Gloria Steinem wrote an oped piece for The New York Times called “Women are Never Frontrunners.”
This is my response:
Dear Ms Steinem-
You might remember me– I lead the group CRAAAP that opposed a hero’s welcome home parade for Mike Tyson in Harlem, several years ago, when he was released from prison for his rape conviction.
I was very appreciative of your attempt to help me at that time. You asked Marcia Ann Gillespie to give me some work at Ms, but she refused. In fact, she was robustly rude, and told me not to call again. She knew the math of two potentially powerful black women working in a white organization: two much. Yours was an honorable gesture, however, and I’ll always appreciate what you tried to do for me. But as Eve Ensler once said, women hate women more than anyone else. I’ve found this true inter and intra racially, across class lines, and nations. As my daughter says way too often; it is what it is.
I’m writing you because I just read your op-ed in the Times about Hillary Clinton.
In your comparison of her and Obama, you inferred that being a white woman was more difficult than being a black man. Ouch. I guess that’s why the prisons are teeming with unjustly imprisoned white women, and that there are no white women in positions of power in the country. And that the police systematically gun down white women and their children annually. Wow! When you put it like that—it’s even more ridiculous! Never mind that there is one black woman senator serving now, and 16 white women. Then you claimed that she had more experience. Well, he has had more elected experience than her; and he has never publicly tried to demean women, whereas she has been embroiled in a number of racially suspect situations. She was friends with the same Sheriff Lee of New Orleans, who blocked black citizens from fleeing the lethal Katrina floods, by preventing them from crossing a bridge to safety, at gunpoint. She refused to repudiate Lee, and instead said he had been a family friend for years. Through her campaign, she has called Obama a drug dealer, a kid (or non-man), a fairy tale, and a naïf. This is the type of undermining rhetoric black people can reasonably expect from whites– men and women. It is our reality. I just didn’t expect it from you, because you are special. You really are.
But your oped wasn’t. Read your piece and point out where you included women who are not white. It is not there. Now read this summary of a recent report from PINK magazine,that was reported this week on NPR, on the status of women:
Are white women supporting their black sisters in the fight for gender parity? The small percentage of African-Americans among women corporate officers (5.9 percent in one study) suggests the answer is no. High-ranking women of color in PINK’s January.February issue point out that white women are, in fact, afforded many of the same privileges as white males. “White women need to remember to honor the covenant between all women,” says Sandra Finley, president and CEO of The League of Black Women. “They need to stop saying, ‘That could happen to anybody.’ The reality is that what happens to black women is different.
Finally, when you pretend that Hillary Clinton comes with no negative baggage, that the only women who would not vote for her are self-hating handmaidens of patriarchy; the true fairy tale begins. She is not a friend of black people, any more than her husband. Bill Clinton’s war against the poor and children pathologizes both even now, even more than the circumstance itself does. Ask Marion Wright Edelman. His racist treatment of Obama has even Donna Brazile in a snit. So when she claims her husband’s experience as her own; it is not only disingenuous, it is embarrassing. There are qualified women who can stand on their own records, without their debasing husbands having to share theirs, and consequently have to defend them in the schoolyard– I mean, public arena. Hillary is not one of them.
Nonetheless, I won’t disparage you if Hillary is your candidate. I won’t run her down with negative stereotypes about white women, just to prop up my candidate. But wait—even if I did, like the tree in the forest, no one would hear. I’m not a feminist icon. That’s why I ask you to please stop doing this yourself. Hillary will be fine. She has apparently already decided that her entitlement to the office of the POTUS is more important than the country not being lead by a republican. As she tearfully said, “it’s personal”. That wasn’t ‘courageous’, by the way. It’s the pyrrhic victory of a 110 pound woman becoming a firefighter in Manhattan. Yeah, she probably can’t lift a 220 pound citizen and carry her down five flights of stairs, but she’s a woman, so we should be happy. Well, I believe we are in that burning building now, and we don’t need a weepy self-described victim, trying to guilt her way into the white house, with a lousy ‘record’, and a ferociously racist campaign strategy. And when I say ‘lousy record’, I mean she’s a warmonger.
The most racist people I ever worked with, were the trust fund ‘feminists’ at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. The women against violence against women in San Francisco run a close second. Let’s not get too warm and fuzzy inside, just because someone you identify with, has an opportunity she doesn’t really deserve. If she did, her opponent’s racial background wouldn’t be so key to her strategy. 
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