Re Clinton/Obama
Women are not nor ought they be "overwhelmingly excited by the
Clinton candidacy" any more so than the Obama candidacy. Let us not confuse
genital identity with political solidarity, here, a woman candidate's
entitlement to claim women's loyalty simply because she is a woman. One
also ought to interrogate other possibly more relevant axes of feminist
solidarity. BTW I am a registered Independent and undecided so read nothing
into this except my rejection of narrow feminist litmus tests.
Disclaimers:
Please note:
I am not characterizing any particular individual now posting.
If this is indeed an improper thread (I took that to be satirical)
then I apologize in advance.
Robin
"Justice will not come... until those who are not injured are as
indignant as those who are." [Thucydides]
-----Original Message-----
From: Feminist ethics and social theory [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Renee
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 8:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Open Letter From Alice Walker
The Walker article had quite a bit of race and gender in it.
Secondly, are you saying talking about Clinton is disallowed? The
article talked about her.
Why not talk about Clinton and not Obama? I was extremely impressed
with his speech during the Wright controversy. But I would think that
dedicated feminists would be overwhelmingly excited by the Clinton
candidacy.
----- Original Message -----
From: CL Nash <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: Open Letter From Alice Walker
Thanks for sharing the piece.
The debate seems "disallowed" only when we talk about race and
gender. If we continue talking about Clinton or keep bringing in articles
about gender being more difficult to overcome than race, it appears the
conversation is allowed.
Nash
On 3/29/08, Renee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It rather opens up a previously disallowed debate.
----- Original Message -----
From: Segebarth, Marsha L <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 3:21 PM
Subject: Re: Open Letter From Alice Walker
This is a wonderful piece! Thanks for sharing.
Marsha
________________________________
From: Feminist ethics and social theory on behalf of
Sarah Hoagland
Sent: Sat 3/29/2008 1:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: Open Letter From Alice Walker
LEST WE FORGET, An Open Letter To My Sisters Who Are
Brave
From Alice Walker
I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find
âEUR" because of the
presidential campaign, and especially because of the
Obama/Clinton race
for the Democratic nomination - a new country
existing alongside the
old. On any given day we, collectively, become the
Goddess of the Three
Directions and can look back into the past, look at
ourselves just
where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the
future. It is a
space with which I am familiar. When I was born in
1944 my parents
lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned
by a white distant
relative, Miss* May Montgomery. She would never
admit to this
relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by
my parents that
several of their children would not eat chicken skin
she responded that
Of course they would not. No Montgomerys would. My
parents and older
siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.
They planted and
raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and
processed her cattle and
hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her
dairy, and, among
countless other duties and responsibilities my
father was her
chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at
any hour of the day
or night. She lived in a large white house with
green shutters and a
green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of
Gone With the Wind
fame, but in the same style. We lived in a shack
without electricity or
running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in
wind and rain. Miss
May went to school as a girl. The school my parents
and their neighbors
built for us was burned to the ground by local
racists who wanted to
keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming.
During the
Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking
family, my father asked
for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss
May responded that
she would not pay that amount to a white man and she
certainly wouldn't
pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger
that much money
she'd milk the dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see
the school bus
carrying white children, boys and girls, right past
me, and my
brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school.
Later, I see my
parents struggling to build a school out of
discarded army barracks
while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a
building made of brick.
We had no books; we inherited the cast off books
that "Jane" and "Dick"
had previously used in the all-white school that we
were not, as black
children, permitted to enter. The year I turned
fifty, one of my
relatives told me she had started reading my books
for children in the
library in my home town. I had had no idea âEUR" so
kept from black
people it had been âEUR" that such a place existed.
To this day knowing
my presence was not wanted in the public library
when I was a child I
am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will
rarely, unless I am there
to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to
keep them open,
enter their doors.
*During my childhood it was necessary to address all
white girls as
"Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in
my early twenties
it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my
parents, who had
been thrown off the land they'd always known, the
plantations, because
they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right
to vote. I wish I
could say white women treated me and other black
people a lot better
than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then
and it seems to me
now that white women have copied, all too often, the
behavior of their
fathers and their brothers, and in the South,
especially in
Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to
register voters in
Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were
gender free. I made
my first white women friends in college; they were
women who loved me
and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood,
as they did, that
they were white women and that whiteness mattered.
