i had one of the worst sleeps in history, yet i'm perfectly content. every 20 minutes or so i woke myself up asking, "is it true? is it really true?" happily, over and over i could put myself back to sleep with a comforting yes: yes, Barack Obama has been elected president of the united states.
i've been caught off guard by how much this election means to me, what it means, symbolically, for the US to elect a black president -- but also an urban president, a liberal, a cosmopolitan. the footage from kenya last night was meaningful not only because it was east africa, which always stirs me, but because for the first time in living memory, maybe the first time in history, the white house has lived connections to another part of the world. it makes it that much more difficult for america to recede into an isolationist exceptionalism.
and then there's the fact that he's african american. like everybody, i've known this all year. when i taught the james baldwin story "sonny's blues" to my first-year students earlier this semester, we ran through the history of slavery, the invention of the cotton gin, the urbanization of african americans in the north, the harlem renaissance, and the nascent civil rights movement. we watched billie holiday sing "strange fruit" (yeah: it's on youtube), and i ended the discussion by saying, "and that's why it's a big deal that there's an african american running for president."
in spite of all this consciousness, there was something, i don't know, different and shocking and inescapable and wonderful about seeing barack and michelle obama with their daughters on stage in grant park chicago last night, knowing that all four of them -- the whole family -- will be moving to the white house this winter. throughout the campaign, something, i suspect it's tokenism, though it's also the fact of cosmopolitanism and the fact of liberalism and the fact of complexity, something made it possible, perhaps even necessary, to see past the fact of barack's blackness (to invoke fanon). but the whole damn family is black, and they're all part of the big show now, all four of 'em, and it's michelle who's going to be walking the razorline of smart, stylish, self-possessed and supportive, and there will be black girls (black girls!) playing in the back yard of 1600 pennsylvania. obama's election is a Big Deal.
so i'm happy today. i'm happy for my former student, linda, who teaches in small-town arkansas. she writes, "There are just no words... I think there were scenes across the South and the nation akin to that which Maya Angelou describes when Joe Louis won the title of Heavyweight Champion of the world. ... I can't wait to get to school this morning. I can't wait to see Dr. Mallory, my colleague who taught in segregated schools and was a student at SAU when blacks were not allowed anywhere on campus outside the classroom. I can't wait to see my black students."
i'm happy for my friends al and sue in seattle, sue in particular being a lifelong democrat.
i'm happy for jesse jackson, whose "keep hope alive!" speech i was fortunate enough to hear in california in the fall of 1988. that's 20 years ago now, and 20 years after MLK's murder -- though at the time the '60s felt ancient, while the '80s feel like yesterday to me now. there is a world of learning there.
i'm happy for deidre and hector, their son eric and the baby they'll have in february. they're new yorkers, and maybe new yorkers don't have to feel so freakishly out of kilter with the country they're a part of, the country they were repatriated into after 9/11. i'm happy for new york.
i'm happy for all three of marcia and leerom's kids, who will grow up with barack obama as their president, and i'm happy for marcia, who protested nuclear arms at the original ground zero in nevada in the 70s and 80s, and i'm happy for lee and the progressive synagogue the family's part of.
i'm relieved and happy and relieved and -- did i say relieved? -- for the whole world this morning.
there's no one to feel unhappy for. during mccain's concession speech, which i agree was very gracious, i realized that in a profound sense he never had much to lose during this election. he's old, he's white, he's conservative, he's male -- the world remains his oyster. he can live the rest of his life off the "i ran against barack obama" stories if he wants to.
right now, though i hasten to add that i'm high on hope and sleeplessness, i don't even feel terribly unhappy about the queers who can't marry. there is work to be done, no doubt, and not least with conservative african americans who, if polls can be believed, voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bans on gay marriage.
but this morning hope is tangible, and i want to remember that "hope" is for us too. not just americans, not just african americans, not just democrats or centrists, but all of us who live for progressive change. there is plenty to despair about in the world, especially over the last 7 years, and there's always room for better. facebook status updates are being qualified already, from last night's jubilation to a more measured tone that notes the disappointments of prop 8.
i get it. but as for me, i'm not going to change my update yet. hope is an unknown territory, and i'm going to take the risk of living there a while.
