, Essence.com posted a “Power List” of 20 black women in Obama’s administration (including some left the administration). The slideshow presented photographs and blurbs of the “big names,” like Jackson, Hamburg, and Jarrett, but the 20 black “Obama women” also included members of the First Lady’s staff (Kristen Jarvis, Special Assistant for Scheduling and Travel Aide, and Dana Lewis, Special Assistant and Personal Aide); the Director of White House Events and Protocol, Micaela Fernandez; and Daniella Gibbs Leger, Director of White House Message Events.

  While the work these women did should not be underestimated, Travel Aide to the First Lady and Ambassador to the UN or Surgeon General are very different positions. If looking exclusively at Black women in the Cabinet or in Cabinet-level positions, the tally of 20 black women in the Obama administration shrank to two: Lisa P. Jackson and Susan Rice. Furthermore, in the selection of Surgeon General, the black woman who ultimately accepted that position was not the President’s first choice. Regina Benjamin was only offered the job after Obama’s first choice, CNN’s chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, turned it down. So while we saw a diverse staff, there was still a telling lack of Black women at the head of the administration and in positions of true power.

  In a September 2009 article for More.com, Teresa Wilz, senior culture editor at The Root, discussed this absence of Black women in upper management and executive positions, despite the numbers of highly qualified Black women available to serve in such capacities. Regarding the women selected to work in Obama’s Cabinet and the White House, Wilz said, “Let me be clear: Not many individuals, black, white, brown or other, achieve that level of power, whether at the White House or at Xerox. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of us, highly qualified and highly educated, available to be tapped.”11 Of the associate and bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students, women earn approximately two-thirds, according to the National Center for Education Statistics,12 and between 1996 and 2007, the number of black women getting master’s degrees grew by 130%, while white women’s increase was only 38%.13

  Krissah Thompson also pointed out the shortage of black women in visible positions of power, citing the Bureau of Labor’s statistic that more than 2.6 million black women were in management and professional jobs, yet “women and minorities still lack representation in proportion to their numbers on the federal level. In Congress, only 90 members are women, 42 are African-American, 28 are Latino and nine are Asian.”14 And, from Wilz again:According to Catalyst, a New York–based research firm that studies women in business, African-American women hold only five percent of all managerial, professional and related positions; white women hold 41 percent. Women of color are similarly scarce on corporate boards. And until Ursula Burns was tapped… to head Xerox, there were no black female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.15

  Wilz pointed to the long-held belief in the Black community that education was the only way to excel as the reason behind this pool of highly educated and qualified Black women. She blamed their underrepresentation in upper-level positions both on a lack of enforcement of company diversity policies, and on quotas : “…whenever one of us does manage to break through, her very presence may provide an excuse for keeping other black women out,” she wrote.16 Frequently, once a company hires one Black woman, the feeling is that one is enough, and there is no need to hire another.

  Finally, she wrote that Black women are rarely hired for or encouraged to pursue positions that put them on an executive track, like sales or profit-related positions. Instead, companies hire them into static positions like community outreach or training jobs. Looking to the Obama administration, we saw this trend perpetuated with the appointment of black women to primarily non-Cabinet-level positions. And for the few appointed to positions of power, when it came time to defend these Black women, the efforts made by the Obama administration were too little (in the case of Desiree Rogers, the former social secretary), or too late (for Shirley Sherrod).

  Tellingly, the administration did stand up for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, despite concerns regarding her own lack of diversity in hiring practices and apparent racial insensitivity.

  Appointing Kagan, Overlooking Black Women

  Early in his administration, President Obama had the opportunity to appoint two justices to the Supreme Court, replacing Justices David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. In May 2009, he selected Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic woman who Clinton appointed to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, to take the place of Souter. In May 2010, he announced Elena Kagan, Solicitor General and former Harvard Law School dean, as his choice to replace Stevens. While the appointment of the first Hispanic to the court was a notable and historic accomplishment toward diversifying the Court, it was disappointing that not a single qualified Black woman made it past the initial nominee list. This oversight on Obama’s part emphasized Wilz’s point on the lack of Black women in upper-level positions, despite the number of qualified candidates, as did Kagan’s own hiring history while dean at Harvard Law School between 2003 and 2009.

