by Ishmael Reed
Ms. Willard’s point of view is echoed by Susan Brownmiller’s implying that Emmett Till got what he deserved, and the rush to judgment on the part of New York feminists whose pressure helped to convict the black and Hispanic kids accused of raping a stockbroker in Central Park. After DNA proved their innocence—the police promised them if they confessed, they could go home—a Village Voice reporter asked the response of these feminists to this news; only Susan Brownmiller responded. She said that regardless of the scientific evidence, she still believed that the children, who spent their youth in jail on the basis of the hysteria generated by Donald Trump, the press, and leading New York feminists, were guilty.
Feminist hero, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, offended Frederick Douglass—an abolitionist woman attempted to prevent his daughter from gaining entrance to a girls’ school—when she referred to black men as “sambos.” She was an unabashed white supremacist. She said in 1867, “[w]ith the black man we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life.”
Steinem should read Race, Rape, and Lynching by Sandra Gunning, and Angela Davis’s excellent Women, Culture, & Politics, which includes a probing examination of racism in the suffragette movement. The Times allowed only one black feminist to weigh in on Ms. Steinem’s comments about Barack Obama, and how he appealed to white men because they perceive black males as more “masculine” than they, an offensive stereotype, and one that insults the intelligence of white men, and a comment which, with hope, doesn’t reflect the depth of “progressive” women’s thought.
Do you think that the Times would offer Steinem critics like Toni Morrison Op-Ed space to rebut her? Don’t count on it. The criticism of white feminism by black women has been repressed for over one hundred years (See: Black Women Abolitionists, A Study In Activism, 1828-1860, by Shirley J. Yee).
I asked Jill Nelson, author of Finding Martha’s Vineyard, Volunteer Slavery and Sexual Healing, how she felt about Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical black woman to make a point against Obama. She wrote:
I was offended and frankly, surprised, by Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical Black woman in her essay supporting Hillary Clinton. I would have liked to think that after all these years struggling in the feminist vineyards, Black women have become more than a hypothetical to be used when white women want to make a point, and a weak one at that, on our backs. It’s a device, a distraction, and disingenuous, and fails to hold Hillary Clinton—or for that matter, Barack Obama and the rest of the (male) candidates—responsible for their politics.
On the second day of a convention held at Seneca Falls in 1848, white suffragettes sought to prevent black abolitionist Sojourner Truth from speaking. The scene was described by Frances Dana Gage in Ms. Davis’s book:
“Don’t let her speak!” gasped half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announced “Sojourner Truth,” and begged the audience to keep silence for a few moments.
Many minority feminists, Asian-American, Hispanic, Native-American and African-American, contend that white middle and upper class feminists’ insensitivity to the views and issues deemed important to them persists to this day.
Their proof might be Ms. Steinem’s lack of concern about how Mrs. Clinton’s war votes affect the lives of thousands of women and girls—her brown sisters—in Iraq and Iran. One hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi people have been killed since the American occupation was ordered by patriarchs in Washington, DC, patriarchs who were responsible for the Welfare Reform Act.
With this in mind, I recently asked Robin Morgan, who was editor of Ms. magazine, where I was called the worst misogynist in America, whether she still held those views. I replied to that accusation that I should be accorded the same respect given to the men who ran the magazine at the time, Lang Communications. The accusation was made by Barbara Smith, a black feminist whom I debated on television and whose bitter comments about the white feminist movement make mine seem timid. She also criticizes the white gay and lesbian movements. She said that when she tried to join the gay and lesbian march on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. That they weren’t interested in black issues. That they wanted to mainstream. About me, she wrote in The New Republic magazine, edited by Marty Peretz, a man who once said that black women were “culturally deficient,” that my black women characters weren’t positive enough. For running afoul of this feminist “blueprint” for writing that she tried to lay on me, her views and those like hers were repudiated by Joyce Joyce, a black critic who deviates from the party line.
I also reminded Ms. Morgan that the Ms. editorial staff reflected the old plantation model, even though its founder, Gloria Steinem, said that she’s concerned about the progress of black women. White feminists had the juicy editorial Big House positions, while women of color were the editorial kitchen help as contributing editors. A few months later, Ms. Morgan resigned as editor and was replaced by a black woman, but not before taking some potshots, not at misogynists belonging to her ethnic group, whose abuse of women has been a guarded secret according to feminists belonging to that group, but at Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas (incidentally, when the white women who ran for office as a result of Ms. Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas arrived in Congress, they voted with the men).
Robin Morgan had her secretary respond to my recent letter and from the letter I gather that Ms. Morgan hasn’t changed her mind. I’m a worse misogynist than the men in the Pentagon, and those who passed Clinton’s welfare reform bill. I guess that bell hooks, another black feminist, who won’t be invited by the men who run the Times to respond to Ms. Steinem, was right when she wrote in her book, Outlaw Culture, that white feminists are harder on black men than white men, but like other black feminists, from the nineteenth century to the present day, her point has been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when they view feminism, and just about every other subject, all they can see is white! (Except when it’s crime, athletics, and having babies out of wedlock!)
