Race & Gender: The Double Standard

In an election that challenges the patriarchal and racial stereotypes of leadership that have dominated this country since the beginning the most effective way to difuse any real challenge to the status quo is to pit one minority against the other.

I listened to Keith Olbermann the other day in his almost hysterical attempt to amp up the conflict to the point of parody.

The fact is that much of what Ferraro said was as true as Clinton's comment that the Civil Rights law would not have passed without the political leadership of Lyndon Johnson (another statement spun as being 'racially insensitive' - not politically correct) by the Obama campaign.

This campaign has been a minefield of racial and gender sensitivities from the beginning. Perhaps no man but a black man could have campaigned as effectively as Obama against the first serious woman candidate for president, as his own status as a member of an oppressed minority trumps her own minority status as a white woman.

In an election that challenges the patriarchal and racial stereotypes of leadership that have dominated this country since the beginning the most effective way to diffuse any real challenge to the status quo is to pit one minority against the other.

I listened to Keith Olbermann the other day in his almost hysterical attempt to amp up the conflict to the point of parody.

The fact is that much of what Ferraro said was as true as Clinton's comment that the Civil Rights law would not have passed without the political leadership of Lyndon Johnson (another statement spun as being 'racially insensitive' - not politically correct) by the Obama campaign.

This campaign has been a minefield of racial and gender sensitivities from the beginning. Perhaps no man but a black man could have campaigned as effectively as Obama against the first serious woman candidate for president, as his own status as a member of an oppressed minority trumps her own minority status as a white woman.

I believe it likely that Geraldine Ferraro was used by the Clinton campaign as a sort of stealth surrogate to bring the subject of race fully into the open in a late hour attempt to counter the efforts of Obama people to foster a racial minefield in which all but the most 'politically correct' discourse is acceptable. Ferraro is well known as the only other woman ever to run for one of the two top executive offices, so her credibility on gender issues is rather sound, and she isn't running for any office so her comments don't pose any risk to her own career. She is also a FOX News commentator and it is the FOX audience that this whole thing is pitched toward. The calculation may be that Clinton can risk alienating black voters in the short term while going after the white voters in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana and Oregon, who are more likely at this point than black voters to put her over the top.

Obama supporters have repeatedly maintained that one of their candidate's chief qualifications for conducting foreign policy is the fact that he is black. Setting aside the dubious nature of this assertion, given the performance of people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, I would maintain that race as well as gender are legitimate parts of the political dialogue. You can't have it both ways, on the one hand using race as some measure of unique qualification and on the other hand denying that race is a clear factor in the popularity of the candidate.

An example of the double-standard applied in the glaringly overblown reactions to Ferraro's comments by the likes of Keith Olberman is seen in the limp or nonexistent reaction to remarks such as these which occurred in a conversation/debate on Democracy Now between major Obama strategist MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL, and GLORIA STEINEM.

This is Ms. Harris-Lacewell commenting on Obama's defeat in New Hampshire:

"White women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women. Those things are true. And so, to pretend that we can somehow take them out of the conversation when a white woman runs against a black man, when she tears up at being sort of beat up by  him, when her husband can come in and rally around her and suggest that we need to sort of support her because she’s having difficulties, while Barack Obama is getting death threats, basically lynching threats on him and his family, these are—for a second-wave feminist with an understanding of the complexity of American race and gender to take this kind of position in the New York Times struck me as, again, the very worst of what that feminism can offer—in other words, division.

I mean, what happened in New Hampshire, clearly Barack Obama brought in the percentage in the polls that he was expected to bring in. But a whole new group of voters showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton. It doesn’t look as though Barack Obama’s poll voters actually abandoned him. It looked as though they actually came and sincerely voted their interest, which I think is a great sign for the capacity of this campaign to move forward. But there was a whole new group of voters, mostly women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, white women of Hillary Clinton’s own generation, who did show up at the polls and vote—cast a vote for Hillary Clinton. And that’s what put her over the top.

And I do believe that much of that had to do with this intersection of race and gender, the ways in which Hillary Clinton became discernible, understandable and recognizable to these voters in her moment of anxiety and stress, in a way that Barack Obama, as an African American man, remains alien to many white women. In other words, it’s just very difficult for them to see themselves in him. But again, 36% of that vote who claimed that they were going to vote for Barack did in fact show up and do so. So I think it’s good news for the Obama campaign, although it does continue to indicate the ways in which white women’s particular race and gender position can be of major benefit to them when running  against an African American man."

So, tell me how this is okay but Ferraro's comments aren't.