Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

Steinem should read Race, Rape, and Lynching by Sandra Gunning, and Angela Davis’s excellent Women, Culture, & Politics , which includes a probing examination of racism in the suffragette movement. The Times allowed only one black feminist to weigh in on Ms. Steinem’s comments about Barack Obama, and how he appealed to white men because they perceive black males as more “masculine” than they, an offensive stereotype, and one that insults the intelligence of white men, and a comment which, with hope, doesn’t reflect the depth of “progressive” women’s thought.

Do you think that the Times would offer Steinem critics like Toni Morrison Op-Ed space to rebut her? Don’t count on it. The criticism of white feminism by black women has been repressed for over one hundred years (See: Black Women Abolitionists, A Study In Activism, 1828–1860 , by Shirley J. Yee).

I asked Jill Nelson, author of Finding Martha’s Vineyard, Volunteer Slavery and Sexual Healing , how she felt about Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical black woman to make a point against Obama. She wrote:

I was offended and frankly, surprised, by Gloria Steinem’s use of a hypothetical Black woman in her essay supporting Hillary Clinton. I would have liked to think that after all these years struggling in the feminist vineyards, Black women have become more than a hypothetical to be used when white women want to make a point, and a weak one at that, on our backs. It’s a device, a distraction, and disingenuous, and fails to hold Hillary Clinton — or for that matter, Barack Obama and the rest of the (male) candidates — responsible for their politics.

On the second day of a convention held at Seneca Falls in 1848, white suffragettes sought to prevent black abolitionist Sojourner Truth from speaking. The scene was described by Frances Dana Gage in Ms. Davis’s book:

“Don’t let her speak!” gasped half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announced “Sojourner Truth,” and begged the audience to keep silence for a few moments.

Many minority feminists, Asian-American, Hispanic, Native-American and African-American, contend that white middle and upper class feminists’ insensitivity to the views and issues deemed important to them persists to this day.

Their proof might be Ms. Steinem’s lack of concern about how Mrs. Clinton’s war votes affect the lives of thousands of women and girls — her brown sisters — in Iraq and Iran. One hundred and fifty thousand Iraqi people have been killed since the American occupation was ordered by patriarchs in Washington, DC, patriarchs who were responsible for the Welfare Reform Act.

With this in mind, I recently asked Robin Morgan, who was editor of Ms. magazine, where I was called the worst misogynist in America, whether she still held those views. I replied to that accusation that I should be accorded the same respect given to the men who ran the magazine at the time, Lang Communications. The accusation was made by Barbara Smith, a black feminist whom I debated on television and whose bitter comments about the white feminist movement make mine seem timid. She also criticizes the white gay and lesbian movements. She said that when she tried to join the gay and lesbian march on Washington, the leaders told her to get lost. That they weren’t interested in black issues. That they wanted to mainstream. About me, she wrote in The New Republic magazine, edited by Marty Peretz, a man who once said that black women were “culturally deficient,” that my black women characters weren’t positive enough. For running afoul of this feminist “blueprint” for writing that she tried to lay on me, her views and those like hers were repudiated by Joyce Joyce, a black critic who deviates from the party line.

I also reminded Ms. Morgan that the Ms. editorial staff reflected the old plantation model, even though its founder, Gloria Steinem, said that she’s concerned about the progress of black women. White feminists had the juicy editorial Big House positions, while women of color were the editorial kitchen help as contributing editors. A few months later, Ms. Morgan resigned as editor and was replaced by a black woman, but not before taking some potshots, not at misogynists belonging to her ethnic group, whose abuse of women has been a guarded secret according to feminists belonging to that group, but at Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas (incidentally, when the white women who ran for office as a result of Ms. Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas arrived in Congress, they voted with the men).

Robin Morgan had her secretary respond to my recent letter and from the letter I gather that Ms. Morgan hasn’t changed her mind. I’m a worse misogynist than the men in the Pentagon, and those who passed Clinton’s welfare reform bill. I guess that bell hooks, another black feminist, who won’t be invited by the men who run the Times to respond to Ms. Steinem, was right when she wrote in her book, Outlaw Culture , that white feminists are harder on black men than white men, but like other black feminists, from the nineteenth century to the present day, her point has been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when they view feminism, and just about every other subject, all they can see is white! (Except when it’s crime, athletics, and having babies out of wedlock!)

Feminists are harder on Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison (yes, him too), and even James Baldwin, that gentle soul, than on Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Harder on Barack Obama than on Bill Clinton, to whom Gloria Steinem, a harsh critic of Clarence Thomas, gave a free pass when he was charged with sexual indiscretions by various women. She said that Bubba was O.K. because when he placed Kathleen Wiley’s hand on his penis and she said no, he withdrew it. That when other women said no, he also halted his sexual advances. A letter writer to the Times challenged Ms. Steinem’s double standard for white and black men:

Bob Herbert (column, January 29) writes that Gloria Steinem said that even though Paula Jones has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, Ms. Jones has not claimed that the president had forced himself on her. “He takes no for an answer,” Ms. Steinem intones.

Lest we forget, Anita Hill said no to Clarence Thomas. And her accusations nearly derailed his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Patricia Schroeder, the former Congresswoman, did not claim that “somebody may be overstating the case” when Ms. Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual misconduct, but Ms. Schroeder claims that now in Mr. Herbert’s column. Again the left inadvertently exposes its sliding scale of moral indignation.

RAYMOND BATZ

San Rafael, California, January 29, 1998

Black feminists also charge that white feminists deserted them during the fight against Proposition 209, which ended racial and gender hiring in the state of California, even though affirmative action has benefited white women the most!

They charge that white women were missing in action during the fight against the welfare reform bill. It seems that the cheapest form of solidarity they can express toward their minority sisters is to join in on the attack on Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, and Clarence Thomas and Mr. _______, a character in The Color Purple , who, for them, represents all black men.

Though Steinem accuses men of being mean to Mrs. Clinton, she expressed no outrage about surrogate Bill Shaheen painting Obama as drug dealer, or the innuendo promoted by Senator Bob Kerrey. Senator Bob Kerrey, who, apparently having made up with the Clintons, was recruited to associate Obama with what the right refers to as “Islamo fascists.”