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Awesome awesome awesome awesome. From the Brooklyn Paper (wince past the headline):
I happened upon the Clintons’ June 1992 appearance on the Arsenio Hall show, and an exchange struck me:
Arsenio: Through all this controversy, have you ever found yourselves at home, fighting? Honestly?
Hillary: No.
Bill: Nuh uh.
Hillary: Not about anything important. We fight about what movie we want to see…
Arsenio: Because, you know… it’s hard to think that you never at some point said Who is Gennifer? I mean, who the hell is she? You know?
Hillary: I know who she is. I mean, I know who she is.
It struck me in light of this moment in Jodi Kantor’s piece on the Obama marriage for the Sunday Times magazine:
Two months later in the Oval Office, I asked the Obamas just how severe their strains had been. “This was sort of the eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard,” the first lady said with a little laugh. “But going into it, no one ever tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love him?’ ‘What’s the dress look like?’ ”
I asked more directly about whether their union almost came to an end.
“That’s overreading it,” the president said. “But I wouldn’t gloss over the fact that that was a tough time for us.”
Did you ever seek counseling? I asked.
The first lady looked solemnly at the president. He said: “You know, I mean, I think that it was important for us to work this through… . There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn’t — that she would be unhappy…”
“If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work… .” Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is “the last thing that we want to project,” she said. “It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”
Of course, that was candidate Clinton in the final run-up to November, but to see how readily Hillary answers the question in that clip, the difference is striking.
It reveals as much about divergent political sensibilities as it does about very different marriages. With the Obamas in mind, it’s hard not to look back to 1992 and see a missed opportunity. But if they had answered otherwise, it wouldn’t have been the Bill & Hillary we know, would it?
Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke, Hannah Rosin, and of course the Gabfest’s own Emily Bazelon launch their terrific XXfactor blog into its own women’s magazine today, DoubleX.
Shipping off for graduate school in New York means that I keep new company, which in turn has made me more aware of my particular biases as an advocate – I’m no longer passionate about feminism and feminist theory as I once was.
DoubleX seems right up my alley, though, and this video is a fantastic introduction. I like O’Rourke’s spin:
Women’s magazines seem to assume that you want to inhabit a very particular kind of identity, and one of the things we’re trying to do is explore many different kinds of identities and do it with a sense of playful inquiry rather than being doctrinaire either on the side of seriousness or on the side of frivolity.
Support them with your clicks today!
Source for the exchange blogged previously, the New Yorker ‘Out Loud’ podcast. The discussion is around Levy’s piece in this week’s New Yorker.
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. Duly noted that Hillary’s womanhood conflicts with cultural norms around female power to her 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, Morgan 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, 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 (see: Blacks and Latinos), dividing the opposition, whites maintain and even increase their supremacy as others knock each other down. It has 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.