  Prior to the announcement of Kagan’s nomination, civil rights groups, bloggers, and Black female attorneys expressed concern about both Kagan’s hiring record and her failure to take action against racism within the law school. In a Salon.com piece, four law professors from different schools examined Kagan’s record, praising her for the number of faculty members she hired. Yet,[o]f these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women…. When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, four-out-of-every five hires to its faculty were white men. She did not hire a single African American, Latino, or Native American tenured or tenure track academic law professor. She hired 25 men, all of whom were white, and seven women, six of whom were white and one Asian American. Just 3 percent of her hires were non-white….17

  After Duke University’s Guy-Uriel Charles, one of the Salon.com authors, wrote a blog post expressing the group’s concern, the White House released talking points in Kagan’s defense. As indicated in the professors’ essay, the White House defense did not contest the numbers the essay cites. Instead, it presented the number of visiting professor offers Kagan made, with percentages of how many of these offers were made to minorities and women. Numbers on tenure-track offers made to minorities and women were not included. The authors also pointed out that at Yale Law School, the dean (who served at approximately the same time as Kagan, from 2004 to 2009), while hiring only 10 professors compared to Kagan’s 32, “…still managed to hire nearly as many women (five of 10 at 50%), and just as many minorities (one of 10 at 10%) as Dean Kagan.”18

  In addition to the clear lack of diversity in Kagan’s hiring record, there was criticism of Kagan’s reaction to a Harvard Law School parody, a skit performed by students and professors in which they “roast” other students. In a guest post on the blog Feministe, Diane Lucas, a Harvard graduate and now an attorney in New York, wrote about the parody that took place while she was at the school in 2006 during the time Kagan was dean. She described how the parody portrayed at least four women of color in an offensive manner:One of my friends who is a very articulate, intelligent, black woman, was made to sound like a Shanaynay-like character from the show, Martin (I love Shanaynay — who doesn’t? But, really?!). Another woman, who is Cuban-American was depicted as having very large breasts, which were actually balloons that were viol
ently popped during the play. They portrayed another woman, who is Dominican-American and speaks fluent English, as barely speaking a word of English. Another black woman was depicted as being sexually promiscuous with classmates and professors.19

  Lucas says when students brought their concerns to Kagan, she refused to make a statement or issue an apology for the play. After pressure from students, two other professors organized a meeting to discuss the parody, but the school’s effort to create a conversation on race ended there, despite students asking Kagan to implement diversity sessions. Kagan’s disregard for legitimate concerns about racism in her school clearly demonstrated a lack of sensitivity and awareness to the experience of minority women, and her inability to find an African-American professor for tenure (but 25 white men) during her time at Harvard further suggested an indifference to the creation of any real diversity in the faculty or the experience of Harvard Law students.

  When it became apparent that Obama would move forward with Kagan’s nomination, many parties protested. They questioned not only Kagan’s diversity record, but also the dearth of Black women considered for the nomination. On May 9, 2010, 28 women from the Black Women’s Roundtable network of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) sent President Obama a letter, voicing their unease regarding Kagan’s possible nomination. In the letter, they reminded the president of the role African-American women played in the 2008 election and stated their concern over Kagan’s “…lack of a clearly identifiable record on the protection of our nation’s civil rights laws.”20 The letter continued:Especially disconcerting is the perceived lack of real consideration of any of the extremely qualified African American women as potential nominees. While we were very pleased to witness the placement of the Honorable Leah Ward Sears and Judge Ann Claire Williams on the reported lists of potential nominees, there did not appear to be any serious consideration of their candidacy, once again…. Mr. President, the nominations and appointments you make today will be far-reaching, particularly for the Supreme Court. As we continue to promote the legacy of our late founding leader and Co-Convener, Dr. Dorothy I. Height , we will always seek to highlight the concerns of Black women, our families and our communities. Thus, as Dr. Height stated in our previous meeting with your Administration, we believe it is time for African American women to be represented in all sectors of government – including the Supreme Court of the United States, which in its 221 year history has not had a Black woman nominated to serve on our highest court in the land.21