[Marxism] Gender-Race Interactions (in the Obama/Clinton constellation)

["Rosa Rot" <roosaroot@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

thanks everyone who gave their view on the questions raised in my
first post some time ago; it was very helpful as well as insightful to
read your thoughts. At the same time, I think there's a few issues I
might want to clarify about my original question. My main concern did
not primarily include discussing and evaluating Clinton's and Obama's
actions per se, but instead I was interested in the way the candidates
and their actions are being discussed in the mainstream media as well
and especially in Marxist analyses. Thus, my interest at this point is
located perhaps more on the meta-level, which I find gives a better
view on the "structural" issues at stake -- the role which race and
gender play not just in this election or for the individuals Obama and
Clinton, but among Marxists, anti-racism activists, feminists. It's
within this framework that I'd be interested to analyse the
interaction of race and gender, and discuss how racism and sexism
might depend on each other, are played out against each other,
reinforce each other. I don't mean to defend Clinton nor am I
interested in attacking Obama, and vice versa. As I'm not US-based, I
don't feel compelled to make a "practical" decision regarding whom to
vote, so maybe it's a bit easier for me to transcend from issues that
arise with a personal decision whom to support in the
primaries/elections.

Below I comment on Fred Feldman's comments ("Gender-Race
Interactions", Sat 17 May 2008). I realize he's not any longer
subscribed to this list, but I think his comments are valuable and
helpful also because to some degree I assume they include opinions and
assessment shared by others on this list, so I'll take them as prompts
in formulating my own thoughts, but don't mean to target him or anyone
personally with my comments. Further below I will also draw on parts
of Zeliah Eisenstein's text "Hillary is white" (posted by Mike
Friedman on Tue 20 May 08) and parts of the Tim Wise article
"Testosterone is not to blame" included in Fred's post.

***

My comments to Fred's comments (Fred's original comments are marked by
inverted commas):

Fred: "One of the most important factors is to not fall into the trap
that supporting Clinton or supporting Obama are purely racial or
gender questions, as though those are the only issues in the
elections. I don't believe that."

Rosa: While with this statement in principle, I think what makes
gender and race crucial for the political debate is not only the
importance of their *conscious* discussion in terms of formal gender
and racial equality policies, but the way race and gender are on a
different, less conscious or obvious level also interconnected with
the shape of politics as a whole, and the way how other political
issues are debated. It's this latter dimension of the gender/race
issue that I was most interested in when I posted my original message:
the kind of racism and sexism that structures arguments and frames
agendas, all kinds of political agendas, reaching far beyond the
discussion of women's and racial minority's rights or issues that
immediately concern these groups. My initial post was motivated by the
impression that the discussion on this list about the election
campaigns somewhat neglected this more subtle dimension and the
interaction between race and gender in this way.  I hope I'll manage
to make myself maybe somewhat clearer in the lines to follow.

Fred: "Clinton'S biggest advantage is her vaunted "experience". Her
sixteen years and more, going back to Arkansas, experience in
supporting and reinforcing the status quo. One of Obama's most
important pluses is HIS LACK OF EXPERIENCE IN DOING THIS."

Rosa: The fact that Hillary's position as a First Lady, i.e. basically
her marital status, is counted as "political experience" is a very
troubling notion to me. I'm slightly baffled by the relatively common
usage of the pluralized form of her last name when talking about
Hillary's campaign and political leaning, i.e. assigning all that to
"the Clintons" rather than herself. She might have been more
politically active as a First Lady than what has been the "standard"
for the president's spouse before her, but she nevertheless was mainly
simply *married* to Bill Clinton until she was elected governor in
2001. The fact that her actions now, in the race for candidacy are
subsumed and discussed under the common heading of "the Clintons'",
sounds slightly worrying to me. Are women still seen as some kind of
annex to their male spouses? Why not hold her *personally* responsible
for her actions, give her the full credit as well as blame? Why is it
"the Clintons'" campaign, not Hillary Clinton's? Why isn't her
"experience" equated with the time since she took office as a senator,
but counted from the time HER HUSBAND was elected president? Or am I
misunderstanding something here - in that case I'd appreciate your
assistance.

Fred: "Barack Obama (particularly because he WANTS to change some
things, especially foreign policy) presents himself as representing
change and can do so partly because he is Black (the color of
"change") and because he takes positions .. which modest as they are,
have been attacked succesfully as appeasement [..]"

Rosa: I'm wondering if this assessment might actually muddle a few
issues that I would think are better kept separate. On the one hand,
Fred prefers the foreign policy statements of Obama to those of
Clinton. Fair enough and understandable. On the other, however, he
assigns a strong symbolic value to Obama being black ("the colour of
change"), which seems to make the actual power of Obama's policy
suggestions less salient, whereas being female doesn't seem to possess
this symbolic power, as the following paragraph seem to suggest:

Fred: "What will electing a woman head of state change. Well, the
evidence is that, partly because of  how deeply rooted in class
society is the oppression of women, that the election of someone like
Clinton will change nothing."