Showing posts with label US election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US election. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
Not hot for hillary
i've defended hillary rodham clinton pretty vociferously through this whole campaign (and longer), but i think i have to let her go.
oh, it's not her. it's me. and, yes, there is another woman -- two of them, actually. one is my generous friend malinda, who always makes me think. the other is alice walker, whose open letter is making the rounds.
as with any break-up, there's sadness, regret, and lots of unfulfilled dreams. i wanted her to get the presidency because she's worked hard for it. moreover, she's put up with a lot of sexist crap: the 1992 chocolate chip cookie challenge, larry king, the "monster" characterizations. i want her to have some payoff for staying with bill through the lewinsky affair. even now it's painful to talk about that period -- i so desperately wanted her to leave bill for us. i want the country that defeated the ERA to have to wake up each and every day to the fact that there's a woman in charge. i want hillary to have had better timing.
and by "hillary," i mean us. and by "us" i mean ... well, i want to mean all women, but i have to admit that there's a powerful identification between hillary rodham clinton and second-wave white feminists, an identification to which i am not immune. i want there to be a woman in charge of the USA so that it is conceivable in this country -- canada, for those or you reading from beyond -- that a woman could land an endowed professorship, become a premier, run major national corporations, and so on. i think this identification is the reason i've supported her for so long, excused her growing conservatism and her recourse to white femininity (as in her use of "hillary" and "clinton"). to support hillary has been to support the feminist choice.
but the thing is, and i still choke a little here, my fingers pause over the keys as i wonder anew about what i'm going to write: hillary doesn't represent my feminism. the fact that she's represented me (white, middle-aged, professional) has perhaps blinded me to the fact that her feminism is not my feminism. the feminism i espouse isn't just about making the world better for white, middle-aged, professional women and the halliburtons of the world, while supporting the war in iraq. it's about working from below, working to understand the vicious connections between transphobia and misogyny, working to ensure that homeless women and men, women of colour, immigrants, the disabled and the uninsured (to choose just a few thorny examples) have better lives. it's a feminism that's about working for the people who come after you and not the folks upstairs. to put this in analytical terms, it's a feminism that works not from gender as a foundational category, but at the interstices of gender -- genders, i should say -- and race, class, nation, sexuality, and so on. it's the hardest work, and the most exhausting.
virtually everyone agrees that hillary clinton has grown more conservative over the years. at what point have you changed so much that you're not recognizable? is senator clinton the same person as HRC at the beijing conference? is this the same person who championed real health care reform in the US in 1992, and who was so punished for it? hillary, i wanted us to grow together, but i'm afraid we've grown apart. i hardly recognize you these days.
and here come the really hard questions, the ones i don't know how to think my way out of. if hillary rodham clinton's conservatism is a function of her experience, a consequence of the constant, necessary compromise that characterizes public life, then why should she take the fall for the circumstances she did not invent but has to navigate? my psyche is littered with horrifying examples of women who have let me down this way: hillary rodham clinton, anne mclellan (who supported rendition), shirley neuman (nicknamed 'shotgun shirley' when she got to u-toronto). what price success? who are the counter-models? and what assurances are there that i won't go the same way? i am already far less radical than i was a decade ago -- more efficient, more effective, and even more courageous, but less bold, less imaginative, and less patient. what yardstick can you use to measure "progress" within the moving field of a human lifetime?
i don't know how to answer these questions, but i'm pretty sure they can't be answered through figure-heading. the US election won't solve them. i feel like a Bad Feminist saying this -- or is this just my own growing conservatism coming out? -- but this US presidential election is too important to be framed as a gender-versus-race issue. and incidentally, that framing is something that robin morgan's revised goodbye to all that does. the first part of that missive shamefully pretends that racism is over while sexism is alive and well. cheap shots, robin. the beginning of alice walker's epistle is similarly manipulative, but i'm with her on the importance of "alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth" -- whatever that means.
what the framing of the US election as gender vs race shows to me is that we still have a long way to go in figuring out how to address sticky old-fashioned questions like role models, essentialism (barack obama is black, and that means something, hillary rodham clinton is a woman, and that means something), solidarity, and the inter-imbrication of race and gender with other social justice issues.
