Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  —Shirley Chisholm, from her presidential campaign announcement speech, January 25, 19723

  Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972 and briefly took the country by storm. If you haven’t heard much about Shirley Chisholm, that’s not surprising. Black women who make history are often written out of it. But Chisholm’s campaign, and the response to it, changed American politics while also showing how our nation’s lack of collective faith in the possibility of social progress that doesn’t center white men will always hold us back.

  In late 1971 and early 1972, Black male political leaders were getting ready to put forward the first major Black candidate for the US presidency. The discussion had been in the works for years, but turmoil after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 had made settling on a candidate difficult. As leaders debated who might be the best choice to run, when he would run, and how, it began to look like the 1972 election might pass them by. As Black elites raced to come up with solutions, Shirley Chisholm stunned them all by announcing that she was running for president.

  “They were standing around, peeing on their shoes,” a Chisholm campaign aide told the New York Times shortly after Chisholm announced her candidacy, “and so, Shirley finally said to hell with it and got a campaign going.”4

  Chisholm ran for president on a platform as bold as her announcement, especially considering the time. She stood for women’s rights, ending the war in Vietnam, campaign finance reform, environmental protections, congressional term reform, the protection of individual rights against government surveillance, police reform, veterans’ benefits, minimum family income, and more.5 Her platform would likely still be considered progressive were a candidate to run on it today, because many of the issues that she discussed are still primary concerns of progressive voters. I know I would vote for her.

  While the announcement of her candidacy may have shocked the media and political elites, Shirley Chisholm’s trailblazing style was probably not much of a surprise to those who had followed her political career. She had already proven herself a competent and confident change-maker. A Quaker-raised teacher with a master’s in education who had long advocated for education reform and child welfare, Chisholm had been actively involved in local politics for over a decade. After years of working in political clubs and committees, she was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1965. Three years later, she ran for the House of Representatives and won in a landslide two-to-one victory, becoming the first Black woman elected to the US Congress.6

  In Congress, Chisholm quickly made a name for herself. She was a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam and was one of only nineteen representatives willing to hold hearings on the war. She was a founding member of the Black Congressional Caucus and the Congressional Women’s Political Caucus.7 Chisholm’s early congressional work included addressing food security and veterans’ affairs. At a time when government offices were overwhelmingly white and male (which was all the time, honestly—including today), all of Chisholm’s congressional staff were women, and half were Black women.8

  At the time of Shirley Chisholm’s campaign, people of all races and genders had been advocating for change. The unwinnable Vietnam War was increasingly unpopular, and the president, Richard Nixon, widely blamed for deepening US ground involvement in the war, was falling out of favor due to his reputation for corruption and political bullying. An unpopular war, a rise in inflation and unemployment, and the rollback of civil liberties to combat political protesters (exemplified in acts such as controversial “no-knock warrants”) left many Americans feeling ignored and abused by the government. Chisholm’s platform of progressive reform should have had wide appeal throughout the political left—especially with women, people of color, and the working and middle classes of all races.

  Shirley Chisholm herself saw the potential for broad appeal in her campaign. “I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America,” she said in her 1972 announcement speech.

  I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I’m equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political policies or fatcats or special interests. I stand here now, without endorsements from many big-name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop; I do not intend to offer you the tired clichés that have too long been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America.9

  Mainstream press responded predictably. It decided that Black candidates could only represent “Black” issues and that women candidates could only represent “women’s” issues and that therefore Chisholm, being both Black and a woman, could not in any way represent the white majority. The New York Times, the paper of Chisholm’s own state, published dozens of articles on Chisholm’s candidacy. In the majority of them, she was described as a candidate for women voters, Black voters, or both. Only four of the thirty articles about her campaign mentioned her possible appeal to white voters. Three of those four were written by a reporter of color.10

  Many of the sexist critiques and dismissals thrown at women political candidates today were hurled at Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Chisholm’s physical appearance garnered regular comment. Not only was Chisholm Black, but she was dark-skinned, broad-nosed, and she dressed like, well, a Quaker schoolteacher. Beyond her appearance there were the general dismissals by men who believed that women have no place in serious politics. Men interviewed in the Chicago Defender, a major Black newspaper in print since 1905, accused Chisholm of playing “vaginal politics.”11 One columnist at the Beaver County Times (Pennsylvania) lamented that voters were “doomed to an era of female meddling in the political process” but gave Chisholm credit for being a “realist” about her election chances.12

  On top of the sexism, Chisholm also faced some of the worst racism of the day in her presidential bid. Almost immediately, the racist tone was set when a campaign worker traveling with boxes of campaign flyers received them back from airport security with the words “Go home nigger” scrawled across them.13 The threats against Chisholm were so intense that she was offered protection by the Secret Service.14

