The Automatik

From This Pop Life:

“The Oppression Olympics” refers to the idea that somehow, you can deny someone their suffering in order to posit your own. People who play the Oppression Olympics get so hung up on their own entitlement to being the Chosen Ones of Fucked Up History that they’re defensive that anyone else would try to lay claim to that legacy, even in what is clearly a show of solidarity.

Or as someone on the LiveJournal community Debunking White put it: “the I’m-oppressed-so-you-can’t-be game.”

Graphic by Bint Alshamsa from her blog
Click on the graphic for a larger version.

Forget the Beijing Olympics and tune in instead to this year’s Democratic Presidential Nomination Badwill Games.

Gloria Steinem, in a recent debate with Melissa Harris-Lacewell, said the following:

“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.”

But in her now-infamous New York Times Op-Ed piece she said that, “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.” She went on to ask why “the sex barrier [is] not taken as seriously as the racial one.” Steinem claims that she is “trying not to choose between race and gender.”

Here’s the thing, Ms. Steinem: you don’t have to.

Liz Sabater quotes an essay by Maria Niles called Open Letter To My White Sisters (which should be read in its entirety), saying that Niles “reminds white women that they can use the royal ‘we’ of when talking about women wanting a woman in the White House because they don’t have to think about race at all when addressing their minority status.”

Niles: I love, adore and respect my white sisters but I am disappointed in some of them. A few have said that the power of seeing the first woman in the White House has put Clinton over the top as their candidate. I always point out that they can only say that because they are not black women. That the face of racial equality is male and the face of gender equality is white is nothing new. But to see the promise of Hillary Clinton in the White House without even acknowledging the promise of Barack Obama in the White House is a matter of privilege.

Instead of addressing the intersectionality of race and gender, Gloria Steinem, like so many others, has decided instead to play the game of Oppression Olympics.

Harris-Lacewell took her to task on her comments in the debate and her Op-Ed piece.

“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.”

She goes on to state:

“I just feel that we have got to get clear about the fact that race and gender are not these clear dichotomies in which, you know, you’re a woman or you’re black. I’m sitting here in my black womanhood body, knowing that it is more complicated than that. African American men have been complicit in the oppression of African American women. 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.”

Perhaps the most important point I took back from Harris-Lacewell’s discussion, however, is the following:

“. . . the key here is to remember, African Americans, like white women, are not a monolithic voting group. They do not make all decisions together. We don’t have a straw vote first and then decide who we’re going to support. We’re independent individual citizens making choices.”

It is our choice, as women, to vote for whom we choose and we shouldn’t feel forced to choose between race and gender when making those choices.

We should all be able to exercise our freedom to vote for the candidate we want, based on that candidate’s positions on the issues most important to us. We should all be able to exercise our freedom to vote for the candidate based on their own words and actions.

This means we shouldn’t support or condemn Hillary Clinton based on the words and actions of Steinem, Roseanne Barr, or Geraldine Ferraro. And we shouldn’t support or condemn her based on the words and actions of her former pastor, Reverend William Procanick, who has been convicted of “first-degree sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.”

Similarly, we should not support or condemn Barack Obama based on the words and actions of Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan.

What we should do is take the candidates to task for their responses; whether or not the candidates’ words and actions support or condone the words and actions of others.

What we should do is take the mainstream media to task for not giving equal coverage to the potentially damaging past misdeeds of both Clinton and Obama. And we should take them to task for attributing the opinions of their supporters to the individual candidates by misquoting, cherry-picking quotes, or just plain ignoring the facts.

Don’t let the mainstream media speak for you, either. Read the original speeches and comments; watch the unedited YouTube and QuickTime media clips. And then, decide for yourself.