Feminists are harder on Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison (yes, him too), and even James Baldwin, that gentle soul, than on Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Harder on Barack Obama than on Bill Clinton, to whom Gloria Steinem, a harsh critic of Clarence Thomas, gave a free pass when he was charged with sexual indiscretions by various women. She said that Bubba was O.K. because when he placed Kathleen Wiley’s hand on his penis and she said no, he withdrew it. That when other women said no, he also halted his sexual advances. A letter writer to the Times challenged Ms. Steinem’s double standard for white and black men:
Bob Herbert (column, January 29) writes that Gloria Steinem said that even though Paula Jones has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, Ms. Jones has not claimed that the president had forced himself on her. “He takes no for an answer,” Ms. Steinem intones.
Lest we forget, Anita Hill said no to Clarence Thomas. And her accusations nearly derailed his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Patricia Schroeder, the former Congresswoman, did not claim that “somebody may be overstating the case” when Ms. Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual misconduct, but Ms. Schroeder claims that now in Mr. Herbert’s column. Again the left inadvertently exposes its sliding scale of moral indignation.
RAYMOND BATZ
San Rafael, California, January 29, 1998
Black feminists also charge that white feminists deserted them during the fight against Proposition 209, which ended racial and gender hiring in the state of California, even though affirmative action has benefited white women the most!
They charge that white women were missing in action during the fight against the welfare reform bill. It seems that the cheapest form of solidarity they can express toward their minority sisters is to join in on the attack on Mike Tyson,
Kobe Bryant, and Clarence Thomas and Mr. _______, a character in The Color Purple, who, for them, represents all black men.
Though Steinem accuses men of being mean to Mrs. Clinton, she expressed no outrage about surrogate Bill Shaheen painting Obama as drug dealer, or the innuendo promoted by Senator Bob Kerrey. Senator Bob Kerrey, who, apparently having made up with the Clintons, was recruited to associate Obama with what the right refers to as “Islamo fascists.”
He said, “His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and his father was a Muslim and his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.” He added that Obama “spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.”
You’d think that the New School of Social Research would have fired Kerrey when he admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Now this.
All of these attacks must be what Hillary Clinton meant when she warned her opponents “now the fun begins.”
One of the charges made by some black feminists is that white women middle-class movement figures embezzle their oppression. In The New York Times, Gloria Steinem’s using a hypothetical black woman to do a house cleaning on Obama was what these women must have had in mind. (Philip Roth does the same thing; uses his black maid characters to denounce black history and black studies: “Missa Roth, dese Black Studies ain’t doin’ nothin’ but worrying folks. Whew!”) Her using a black woman as a prop must have annoyed Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison who made blistering comments about Ms. Steinem during an interview conducted by novelist Cecil Brown and carried in the University of Massachusetts Review, where Ms. Morrison made the harshest comments about Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple to date, even harsher than those made by black feminist Professor Trudier Harris, who, as a result of her essay, published in African American Review, faced such a hostile backlash from white feminist scholars that she stopped commenting about the novel, which has become a sacred text among white feminists, who are silent about how women are treated among their ethnic groups. Steinem said that had Obama been a black woman, he would not have made as much progress as a presidential candidate and added that white men would prefer voting for a black man over a white woman because they perceived black men as being more masculine than they.
I wrote a response to the Times on January 8, 2008:
Dear Times,
Even Dr. Phil would probably snicker at the level of pop psychology employed by Gloria Steinem to explain the attraction of many voters to Senator Barack Obama. For example, she believes that the preference for a black male candidate over a white woman by some white males is based upon their admiration for the black male’s “masculine” superiority. “Masculine superiority?” All four of the current heavyweight champions are white as well as last year’s MVPs of the NBA were white men.
Moreover, Ms. Steinem is a long time critic of black men as a group. She said that the book, The Color Purple, in which one black man commits incest, told “the truth” about black men, the kind of collective blame that’s been used against her ethnic group since the time of the Romans.
I also made a reference to her abandonment of a tearful Shirley Chisholm’s presidential candidacy after supporting it. If she’s so concerned about the political fate of a black woman’s presidential bid, why did she desert Ms. Chisholm in favor of the man?
She also said “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.” The fact that when white women received the vote they experienced little of the violence that accompanied black men being awarded the right to vote, fifty years earlier, suggests that some groups, black men, black women, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians, face more restrictions than white women, whose college enrollment is far higher even than that of white men. (Steinem said that women are never “front runners.” How many white women senators are there? How many black?)
