Black women torn
between two firsts
ELLEN GOODMAN,
COMMENTARY, Home News Tribune Online (thnt.com) May 18, 2007
I don’t doubt Oprah Winfrey's
marketing magic, although we don't know yet whether she can do for politics what
she's done for publishing. Her endorsement of the candidate Barack Obama
may not be as successful as it was for the author Barack Obama.
But ever since she gave a nod to Obama on the Larry King show, Oprah has brought
some extra attention to a familiar and not always welcome question. Are
African-American women, a large and loyal subset of the Democratic Party, going
to be torn between two firsts? Will they be black-while-voting or
female-while-voting? Or both? Or neither?
Right now, black support is split about evenly between Hillary Clinton and Obama.
But while the polling numbers are small, there's strong evidence of a gender
gap. Obama has a comfortable lead among black men while black women —
Oprah notwithstanding — overwhelmingly favor Clinton.
There are, surely, many reasons for the support of either candidate. War and
peace rank beside race and gender.
But I raise this question because black women in America have historically had
the pieces of their identity sliced and diced — and they've been asked to pick
one. They've been subject to loyalty oaths or disloyalty taunts.
They've been talked about as a two-fer minority or a torn-in-two minority.
This tension goes back to Sojourner Truth's famous response to the ministers at
the Women's Rights Convention in 1851. After listening to the white men
defend women's inequality and gentility, the former slave reportedly asked, "Ain't
I a woman?"
Of course, we don't need to go back that far to see these tensions. In his
infamous confirmation hearings, Clarence Thomas described the sexual harassment
charges against him as "a high-tech lynching," thereby defining his opponents as
racists. His African-American accuser, Anita Hill, was cast in female
terms as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty."
Hill, now a Brandeis University professor, remembers many people who thought
that believing her would "be denigrating to African-American men. They
couldn't understand about the denigration of African-American women. They
didn't even see my race, they saw me as a woman."
Time and again, whether during the O.J. Simpson trial or the Mike Tyson rape
case, black women were often expected to take "sides." And during the Don
Imus debacle, "nappy-headed hos" was labeled a "racist slur, " as if "ho" were a
unisex epithet and the only problem was that the man hurling it was white.
Now, in the presidential race we have both a white woman and a black man in the
top tier of contenders. At the same time, these are candidates who have,
in many ways, transcended their race and gender.
Some folks are still asking whether the country is "ready" for a black or a
female president. But for many African-American women, facing two
attractive candidates is a pretty nice dilemma.
"I'm really a Pollyanna," says Hill. "I really want this to mean that
we've kind of broken through our set ideas that you have to choose, and that now
we can look at people as individuals. Because we have options, it's a
great place."
It would be ironic if these transcendent candidates heightened our tired
identity politics. I'm betting, or hoping, they may help lay these
conflicts to rest. But it's early in a campaign and in a conversation
likely to offer juicy fodder for a talk-show nation. Oprah, are you
listening?
Write to Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe, Boston, MA 02107 or
e-mail ellengoodman@globe.com.
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