Racialicious on Gloria Steinem, pitting race against gender

Racialicious on Gloria Steinem, pitting sex against gender (via Funky Brown Chick on Twitter)

But the contradictions on how to consider Senator Clinton’s gender seem to run deeper – all the way to the Senator’s campaign. Senator Clinton repeatedly cites the change that will be affected by electing a female president, but then dismisses the charge that she is playing the “gender card”. (By contrast, not once has Obama said that he should be elected because he would be the first Black president). Senator Clinton claims to be the candidate of feminists (indeed, Steinem herself basically questions the gender authenticity of young women for daring to choose a male candidate over Senator Clinton – going so far as to suggest that “women are the one group that grows more radical with age”) and yet Clinton expected to ride the wave of her husband’s accomplishments all the way to the White House. And in case we found out that she actually had very little to do with those accomplishments, she and her husband have carefully chosen to exclude White House documents pertaining to the First Lady’s role during the Clinton years from the public eye.

Ultimately, however, Steinem’s piece (intentionally or unintentionally) draws a line in the sand between people of colour and women, essentially disregarding the everyday racism faced by Black and Brown people, and claiming the Oppression Olympics gold medal for women. Further, by casting the debate as between Black men and White women (despite her imperfect creation of Achola Obama), Steinem renders the woman of colour invisible, reaffirms the binary Black-White paradigm of race, and demands we take a side in the epic battle between race and gender. Is it no wonder, then, that women of colour have long felt alienated by feminists like Steinem? Where do we fit when we’re being asked to choose between Obama and Clinton as a metaphor for race versus gender? And how are we supposed to react when an incorrect choice labels us as “less radical”?