For Feisty Feminists

You’ve probably heard about McCain’s latest ad, which says that Obama wants to teach kindergartners comprehensive sex education before they learn to read. This is based on a bill he supported that would teach kids how to identify and report sexual predators. It’s real slimy. I think it’s pretty clear that any hope for a clean campaign from the McCain camp is gone.

The Obama campaign response?

Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.

DAMN.

Read Pat Buchanan’s latest rant at Real Clear Politics. He buries the blatant race-baiting two-thirds of the way down:

Why did the selection of Sarah Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that has been so in the tank for Barack even “Saturday Night Live” has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us — and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah Palin kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America — until Barack started winning.

Now, who is the ‘us’ that Pat Buchanan is talking about, and who is the ‘them’? If it’s really about the democratic ticket and not about race, why is Joe Biden absent from this discussion?

Even if we weren’t talking about Pat Buchanan - a virulent racist whose response to Obama’s speech on race (referring to him as ‘Barack,’ but using last names for all the white people mentioned) was “It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running [for years]” and “White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to” - it’s pretty clear who is meant by ‘them’ and ‘us.’

McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I haven’t decided if I think this move is brilliant or profoundly stupid. I’m leaning toward profoundly stupid, because she has no national experience, plus the fact that she’s a woman - even if a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, traditional, non-threatening woman - will probably make some fundies heads explode, and may make some of those middle of the road defect to the Obama camp.

Clinton lost the primary. So, the first woman on a major party ticket in the general election since Geraldine Ferraro is anti-choice, anti-woman, and very conservative. Already the misogyny has started, with comments about her looks, her intelligence, rumors about the parentage of her youngest child. Some feminists are calling out the misogyny, even as they disagree with her politics. While I hope that continues, I think it’s possible to avoid misogyny but still look at the gender issues, the ways in which a woman who toes the line like Palin will get places that women who actually care about other women cannot.

Someone posted this excerpt from Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Right-wing Women,’ it illuminates why someone like Palin, a token, is electable - not like Clinton, who did not dissociate herself from other women, but tried to work for them.

The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to disassociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own complicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through disassociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance.

• A comparison of anti-trans arguments to anti-gay rhetoric at Fetch me my axe. Why all the stuff about trans issues? Because 1. I want it clear I do not believe that trans individuals or politics are a threat to feminism, and 2. those of us who are not anti-trans need to be vocally pro-trans.
• Nojojojo at the Angry Black Woman on POC on TV.
• Carnival against Sexual Violence 53, with links to posts on legal aspects, media, research, recovery, and other topics.
• Michelle Obama guest posts at BlogHer.
• Speaking of Obama…some dipshit produced shirts that said “Obama is my slave” is being sued by another dipshit who was surprised that black people were offended by it.
• On the lighter side, Pajiba finishes off a series on the greatest TV seasons of the last 20 years with Season 2 of The Office (US version).

I was all set to write a post for the Angry Black Woman’s carnival of allies, but the day slipped by me.

I could make all sorts of excuses as to why I didn’t write it in time. I was busy, I had an earwig burrowing into my brain, I was tired. Whatever.

I didn’t write about it because I don’t have to. One of the biggest privileges I have as a white person is that I don’t have to think about my privilege. I don’t have to think about it, and when I do, I get a cookie for even acknowledging that racism exists. (Note that said cookie usually comes from other white folks grappling to excuse themselves from their privilege, not from people of color.) I get lauded for saying that I have unearned privilege - general privilege as well as concrete, multiple, specific privileges.

Another symptom of privilege is that I don’t notice it until I compare it to male privilege. Although I know that, for example, women should be the ones defining what is and isn’t sexism, I get to mentally excuse racism as ‘not racist’ because it wasn’t intended that way, I don’t see it as racist, or the person complaining just needs to lighten up and take it as a joke.

Even when I don’t speak up and express those views, my silence speaks volumes. Sometimes I rationalize my silence with the fact that everyone already knows what I think, and they’re tired of hearing about it. Yet, me feeling slightly alienated at my (white) peers dismissing me and thinking that I’m still spouting off the same bullshit pales in comparison to the toll of being the subject of racism. No, really, it does.

That’s really the point. I can choose to call out racism or not, but the rewards of said calling out are generally huge in a liberal/progressive community. I win either way. A person who is subjected to racism and has to choose whether or not to call it out loses either way: either xie is going along with racist crap - and therefore agrees with the racist crap - or xie is angry and irrational for daring to call it out.

I ask that white folks call out their own privilege because of the continuing nature of said privilege, and all the ways they have benefited. I don’t care if your ancestors didn’t own slaves, or were Irish and were treated as not white, or whatever.

You still benefit from unearned privilege. Deal with it. Do something productive with it, rather than trying to defend the completely unjust benefit that you are getting.

You get to overhear a lot of conversations on the bus, and learn some pretty personal things about your fellow riders.  While the overwrought tales of interpersonal drama can be irritating, more often they are entertaining.  If only I did not have to overhear crap like a conversation concerning the election between two seemingly educated, seemingly intelligent, liberal young men, wherein I learned the following:

• Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be president because he is bald.
• John McCain is too old to be president.
• Rudy Giuliani clearly has mob ties, as he is from New York and has an Italian name.
• Although they both agree with Hillary more than Obama, they will vote for Obama because he gives them the warm fuzzies, or something.
• Obama should do something more interesting with his hair, like get dreadlocks.

For the most part, these things are just asinine (although the thing about Obama’s hair is plain offensive); it makes me very sad, however, that these are the kinds of things people are discussing concerning the election.  I am not sure if this is because these two young men were particularly dim-witted, or because the election really does not bring up anything of meaning - just campaign slogans and meaningless mud-slinging.   I am sure that it is fucking depressing to hear shit like this.