And when I say Hillary, I really mean to include what seems to be an increasing number of Second Wave feminists advocating on her behalf: first Gloria Steinem got me worked up with her Op-Ed in the Times a month ago, detailing the case for how Women Have it Harder Than Blacks.

I really started shouting at the radio yesterday, however, when Women’s Media Center founder Robin Morgan made the similar but exponentially more outrageous implication on Day to Day that while Barack, as a man, moves through this patriarchal political system with ease, Hillary is pathologically harassed. To wit,

When a sexist idiot screamed at Hillary, “Iron my shirt!” it was considered amusing, there was a lot of chuckling on all the airwaves. If a racist idiot had shouted, “Shine my shoes!” at Barack Obama, it would have inspired pages of newsprint and hours of airtime, analyzing what would in fact have been our national dishonor. [The nutcracker made to look like Clinton] is being sold in airports. If it were a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged, and yet people think this is amusing.

The essay discussed in this piece, ‘Goodbye to All That (#2),’ is here. A few things: I agree that much of this is pathological “woman-hating,” in Morgan’s word. And of course Hillary’s womanhood conflicts with societal norms of masculinity and femininity and puts her at great disadvantage.

Yet Morgan’s sycophantic outrage at Hillary’s treatment completely silences racist elements of national discourse around Barack. In fact, Morgan does something worse: she acknowledges and dismisses the contemporary perniciousness of racism altogether! By caricaturing the actual operation of racism with references to “extreme far ultra-right racists” and blackface figurines at airports, she reinforces her own great white fantasy of racism’s being restricted to a small fringe of (racialized) poor whites in trailer parks. In what strikes me as her callow, fearful, threatened finger-pointing of “if this were about the Jews!” and “if this were Racists!” she does great disservice to her movement (well, it’s my movement, too, if I’m allowed that) but causes much greater harm to people of color - not only Blacks, but all communities for whom lived experience tells them that racism is not a distant memory, restricted to “far ultra-right racists,” but a daily, hourly act performed on their bodies by whites and others in power. Morgan denies all that to her ends.

Of course, that’s exactly what white male patriarchy likes to see! After all, if we can keep them all fighting amongst themselves (like Blacks and Latinos), dividing the opposition, we maintain and even increase our supremacy as they knock each other down. It’s been happening in this country for centuries (see, The Wages of Whiteness) and continues to be a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of white power.

Enter Steinem and Morgan.

Finally, there is a whole other element to this discourse which I have hardly touched on in my focus on Morgan’s article but is pushed to the fore in Steinem’s ludicrous false premise of a thought experiment: “What if Barack were a black woman?”

The answer, you might guess, is “By gum, he’d have it harder! See?” In this first clip (of 4) below from an episode of Democracy Now, the crazy-impressive Melissa Harris Lacewell similarly calls out Steinem on the invisibilization of racism’s death grip on all black bodies. Where Morgan wishes to ignore race altogether, here Lacewell systematically picks apart Steinem’s more nuanced assertion that sexism is worse than racism. Things get going around 2:00 if you’re in a hurry (but I don’t think you’d be here if you were):

Lacewell makes several points I really like in that clip and the following ones, but I think I’ve said my piece - you can click through for more interesting conversation (well, Steinem basically evades engaging with Lacewell, so I’m not sure it could exactly be called a conversation).

Do I have a pithy conclusion? I don’t know, this shit tires me out. To see white woman feminists I respect divide the fight for equity and - I feel - actively, perniciously, and knowingly step upon the fight of others for their own gain and self-satisfaction makes me sick and, as Harris Lacewell says, represents the very worst of the women’s movement.

More directly: when white people use their location of power not just to grab more, but to single out historically oppressed communities as a point of leverage to that power, it is racism - plain and simple. Even when those white racists are women carrying the mantle of ‘feminism.’

No feminism I accept sees it necessary to harm others’ fight for equity for self-gain.