The Most Recent Word On Sexism in National Politics

How do people without students find anything cool?

Hat tip.

What Would Eleanor Roosevelt Do? The Radical Ponders The State Of The Union

Last night, after a week of watching the Democratic Party proudly raise its liberal banner years after George H.W. Bush operatives tagged the Dukakis campaign with "the L word," I am happy to say that, whatever happens in this election, the spirits of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey once again walk the land. And in a black man's body, no less. The Democratic party is reclaiming its commitment to working people, to the frail among us, and to the rule of law.

I had many thoughts, but prominent among them was: "That I should live to see this day."

While some may not have felt Obama brought anything more specific to his acceptance speech than he has to any speech, I disagree. What use has it ever been to hear that a president will spend eight billion dollars on this problem, and three trillion on that? When has money been more critical to an historical outcome than a sense of mission? Obama committed to guaranteed health insurance; ending the war in Iraq; saving social security; quality public education; reforming the tax code to stop the flow of money to the wealthy. He committed to addressing the great national shame of foreclosure and poverty; to the future of military veterans who currently return from combat and are cut loose as quickly as possible to fend for themselves in confusion and pain.

I think the consequences of the war we never wanted will be particularly important for liberals to embrace in this election. It doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to know that it is better for many wounded veterans' families if they die, rather than live: death at least brings several hundred thousand dollars in insurance and federal compensation payments. Life brings decades of medical bills that bankrupt the family. In fact, most people who have been plunged into poverty have done nothing to cause it. They have been robbed by deregulated markets, by refusal to enact national health care, by an illegal war and a prison system that has stolen our young and our money and poured it into contractors who line the pockets of politicians, by disastrous education policies that bleed money out of the public coffers to privatized schools and unfunded mandates that replace real learning with tests.

Can Obama turn things around, given the ruined state of our country? Is anything we do, as citizens of good will, going to be enough for him to succeed? I don't know. But let me remind you, dear reader, that when the United States began to commit to the fight against fascism in 1939, and then went to war two years later, this country was ruined in similar ways. But we did it anyway because we had ideas and the will to succeed.

Si, se puede.

You can argue with me on the fine points. You can remind me of the Democrats who have been collaborators in this disaster: the Clintons, for example, and everyone who voted for NAFTA, NCLB and the war. You can remind me of the Democratic policies that turned resentful (yes, resentful -- historians know he spoke the truth here) white voters enraged about desegregation and antipoverty programs over to the Republicans. But I still maintain this central truth: this disaster was planned and executed by a ruthless conservative establishment dedicated to the transfer of wealth from the many to the few - not just the Reagans, Bushes and Cheneys, but the William Kristols, the Pat Buchanans, the Milton Friedmans, the John Yoos, the Phyllis Schlafleys, the David Horowitzs, the Rupert Murdochs, the Rush Limbaughs, the Ann Coulters, the John Silbers. This is what they have done to us, and to our country: they stole our money, and spouting constitutional pieties all the way, they stole our constitution. Talking about freedom all the way, they stole our freedom and replaced it with fear, suspicion, intolerance and poverty.

And this is what made the most difference to me last night: Obama, and others, have finally said, straight out, what Congress and the press has been unwilling to say for years: "the Emperor has no clothes. None. The Emperor is stark, staring naked, and those of us who could afford to have turned away because the power of corruption in this country has been so awesome and overwhelming." But many people, for example every member of the military, their families, people wallowing in debt because financial fraud is now legal, and hundreds of thousands of people on the Gulf Coast still suffering from the impact of Hurricane Katrina three years later to the day couldn't turn away. They have had no place to go. And as southerners wait for another hurricane to strike the Gulf Coast, wait to see if their hard earned property will still be there next week, the same mean, broken government is in charge. The Bush administration let them drown once, and they will do it again, because three years later that city is no safer, the levees no taller, the working people no more able to help themselves than they ever were.

There's the Republican party in a nutshell, friends. You live and die, succeed or fail, alone. Forget it that the rich, or even the modestly well off like your Radical here, are never alone. They have financial advisors, tax accountants, trust funds, 401k managers, secretaries, domestic servants, a whole army out there fighting to keep gasoline under $5.00 a gallon. They have inheritances, private schools, several (seven? eight?) homes. And even those who don't expect to be independently wealthy have parents who write a check every year for the maximum annual gift that can be passed on from an estate without taxation. And yet all we hear from the Republicans is that if every American doesn't go it alone, the Union will fall.