Rosa: My honest, not rhetorical question is, do you think Obama as
president will radically improve the position of blacks and other
racial minorities in the USA? Has he got a clear and strong
anti-racism agenda? I don't know if he does, but it seems that the
question whether or not he has a clear stance against racism and
concrete and his systematic plans in this direction are far less
important in judging him to be capable of bringing about a so far
quite undefined "change" than the woman who doesn't have a clear
anti-sexism agenda. I think it's completely fair to prefer Obama's
stance on foreign policy over Clinton's and give good reasons for it.
But to me it seems that how the debate of the candidates here on this
list is conducted, the preference for Obama isn't really or at least
not mainly hinging on his actual statements and plans, but to a much
stronger degree rests on the symbolic value of having a black
president. There seem to be all kinds of far-reaching hopes tied to
this symbolic progress, so that when certain disagreement with Obama's
policy is admitted, e.g. that his positions on foreign policy are
still rather "modest", the symbolic value of his candidacy  seems to
make up for this  lack of "change" in terms of content.

Clinton, on the other hand, is subjected to a far more harsher
scrutiny. Being female doesn't seem to have the same symbolic effect,
and the arguments that are put forward (in Freds mail) to seemingly
explain this is that the oppression of women is too deeply rooted in
class society, so that a) it's questionable what a female head of
state will bring, and b) at least Clinton is not feminist enough to
change anything and c) her general policies are mainstream and not
radically different from the status quo.

But couldn't you say pretty much the same thing about Obama? And what
kind of change can be expected from a mainstream liberal candidate in
general? Or is the crucial point in this issue actually found in the
idea that the African American community is more united and therefore
more capable of inspiring a sort of mass movement for change once a
Black president (pretty much any Black president, regardless of the
extent of radicality of his ideas or his precise and concrete ideas
and plans) manages to get into office, than a female president? If
that's the general idea and main motivation to support Obama, then I
still find that a number of crucial questions are left unexplored or
at least underexplored (and again, these are honest, not rhetorical
questions):

a) what kind of change are you expecting, in which way is this change
challenging the status quo
b) why is it that this kind of change can be expected from Obama/the
Black community in a way in which it cannot be expected from women/the
feminist movement
c) if the assessment rests on the assumption that the potential for
inspiring a mass movement is greater with the African American
community, and if the idea is that this is due to some kind of
systematic problem with feminism, why is it that this perceived
problem of feminism is not explored as a mainstream topic within the
left/on Marxmail?

In short, the argument to me sounds a bit like "Blackness itself is
enough for change, whereas with women it depends on the individual
woman and her feminist/left credentials".

On a more general note (but connected to the issue of gender/race
interactions), the picture that I'm getting is that gender is a
"speciality" subject on the left, an issue that concerns women, who at
the same time are also seen as the ones mainly responsible for
debating gender issues. "Mainstream Marxists", on the other hand, seem
to concern themselves mostly with seemingly gender-free notions of
class and racist oppression. Women get the moral support of Marxists
in the issues that immediately concern them, e.g. abortion rights, but
on a more general level and a more far-reaching level, e.g. the way
sexism might be inherent also in Marxist concepts of class and the
structures of racism, feminism hasn't yet managed to become a
mainstream agenda within the left (or at least that's the impression
I've been getting.)

Thus, one of the main questions that sparked off writing this e-mail
in the first place is: why is it that the debate of racism is a much
more "mainstream" topic on Marxmail/the left/ (concretely in the
Obama/clinton context) compared to issues of gender, in that more
sensitivity is given to oppression in terms of race (including it's
more subtle and implicit form) than to oppression in terms of sex? I
appreciate that there have been articles posted on the list that deal
with gender issues, but they were mainly so to say secondary sources,
thus again the issue was more or less left to the feminists, and
didn't enter so much the own posts/analyses of the subscribers to this
list.

Fred: "Did Margaret Thatcher radically improve the position of women
in the United Kingdom? Indira Gandhi. Sirimavo Bandaranaike? Queen
Elizabeth, Queen Mary, Queen Victoria, and again Queen Elizabeth?
Maybe it hasn't hit the United States yet, but lots of people know the
score."