  Sadly, as we saw with the Chicago Defender, it was not just white men who wrote off Chisholm’s presidential bid. Chisholm found out what many Black women find out when we try to lead: we are the only ones who have any faith in us. Even with a strong record of advocating for issues impacting women and the Black community, Chisholm found support from the broader feminist and Black political circles to be sorely lacking. Some believed that only a white man could defeat Nixon. Many Black political leaders decided to support front-runner George McGovern instead of Chisholm. Women also hedged their bets. Chisholm had helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968 with Gloria Steinem, and although Steinem gave Chisholm her personal endorsement, the organization itself decided to throw its weight behind McGovern for its official endorsement. It had been so long established in American politics that only white men could hold real political power that even many women and people of color had difficulty imagining a departure as far from the norm as a Black woman president. For others, resentment and personal bigotry likely also kept them from supporting Chisholm. While white feminists may have wanted to see a woman as president, and Black men may have wanted to see a Black president, some of those whose race or gender placed them higher on the sociopolitical ladder than Chisholm probably resented what they saw as the attempts of a Black woman to leapfrog over them into the nation’s highest office.

  Chisholm was, as the sexist columnist at the Beaver County Times had stated, a realist. But within that realism was a vision for radical change. Although she was running a serious campaign, Chisholm did not expect that her efforts would place her in the White House. But nor was her campaign an exercise in pride or protest. She may not have had a chance of becoming president, but there was a real chance
that her platform could appeal to enough primary voters to get her a healthy delegate count. If her delegate count was high enough, she could use those delegates as leverage with whichever leading candidate needed her delegates at the national convention. If Chisholm’s voters were necessary to secure the Democratic nomination, then her politics would be too, and she’d have an opportunity to include some of her progressive priorities in the Democratic national platform. The possibility that those who had long felt overlooked might have their needs included in the platform of the next presidential nominee offered a real opportunity for meaningful political change. That change could benefit anybody Chisholm’s platform was designed to lift up. Her strategy to use her support to pressure the Democratic candidate to adopt policies that would help women, people of color, and the poor and working classes directly countered the idea that a vote for her was unproductive—and even harmful—to progressive causes. And yet that dialogue about “harm” was what prevailed. Little serious discussion was given to the political power that could be gained by sending Shirley Chisholm to the national convention with a strong delegate count.

  In the end, Chisholm did not get the delegates she had hoped for, and McGovern’s decisive nomination victory meant that he had no reason to listen to any of her requests to make his platform more inclusive or progressive.

  Rarely do the white men that we choose over Black women end up leading us safely to the victory that we seek. McGovern did not end up being the strong white man the party thought it needed to defeat Nixon—not by a long shot. His choice of the unvetted Thomas Eagleton as his vice-presidential running mate turned out to be a disaster when Eagleton’s long and recent battles with mental health were revealed. Still, McGovern voiced strong support for his VP choice (laudable), only to withdraw that support just days later (not so laudable)—making him seem both unprepared for the presidency and like a disloyal opportunist. As the vice-presidential fiasco dominated news cycles in a society that held, then and now, deeply ableist notions that stigmatized anyone with mental health issues, McGovern’s chances at victory tanked. His humiliating defeat was the second worst in US presidential election history. Nixon remained president until resigning from office in 1974 in the midst of the Watergate scandal, still recognized as one of the United States’ biggest presidential disasters. Whereas Chisholm’s candidacy had been ridiculed and dismissed, the white male candidates ended up making history for their embarrassing levels of incompetence and corruption.

  Shirley Chisholm, on the other hand, went back to kicking ass at her job. She returned to Congress and continued to work on the issues that meant the most to her constituents. She was well loved by her peers and her constituency, retiring in 1982 as one of the top-ranking members of Congress. After retirement she went back to teaching, this time at Mount Holyoke College, where she was a popular professor of race and gender issues in politics.

  A study at Columbia University showed that people are less likely to remember the faces and words of Black women than they are to remember Black men or white women. That goes a long way toward explaining our amnesia surrounding Shirley Chisholm’s political legacy, which was quickly forgotten in much of mainstream media. When Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984, he was often touted as the first African American to run a serious campaign for president. For years, no biography of Chisholm was available in print from a mainstream publisher.