Cecil Brown, author of the bestselling Hey, Dude Where’s My Black Studies Department, wrote:
I grew up in North Carolina, where I often heard my mother and my aunts speak of the racism of white women against them. Their experience is that of millions of black women who were and are discriminated by white women.
In the Bay Area, where I now live, a professor friend told me, recently, that a white female student told him that she found the use of the expression, “white woman” in his lectures offensive, and asked that he not use it.
Like this student, Ms. Steinem avoids the phrase “white woman,” because it historicizes their gender. While she lectures to us about black men, white men, and black women, she can only think of her white women as women.
“It’s time to take pride in breaking all the barriers,” Ms. Steinem ends her remarks. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting [Hillary] because she’ll be a great president and because she is a woman.” But do we dare say that we should support her because she is a white woman?
Our letters were not published, but one written by a black feminist exposed the divide between black and white feminists, one that is rarely aired since white feminists have more access to the media than black ones. White feminists, in their books, report, falsely, a solidarity between them and black women. Among letter writer Karin Kimbrough’s comments:
As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics.
She cites as evidence that “black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.” So what?
My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.
Camille Paglia also weighed in:
Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem’s fawning, gaseous New York Times Op-Ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the twenty-first century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.
An example of the problems that Barack faces as a result of there being few blacks having jobs in the old media occurred during an appearance by a white woman reporter on The Washington Journal (January 14, 2008). So pro-Hillary was this reporter, Beth Fouhy, that one woman called and said that she thought that this woman was a Hillary spokesperson, before noticing that she was from the Associated Press. Obviously the media have been infiltrated by Steinem’s legions.
Scathing comments about the white feminist movement by black feminists are included in The Feminist Memoir Project, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow. Times person Maureen Dowd also challenged Steinem, who is hard on black guys, but once confessed in the Times that she becomes embarrassed when a male of her ethnic group becomes involved in a scandal. Challenging Steinem’s argument that “she is supporting Hillary [because] she had no ‘masculinity to prove,’” Dowd wrote, “Empirically speaking, her masculinity is precisely what Hillary has been out to prove in her bid for the White House. What else was voting to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backing the White House’s bellicosity on Iran but proving her masculinity.”
Desperate, when the campaign moved into New Hampshire, the Clintons launched the brass knuckles attack on Obama that commentator William Bennett predicted would happen after Mrs. Clinton was upset in Iowa.
His voice shaking with rage, a livid Bill Clinton said that Obama’s positions on the war in Iraq were “a fairy tale,” and that nominating Obama was “a roll of the dice.”
/> Writing in The Washington Post on January 13, 2008, Marjorie Valbrun, voiced the reaction of many blacks to Clinton’s performance:
If anyone needed any proof that the mean Clinton machine is alive and well in this campaign, all they had to do was watch Bill Clinton deliver his angry diatribe against Obama in New Hampshire last week just before the primary. His red-faced anger was clear and a little scary, too. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it. His tone was contemptuous of his wife’s main challenger, whom he described as a political neophyte who for some reason was being granted a honeymoon with the national media.
This is the same Bill Clinton who took on Sister Souljah, a young and, at the time, controversial black rapper who made incendiary racial remarks after the Los Angeles race riots. Many people accused Clinton of using the rapper, and an appearance before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, as an opportunity to distance himself from Jackson, the ultimate race man. The move helped reinforce his white moderate bona fides.
On January 13, when Tim Russert interrogated Mrs. Clinton as to whether the attacks on Obama by her, her husband, and her surrogates were racist, she filibustered and dismissed such concerns as the one made by Ms. Valbrun and other blacks in a patronizing manner. She falsely accused Obama of comparing himself with JFK and MLK. He didn’t. He invoked their names to make a point about hope. How some hopes, considered false by cynics, can be fulfilled.
So offended by what he considered a black man getting “cocky” with his wife, Clinton blew his top. “Cocky” was the word that nuns-educated Bob Herbert used to admonish Obama. Herbert, one of three blacks whom the Times views as unlikely to alienate their readership, pointed to an exchange between Obama and Mrs. Clinton. When Mrs. Clinton, during a debate, commented that voters found Obama more “likeable” than Mrs. Clinton, Obama said that Mrs. Clinton was “likeable enough.” Obama’s reply prompted an Antebellum white man, Karl Rove, to refer to Obama as “a smarmy, prissy little guy taking a slap at her.” He said that this exchange threw the primary victory to Mrs. Clinton. Notwithstanding the irony of Karl Rove referring to someone as “smarmy,” if a reply as mild and innocuous as Obama’s leads to his being flogged by Clinton and reprimanded by one of the Establishment’s black tokens, Obama is going to be restricted in his ability to take on the political brawlers and hit persons aligned with Clinton, like Don Imus’s buddy, James Carville, a man who sneers at people who live in trailer parks, and who practices a no-holds-barred political strategy.