Rosa: This sounds a bit like "well, you girls had the chance so many
times in history and you messed it up, so you might as well stop
trying". I know Fred doesn't really mean it like this. But I find it
troubling that from a structural point of view, this comment is (in my
view) very similar to the racist view that "it only proves the
backwardness of Blacks/Africans that after the end of formal
colonialism, only war, corruption and poverty prevailed, showing that
these uncivilized and barbarian Blacks in Africa haven't gotten their
act together to this day even though the so charitable and honorable
West "helps" them so much with all kinds of financial/economic aid."
Of course there are tons of very good arguments why this view on
Africa is plain wrong and outright racist. But I wonder why on the
left it is far less outrageous to state something to the same effect
about women. (I don't mean to personally attack Fred with this, by the
way.)

The arguments Fred and others put forward for showing that Clinton has
consciously taken up a racist approach to her campaign are convincing.
This move of hers is deplorable and appalling. However, I think that
instead of being satisfied with having detected this serious flaw in
her character, I think it would be a more fertile approach to treat
this phenomenon as a potential symptom of larger, structural issues
that could be at play within the circles of power. The real question
would be *why* is it that she resorted to race tactics? Could it be
that her displayed racism is in itself a symptom of a more subtle form
of sexism that structures access to power?

At this point, I'd like to bring in some of Zeliah Eisenstein's
thoughts, which address this issue (quoting from her text "Hillary is
White" that was posted by Mike Friedman on Tue, 20 May 2008 (text in
quotation marks from now on refer to Eisenstein's text)).

Eisenstein: "But the truth is that she is not simply a woman but both
a woman and also white. The very fact that she ignores her own race,
in a way that Obama cannot, is proof of the normalized privileging of
whiteness. In this is instance white is not a color, but the color,
the standard, by which others are judged. So she .. uses her color to
write her meanings of gender and mobilized older white women and angry
white men by doing so. She presents herself as a woman but her real
power here is as white. Misogyny .. ensures that Hillary's privilege
is her whiteness. [..]
[Barack Obama] is not post-racist, but recognizes the newly raced
relations as they exist at present. Nevertheless, he must give a
speech on race although he says he does not want to be racial
candidate. [..] Meanwhile Hillary says she is running as a woman, and
never gives a speech on gender because white angry men and women,
would not be pleased by this. So patriarchy, or sexual discirmination,
or the structural hierarchy of masculinity with its racialized and
class aspects is never mentioned in her campaign. [..] She never once
mentiones the unacceptable misogyny of this country, or the sexual
hierarchy of the labor force, or any of the great racial and class
inequities that define women's lives today. This is a misuse and abuse
of her gender."

Rosa: I largely agree with this assessment. However, of course being
white is not the only standard that is taken for granted -- being male
is another one. And in my view, Eisenstein leaves out the interplay
and the similar ways in which these two standards appear in the
primaries -- because to some extent, it seems to me that Clinton and
Obama also have some things in common in their approach. After all,
both are mainstream candidates and both will try to maximize the
number of votes they get. Part of this strategy is to try to avoid
branding your own stand with a particular and discernible group: Obama
therefore doesn't want to be a "racial candidate", Clinton doesn't
want to be a feminist. They both therefore try to live up to the white
male standard in a way, only departing from different directions, and
by that they are enacting the problematic in inverse terms (while at
the same time, their minority status could implicitly also work in
their favour, motivating blacks and women respectively). Could it be
that it is being male which helps Obama to avoid being a racial
candidate (and thus assuming a "white" approach, in the context of
Eisensteins argumentation), precisely because it is a female candidate
he's up against -- who in turn is then critized by Eisenstein for not
having a clear feminist agenda (thus, being assigned the "black"
position within Eisensteins argument)? Could it be that being female
is still the bigger disadvantage in this constellation, which
therefore motivates Clinton to resort to an appalling racist approach
in her campaign?

I think that in order to successfully dismantle and combat racism, it
is crucial to make sexism a mainstream rather than a specialist area
within the left. I'm personally not at all impressed with the
situation of feminism today, and in no way do I want to downplay or
excuse the use that Clinton has made of racism in her campaign. I
acknowledge and deplore that feminism, in Eisenstein's words, "has a
history of being bankrupt on this issue". But what I would like to
defy is the notion that *this is exclusively feminism's/feminists'
problem*. If Tim Wise, in his text posted by Fred (copied into Fred's
post on Sat 17 May 2008) states that "Perhaps the defeat of Hillary
Clinton will expose for all the underlying racial supremacy at the
heart of much white feminist analysis. Perhaps it will allow the
development of a more compete and throught analysis of patriarchy and
the way it interrelates with white supremacy to divide and conquer
groups that often have common interest" -- then I'm a bit pessimistic
about the success of such self-critical endeavour of feminists, unless
Marxists/the left is also prepared to engage in similar self-critical
analyses that include  the role of sexism implicit in Marxist views on
class and race. I have a hunch that only by making feminism/sexism a
more mainstream Marxist agenda can we successfully tackle racism as
well as capitalism.


Best,

Rosa

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