That, for instance,
at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted
into the Board of
Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made
my way to the
campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while
the other
trustees, women and men, all white, made their way
by limo. Because, in
our country, with its painful history of unspeakable
inequality, this
is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school
for trying to make
me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative
poverty I knew I
could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is
the right person to
lead the country at this time. He offers a rare
opportunity for the
country and the world to start over, and to do
better. It is a deep
sadness to me that many of my feminist white women
friends cannot see
him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot
hear the fresh
choices toward Movement he offers. That they can
believe that millions
of Americans âEUR"black, white, yellow, red and
brown - choose Obama over
Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels
tragic to me. When I
have supported white people, men and women, it was
because I thought
them the best possible people to do whatever the job
required. Nothing
else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any
sense mediocre, he
would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a
remarkable human being,
not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and
like Mandela is. We
look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to
be of our species.
He is the change America has been trying desperately
and for centuries
to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have
if we are to
convince the rest of the world that we care about
people other than our
(white) selves. True to my inner Goddess of the
Three Directions
however, this does not mean I agree with everything
Obama stands for.
We differ on important points probably because I am
older than he is, I
am a woman and person of three colors, (African,
Native American,
European), I was born and raised in the American
South, and when I look
at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of
life, there is not one
person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they
have done to me or to
anyone else; though I understand quite well the
place of suffering,
often, in human growth. I want a grown-up attitude
toward Cuba, for
instance, a country and a people I love; I want an
end to the embargo
that has harmed my friends and their children,
children who, when I
visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to
kiss. I agree with
a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as
objectionable as
cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a
means of improving
life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately
and I want the
soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons
and to drive
themselves out of Iraq. I want the Israeli
government to be made
accountable for its behavior towards the
Palestinians, and I want the
people of the United States to cease acting like
they don't understand
what is going on. All colonization, all occupation,
all repression
basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here
our heads cannot
remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our
ability to study,
to learn, to understand what is in the records and
what is before our
eyes. But most of all I want someone with the
self-confidence to talk
to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has
shown he can do. It
is difficult to understand how one could vote for a
person who is
afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When
you vote you are
making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to
speak when, and in
places, you cannot. But if they find talking to
someone else, who looks
just like them, human, impossible, then what good is
your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs.
Clinton ( I wish
she felt self-assured enough to use her own name)
referred to as "a
woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as
"a black man." One
would think she is just any woman, colorless,
race-less, past-less, but
she is not. She carries all the history of white
womanhood in America
in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the
world, did not
react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt
to make her
innocent of her racial inheritance. I can easily
imagine Obama sitting
down and talking, person to person, with any leader,
woman, man, child
or common person, in the world, with no baggage of
past servitude or
race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the
same scenario with
Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First
Century American
leadership the same image of white privilege and
distance from the
reality of others' lives that has so marred our
country's contacts with
the rest of the world. And yes, I would adore having
a woman president
of the United States. My choice would be
Representative Barbara Lee,
who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to
make war on Iraq.
That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if
she had been white
I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not
running for the
highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And
because Mrs. Clinton
is a woman and because she may be very good at what
she does, many
people, including some younger women in my own
family, originally
favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost.
It is because, in my
own nieces' case, there is little memory,
apparently, of the
foundational inequities that still plague people of
color and poor
whites in this country. Why, even though our family
has been here
longer than most North American families âEUR" and
only partly due to the
fact that we have Native American genes âEUR" we
very recently, in my
lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after
numbers of people
suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago,
it was to give us a
tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times
like these. These are
the moments we can see clearly, and must honor
devotedly, our singular
path as women of color in the United States. We are
not white women and
this truth has been ground into us for centuries,
often in brutal ways.
But neither are we inclined to follow a black
person, man or woman,
unless they demonstrate considerable courage,
intelligence, compassion
and substance. I am delighted that so many women of
color support
Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young
and old white women
and men who do. Imagine, if he wins the presidency
we will have not one
but three black women in the White House; one tall,
two somewhat
shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and
out of the back door.
The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we
have a better chance
of surviving the madness and fear we are presently
enduring, and with
whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new
possibility? In other
words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want
in the boat with us
as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how
best to share the
meager garden produce and water? We are advised by
the Hopi elders to
celebrate this time, whatever its adversities. We
have come a long way,
Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our
time. One of which is
to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity,
color, nationality,
sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate
our journey. Enjoy
the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over
its outcome. Even if
Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin
it may well be
beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation.
If he is elected
however, we must, individually and collectively, as
citizens of the
planet, insist on helping him do the best job that
can be done; more,
we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a
blessing that our
mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as
the Hopi elders
declare: The river has its destination. And
remember, as poet June
Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of
telling us: We are
the ones we have been waiting for.
Namaste;
And with all my love,
Alice Walker
Cazul
Northern California
First Day of Spring
March 21, 2008
------ End of Forwarded Message
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