Race and Gender in Presidential Politics: A Debate Between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Democracy Now - The War and Peace Report
January 14, 2008


In the race for the Democratic nomination, a victory for either Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama—as the first woman or African American Democratic nominee—would be unprecedented in U.S. history. We host a discussion on race and gender politics with feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem and Princeton University Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

Guests:
Gloria Steinem, feminist pioneer and bestselling author of several books, including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. In the early ‘70s she founded Ms. Magazine and New York magazine and also helped organize the National Women’s Political Caucus. More recently she co-founded the Women’s Media Center in 2004.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She is at work on a new book called For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn’t Enough.
Rush TranscriptThis transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Related Links
Read Steinem's OpEd "Women Are Never Front-Runners" (See AAAA Blog)
Women's Media Center
Melissa Harris Lacewell Online

AMY GOODMAN: The results from Iowa and New Hampshire have placed Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the current frontrunners for the Democratic nomination. A victory for either of them as the first woman or African American Democratic nominee, not to mention president, would be unprecedented in American history.
In recent days, their differences over foreign and domestic policy have taken a backseat. Instead, questions of race and gender have dominated the political contest between them. The debate came to a head over a comment made by Senator Clinton in an interview on Fox News.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do; presidents before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said, “We’re going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.
AMY GOODMAN: After Clinton made those remarks, Senator Obama and several others criticized her for minimizing Dr. King’s role in securing the Civil Rights Act. NBC host Tim Russert questioned Senator Clinton about this on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. Clinton emphasized race or gender should have nothing to do with the campaign.
SEN. HILLARY CLINTON: This is the most exciting election we’ve had in such a long time, because you have an African American, an extraordinary man, a person of tremendous talents and abilities, running to become our president; you have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us want to inject race or gender in this campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we host a discussion on race and gender politics in the race for the Democratic nomination.
Gloria Steinem is a feminist pioneer, a bestselling writer. She founded Ms. Magazine, helped organize the National Women’s Political Caucus in the early ’70s, and in 2004 co-founded the Women’s Media Center. Gloria Steinem recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Times supporting Hillary Clinton. It’s titled “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” She argues Senator Obama could never have been a viable candidate if he were a woman and asks, “Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” Gloria Steinem joins me here in the firehouse studio.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. She is at work on a new book called For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn’t Enough. Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a Barack Obama supporter. She joins us now from Princeton, New Jersey.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Gloria Steinem, let’s begin with you. You laid out a hypothetical in your op-ed piece, in your column. Why don’t you lay it out for us here?
GLORIA STEINEM: Well, I was just—I think one learns a lot from parallels, and so it would be interesting to try to project what would have happened to Barack Obama in his life if he had been a female human being. I mean, I really think that we have seen historically that women of color, African American women, have understood—have been just in a better position, you know, to understand the roles of both sex and race, and it made me nostalgic for the days of Shirley Chisholm and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
GLORIA STEINEM: Well, you know, it was so clear that, you know, because one didn’t have to choose between race and gender. And indeed, I am still trying not to choose between race and gender, because the basis of my choice was not that, but that, in fact, Hillary Clinton will arrive in Washington knowing how Washington works, because she’s had it written on her skin like Kafka in The Prisoner—wasn’t it?—when—and I think we can’t afford really—we’re in such dire circumstances that to have the first couple of years of Carter or even the first couple of years of Clinton again, who arrived in Washington not understanding how Washington worked. But if Barack Obama is the candidate, I will work for him with a whole heart. And I wish we had preferential voting, you know, so we can go one, two and three, at least, rather than having to choose only one.
AMY GOODMAN: You hadn’t originally come out for Hillary Clinton.
GLORIA STEINEM: No, my first column on this subject was essentially taking to task the media, who were asking us, trying to force us to choose prematurely and asking me, “Are you supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?” And I would always just say yes, because it seemed to me wrong that they were, you know, so forced on—so focused on this long before the primaries.
AMY GOODMAN: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, your thoughts on this discussion about race and gender?
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, I mean, honestly, I’m appalled by the parallel that Ms. Steinem draws in the beginning part of the New York Times article. What she’s trying to do there is to make a claim towards sort of bringing in black women into a coalition around questions of gender and asking us to ignore the ways in which race and gender intersect. This is actually a standard problem of second-wave feminism, which, although there have been twenty-five years now—oh, going on forty years, actually, of African American women pushing back against this, have really failed to think about the ways in which trying to appropriate black women’s lives’ experience in that way is really offensive, actually.
And so, when Steinem suggests, for example, in that article that Obama is a lawyer married to another lawyer and to suggest that, for example, Hillary Clinton represents some kind of sort of breakthrough in questions of gender, I think that ignores an entire history in which white women have in fact been in the White House. They’ve been there as an attachment to white male patriarchal power. It’s the same way that Hillary Clinton is now making a claim towards experience. It’s not her experience. It’s her experience married to, connected to, climbing up on white male patriarchy. This is exactly the ways in which this kind of system actually silences questions of gender that are more complicated than simply sort of putting white women in positions of power and then claiming women’s issues are cared for.
Now, what I know from the work that I’ve done on the Obama campaign is that there are tens of thousands of extremely hard-working white men and women, as well as black men and women, as well as actually a huge multiracial and interethnic coalition of people working for Barack Obama. And so, for Steinem to sort of make this very clear race and gender dichotomy that she does in that New York Times op-ed piece, I think it’s the very worst of second-wave feminism.
[To see the entire transcript or view the video, go to: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/14/race_and_gender_in_presidential_politics]

Women Are Never Front-Runners

The New York Times
January 8, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
By GLORIA STEINEM

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.
Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?
If you answered no to either question, you’re not alone. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.
That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).
If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.
So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.
I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.
But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.
What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.
What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.
[To read the entire op-ed, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/opinion/08steinem.html?em&ex=1200459600&en=4d398271b1a7c7da&ei=5087%0A]

[See one response to Gloria Steinem's controversial op-ed from a young feminist:
http://www.glamour.com/news/blogs/glamocracy/2008/01/an-open-letter.html ]