[Marxism] Gender-Race-Interactions?

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 I'd
be interested to know what, in your opinion, is the *relation between
racism and sexism* in the dynamics that make up this campaign for
nomination as Democratic presidential candidate.

^^^^
Welcome , Rosa,

There are a few critical facts about the campaign critical to your
question :

1) Black women are voting 9 to 1 for Obama over Clinton. This should
raise for all feminists the critique of feminism made by Black feminist
Sojourner Truth in the 1800's which she posed by asking the question
"Ain
t I a woman ? " In other words, white feminsts have had a long term
weakness of not listening to Black women as if they aren't women. This
is reflected in media reports of the current campaign wherein it is
reported that "women " are voting overwhelmingly for Clinton,
conveniently failing to mention that Black women are voting
overwhelmingly for Obama.
Aren't Black women , victims of both sexism and racism, the logical
group to decide who should be supported in a campaign that has a women
vs a Black man?

2) Clinton has made racist appeals for votes, but Obama has _not_ made
sexist  appeals for votes. 

3) There are more women voters than men voters. Women are the majority
of voters.  Black people are a small minority of voters. So, it would
have been both pragmatic and principled for Clinton to run explicitly
appealing to women voters ( without making the racist appeal , of
course; Black women probably would have supported her more if she and
Bill had left out the not so subtle appeals to racism; there are
numerous articles by Black activists and white anti-racists,
demonstrating that they did do this) But she didn't run that way.  Now
at the end , she says she's staying in the race for all her women
supporters. Fine , but that's a bit late, basically pandering to
feminism as an excuse to stay in the race when for a couple of months
the statisticians have been saying it is almost impossible for her to
catch up because of the representational/proportional system which only
allows even winners of states to get a small net gain in the primaries.
It was amazing and surprising that Obama got so far out in front so
fast, basically just after Super Tuesday with about 11 or 13 straight
wins. But he did. It just was a fact. She has not been able to face the
fact. He won them fair and square.  Her explicit strategy is to claim
that Obama can't win enough white votes ( including white women, by the
way; the media has not been pointing at that aspect that is racist
analogously to the appeal to "hardworking white workers" ; Ain't Black
women, who are voting for Obama, women ?). And so she should get the
nomination !  That is an astonishingly stark violation of the "Sojourner
Truth rule for feminists".


That is my take on the important interactions of gender and race as
this campaign has actually "gone down".

Charles




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