sticking with hillary is not the way to get there.
oh, it's not her. it's me. and, yes, there is another woman -- two of them, actually. one is my generous friend malinda, who always makes me think. the other is alice walker, whose open letter is making the rounds.
as with any break-up, there's sadness, regret, and lots of unfulfilled dreams. i wanted her to get the presidency because she's worked hard for it. moreover, she's put up with a lot of sexist crap: the 1992 chocolate chip cookie challenge, larry king, the "monster" characterizations. i want her to have some payoff for staying with bill through the lewinsky affair. even now it's painful to talk about that period -- i so desperately wanted her to leave bill for us. i want the country that defeated the ERA to have to wake up each and every day to the fact that there's a woman in charge. i want hillary to have had better timing.
and by "hillary," i mean us. and by "us" i mean ... well, i want to mean all women, but i have to admit that there's a powerful identification between hillary rodham clinton and second-wave white feminists, an identification to which i am not immune. i want there to be a woman in charge of the USA so that it is conceivable in this country -- canada, for those or you reading from beyond -- that a woman could land an endowed professorship, become a premier, run major national corporations, and so on. i think this identification is the reason i've supported her for so long, excused her growing conservatism and her recourse to white femininity (as in her use of "hillary" and "clinton"). to support hillary has been to support the feminist choice.
but the thing is, and i still choke a little here, my fingers pause over the keys as i wonder anew about what i'm going to write: hillary doesn't represent my feminism. the fact that she's represented me (white, middle-aged, professional) has perhaps blinded me to the fact that her feminism is not my feminism. the feminism i espouse isn't just about making the world better for white, middle-aged, professional women and the halliburtons of the world, while supporting the war in iraq. it's about working from below, working to understand the vicious connections between transphobia and misogyny, working to ensure that homeless women and men, women of colour, immigrants, the disabled and the uninsured (to choose just a few thorny examples) have better lives. it's a feminism that's about working for the people who come after you and not the folks upstairs. to put this in analytical terms, it's a feminism that works not from gender as a foundational category, but at the interstices of gender -- genders, i should say -- and race, class, nation, sexuality, and so on. it's the hardest work, and the most exhausting.
virtually everyone agrees that hillary clinton has grown more conservative over the years. at what point have you changed so much that you're not recognizable? is senator clinton the same person as HRC at the beijing conference? is this the same person who championed real health care reform in the US in 1992, and who was so punished for it? hillary, i wanted us to grow together, but i'm afraid we've grown apart. i hardly recognize you these days.
and here come the really hard questions, the ones i don't know how to think my way out of. if hillary rodham clinton's conservatism is a function of her experience, a consequence of the constant, necessary compromise that characterizes public life, then why should she take the fall for the circumstances she did not invent but has to navigate? my psyche is littered with horrifying examples of women who have let me down this way: hillary rodham clinton, anne mclellan (who supported rendition), shirley neuman (nicknamed 'shotgun shirley' when she got to u-toronto). what price success? who are the counter-models? and what assurances are there that i won't go the same way? i am already far less radical than i was a decade ago -- more efficient, more effective, and even more courageous, but less bold, less imaginative, and less patient. what yardstick can you use to measure "progress" within the moving field of a human lifetime?
i don't know how to answer these questions, but i'm pretty sure they can't be answered through figure-heading. the US election won't solve them. i feel like a Bad Feminist saying this -- or is this just my own growing conservatism coming out? -- but this US presidential election is too important to be framed as a gender-versus-race issue. and incidentally, that framing is something that robin morgan's revised goodbye to all that does. the first part of that missive shamefully pretends that racism is over while sexism is alive and well. cheap shots, robin. the beginning of alice walker's epistle is similarly manipulative, but i'm with her on the importance of "alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth" -- whatever that means.
what the framing of the US election as gender vs race shows to me is that we still have a long way to go in figuring out how to address sticky old-fashioned questions like role models, essentialism (barack obama is black, and that means something, hillary rodham clinton is a woman, and that means something), solidarity, and the inter-imbrication of race and gender with other social justice issues.
sticking with hillary is not the way to get there.
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