  While Chisholm may have been quickly erased from many history books, her impact on national politics for Black Americans and Black women was real. Chisolm was the first. Someone had to be, and she stepped up to show that a Black American—a Black woman—could run a serious campaign for president of the United States and could take that campaign all the way to the national convention. The spirit of Shirley Chisholm was felt when Barack Obama became the first Black president in 2008. In 2015, Shirley Chisholm was posthumously honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “When asked how she’d like to be remembered, she had an answer: ‘I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts,’” Obama said during the medal ceremony. “And I’m proud to say it: Shirley Chisholm had guts.”15

  When I think of Shirley Chisholm, I think of another quote from her about how she wanted to be remembered: “I want history to remember me not just as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a Black woman who lived in the twentieth century and dared to be herself.”16

  Chisholm dared to be her full self as a Black woman in America: a strong, talented woman who was passionate about including all Americans in the American dream. For her efforts, she received ridicule and threats, but she also helped create change that improved the lives of countless Americans, through her work in Congress, her work in education, and her example as a Black woman willing to challenge the white male status quo. We still fight for many of the reforms that marked Shirley Chisholm’s presidential platform, but perhaps we will one day honor her not with posthumous medals but with the open embrace of the next Black woman who shows up on the steps of Washington, ready to lead the country to a more inclusive and just future.

  LANI GUINIER DARES TO SUPPORT GREATER DEMOCRACY IN OUR ELECTIONS

  We already have moved a long way toward Guinier’s goal of a nation of grievance groups exploiting the coveted status as “victims” (of America’s wickedness) to claim special rights and entitlements.… People like Guinier, who affix the label “civil rights” to every bit of their political agendas, have made it an empty phrase—a classification that no longer classifies. This, too, is a consequence of a “progressive” idea: “critical race theory.”

  —George Will, 199317

  On January 29, 1993, the Clinton administration announced that it had nominated Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Guinier, forty-three at the time, was a well-respected legal expert on voting rights law and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a personal friend of Bill Clinton. Weeks before the administration announced the nomination, conservative advocacy groups had warned Clinton that if he nominated Guinier they were prepared to vigorously fight her appointment and would make specific issue of her published opinions on the Voting Rights Act. Clinton moved forward with the nomination anyway.

  This was the opportunity that Clint Bolick, a conservative legal activist, had been waiting for. The next day Bolick published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Clinton’s Quota Queens.”

  The article launched a media firestorm that would make Guinier the target of hatred, bigotry, and lies for months before it all ended with a betrayal by her onetime friend Bill Clinton.

  Bolick would later admit freely to the Washington Post that he had no idea who Guinier was and no particular grudge against her before her nomination to the Justice Department. He had been looking for a way to exact revenge on leftists, whom he blamed for dragging his friend Clarence Thomas through brutal confirmation hearings after Anita Hill came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against him.18 When he was informed that Clinton was planning to nominate an “activist” Black lawyer with controversial views on the electoral process, he created a devastating title for Guinier that would quickly poison her nomination in the opinions of both Congress and American voters.

  “Quota Queen” was a title that was impressive in its racist connotations. “Quotas,” of course, had been a major source of fear and outrage for white Americans—and especially white American men—since the inception of affirmative action programs in the 1960s. “Queen” was a reference to the highly effective—and highly racist, sexist, and classist—exploitation of the case of Linda Taylor, the woman who had used “80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers” to obtain fraudulent welfare benefits. While Taylor does appear to have been a very accomplished scam artist (and possible murderer and kidnapper—google her story sometime, it’s fascinating), her exceptional case had been used by Ronald Reag
an to paint a picture of widespread fraud being perpetrated across the welfare system in order to bilk taxpayers out of millions of dollars, all under the watch of a bleeding-heart liberal government. Reagan rode his promise of welfare reform to victory.19

  By referencing two classic, even if untrue, narratives of “minorities stealing from hardworking Americans” in one name, Bolick found a shortcut to white American anger. As a successful Black woman who held challenging political ideas, Guinier made a perfect target. Suddenly, hundreds of articles about Guinier appeared that referenced her advocacy of “racial quotas” in the voting process to give people of color—Black people in particular—power over whites.

  “Guinier, who has been a voting rights litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, seeks a society in which a minority can impose its will on the majority,” wrote Lally Weymouth at the Washington Post.20

  Democratic representative Dave McCurdy felt the need to remind people, in a bizarre analogy that he apparently said without irony, that there was no chance Guinier would be confirmed because: “Majority rule is what this country was built on. This is not South Africa.”21

  There were, of course, a few flaws with the reasoning behind all the outrage over Guinier’s nomination. “No one cared that, in fact, I did not believe in quotas,” explained Guinier in her memoir.22

  If Guinier wasn’t actually advocating for racial quotas in voting, what was she advocating for?