No Bravery in Dividing and Distracting by Race and Gender

by Audrey deCoursey

Now, of course I am glad about Obama’s win in South Carolina today. But that’s not what I’m here to write about.

What strikes me about the media analysis (spin?) of the election results is how completely they want to erase African-American female voters. On CNN, their break-downs of different categories of voters have been saying, “Women vote for Clinton for the same reason Blacks vote for Obama,” i.e. for pride in their identity. But where does that leave Black women? It seems that the title of the Black Women’s studies reader edited by Gloria Hull is still all too apt: when it comes to the simplistic binaries of many media commentators, “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men.” And who of us are brave enough to make a politics for all of us?

It occurs to me that emphasizing the identity politics at play in this primary season is another way to divide this election (and its voters) by generation more than by race or gender: identity politics have been the staple of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s; third wave feminism and queer rights movements have tried to transcend the identities of gender and sexuality in becoming fully human.  Continuing to contextualize the divisions in this election by racial and gender identities is a way of continuing to spin the election in the terms expected by the middle-aged generation Clinton is counting on for her support.

Obama, meanwhile, is trying to appeal to voters across race, gender, class, age, and education, by talking about change and the future, even as he is boxed into the tired categories his opponents wish to relegate him to.   Some media commentators’ insistence on comparing him to Jesse Jackson – who didn’t win and was not as strong a candidate as Obama is now – instead of comparing him to white candidates/presidents like John F. Kennedy, sends a pretty clear message about what limited frameworks they will use to consider candidates who are not straight, white males.  One would think that Obama’s wins in Iowa and  South Carolina, which represent very different racial diversities, would liberate election analysts from boxing the candidates into racial categories, but perhaps that’s too much hope for me to have in mainstream media?  (For a funny spoof of this media tendency, check out the Daily Show’s “Daily Show-Down” with Samantha Bee on January 18, 2008.)