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

He said, “His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and his father was a Muslim and his paternal grandmother is a Muslim.” He added that Obama “spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa.”

You’d think that the New School of Social Research would have fired Kerrey when he admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Now this.

All of these attacks must be what Hillary Clinton meant when she warned her opponents “now the fun begins.”

One of the charges made by some black feminists is that white women middle-class movement figures embezzle their oppression. In The New York Times , Gloria Steinem’s using a hypothetical black woman to do a house cleaning on Obama was what these women must have had in mind. (Philip Roth does the same thing; uses his black maid characters to denounce black history and black studies: “Missa Roth, dese Black Studies ain’t doin’ nothin’ but worrying folks. Whew!”) Her using a black woman as a prop must have annoyed Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison who made blistering comments about Ms. Steinem during an interview conducted by novelist Cecil Brown and carried in the University of Massachusetts Review , where Ms. Morrison made the harshest comments about Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple to date, even harsher than those made by black feminist Professor Trudier Harris, who, as a result of her essay, published in African American Review , faced such a hostile backlash from white feminist scholars that she stopped commenting about the novel, which has become a sacred text among white feminists, who are silent about how women are treated among their ethnic groups. Steinem said that had Obama been a black woman, he would not have made as much progress as a presidential candidate and added that white men would prefer voting for a black man over a white woman because they perceived black men as being more masculine than they.

I wrote a response to the Times on January 8, 2008:

Dear Times,

Even Dr. Phil would probably snicker at the level of pop psychology employed by Gloria Steinem to explain the attraction of many voters to Senator Barack Obama. For example, she believes that the preference for a black male candidate over a white woman by some white males is based upon their admiration for the black male’s “masculine” superiority. “Masculine superiority?” All four of the current heavyweight champions are white as well as last year’s MVPs of the NBA were white men.

Moreover, Ms. Steinem is a long time critic of black men as a group. She said that the book, The Color Purple , in which one black man commits incest, told “the truth” about black men, the kind of collective blame that’s been used against her ethnic group since the time of the Romans.

I also made a reference to her abandonment of a tearful Shirley Chisholm’s presidential candidacy after supporting it. If she’s so concerned about the political fate of a black woman’s presidential bid, why did she desert Ms. Chisholm in favor of the man?

She also said “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.” The fact that when white women received the vote they experienced little of the violence that accompanied black men being awarded the right to vote, fifty years earlier, suggests that some groups, black men, black women, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians, face more restrictions than white women, whose college enrollment is far higher even than that of white men. (Steinem said that women are never “front runners.” How many white women senators are there? How many black?)

Cecil Brown, author of the bestselling Hey, Dude Where’s My Black Studies Department , wrote:

I grew up in North Carolina, where I often heard my mother and my aunts speak of the racism of white women against them. Their experience is that of millions of black women who were and are discriminated by white women.

In the Bay Area, where I now live, a professor friend told me, recently, that a white female student told him that she found the use of the expression, “white woman” in his lectures offensive, and asked that he not use it.

Like this student, Ms. Steinem avoids the phrase “white woman,” because it historicizes their gender. While she lectures to us about black men, white men, and black women, she can only think of her white women as women.

“It’s time to take pride in breaking all the barriers,” Ms. Steinem ends her remarks. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting [Hillary] because she’ll be a great president and because she is a woman.” But do we dare say that we should support her because she is a white woman?

Our letters were not published, but one written by a black feminist exposed the divide between black and white feminists, one that is rarely aired since white feminists have more access to the media than black ones. White feminists, in their books, report, falsely, a solidarity between them and black women. Among letter writer Karin Kimbrough’s comments:

As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics.

She cites as evidence that “black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.” So what?

My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.

Camille Paglia also weighed in:

Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem’s fawning, gaseous New York Times Op-Ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the twenty-first century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

An example of the problems that Barack faces as a result of there being few blacks having jobs in the old media occurred during an appearance by a white woman reporter on The Washington Journal (January 14, 2008). So pro-Hillary was this reporter, Beth Fouhy, that one woman called and said that she thought that this woman was a Hillary spokesperson, before noticing that she was from the Associated Press. Obviously the media have been infiltrated by Steinem’s legions.

Scathing comments about the white feminist movement by black feminists are included in The Feminist Memoir Project , edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow. Times person Maureen Dowd also challenged Steinem, who is hard on black guys, but once confessed in the Times that she becomes embarrassed when a male of her ethnic group becomes involved in a scandal. Challenging Steinem’s argument that “she is supporting Hillary [because] she had no ‘masculinity to prove,’” Dowd wrote, “Empirically speaking, her masculinity is precisely what Hillary has been out to prove in her bid for the White House. What else was voting to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backing the White House’s bellicosity on Iran but proving her masculinity.”

Desperate, when the campaign moved into New Hampshire, the Clintons launched the brass knuckles attack on Obama that commentator William Bennett predicted would happen after Mrs. Clinton was upset in Iowa.