Well, they have lied. And they will go on lying. But -- regardless of the details (or lack thereof) Obama and the Democratic party are telling the truth this time. Things are bad in America, and it doesn't require a return to Great Society policies (which, I might remind you, were enacted during one of the most dishonest periods in American foreign policy ever, and did not end poverty either) for us to be Democrats again and admit that no one -- no one -- goes it alone. To say loudly and clearly that the federal government has a special obligation to citizens who are alone. That is part of what a commitment to human rights and to freedom, at home and abroad, means.

I want to close by citing the ideological architecture of modern American liberalism, as it was articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his state of the union address on January 6, 1941. This has come to be known as the "Four Freedoms" speech, in which FDR spoke of the responsibilities of government at a dark time when the United States had not recovered from the Depression, and was about to plunge into a terrible war. As he reached the conclusion of this speech, Roosevelt said:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

This wasn't very specific, was it? And yet a whole democratic world order, not to mention the ongoing achievement of civil rights for minorities, women, children, the poor and the queer in the United States, was built on it -- however imperfectly.

It's time. We need to act. And for those of you who are still ripped about Hillary Clinton not winning the nomination, ask yourself: what would Eleanor Roosevelt do? Then go do it.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

As It Turns Out, This Year's Campaign Is Not Going To Be Revolutionary After All

One of the things that is great about being on the Zenith faculty is that my students (and I use this term broadly, since I teach relatively few of them) can always be counted on to be amusing. Well-behaved, not so much, but I don't care about that most of the time, and don't even really value it (as anyone who knows me or follows this blog could testify.) But amusing is essential. Among their habits is providing a helpful public service. They sift through the gunk that proliferates on the internet to come up with the funniest things -- things that will lift our spirits; things to provide blog content over the weekend when we faculty should really be writing for those stuffy folks who publish words on paper. And my students provide this service at no charge whatsoever - whereas they are charged for everything they get from me through annual payments of almost $45K. I find this remarkably generous of them, don't you?

See the latest contribution, via internet content producer Jib Jab:

Hat tip.

Political Notes: Of Kings, and Kingmakers

Several summers ago, following George W. Bush's re-election, I had the pleasure of sitting down informally with two progressive Democratic party activists. Over evening drinks, a group of us discussed plans for the next election. This couple -- who are well-to-do but not mega-rich fundraisers -- were quite confident that Hillary Clinton would be the party nominee. I remember feeling both a great thrill that I had tapped into this insider conversation, and pretty annoyed that it was all over before we had begun. My annoyance was tempered, to some extent, by the fact that these two activists were genuinely interested in how Clinton would play back in New England, what our issues were with a potential Clinton presidency, and so on.

As the Clinton candidacy teeters on the edge of Big Trouble, I look back on this conversation, and think: "Well." (This is how Radicals sometimes verbally mark an unexpected turn of events. Sometimes a twist of fate is also signaled by "Ahem." Or "My goodness.")

But I also wonder whether there is a historical change in how national politics work, and whether it is a change being created by the candidacies themselves, as the Obama people want to persuade us; or whether it is being forced by shifts in media, the proliferation of arenas for activism and perhaps increased voter sophistication. Here are some things that seem different to me.

Announcing early can significantly damage a candidacy since, as time passes, the capacity of the candidate to say something new (or have policy shifts perceived as distinctly fresh) diminishes. Historically, we might also look at the Nixon campaign for hints as to how this works. That's a difficult comparison, however, since although it was assumed from election day 1956 on that Nixon would be the next Republican candidate, Eisenhower simultaneously made it clear how little he liked his vice president for the four years that Nixon worked to persuade the party base to turn out for him. Which they didn't, at least not in sufficient numbers to defeat a relative upstart.

Now Clinton, although her husband's presidency sometimes hangs like a lodestone around her neck, has altered and expanded her talking points since she announced her candidacy, many months and millions of dollars ago. A die-hard centrist, she has also moved left as the discussion has moved left. So I would say there is no question that she has grown into her candidacy. But Obama gives the impression of having grown more as a candidate, in part because his transformations, in some cases less progressive than hers, have occurred in a drastically shorter time frame. Thus, although I am not sure that he is genuinely more dynamic, he appears to be so. Furthermore, to announce early, I would argue, is also to give a false sense of one's actual support among voters. In the absence of other candidates, the poll numbers may represent supporters, who, in reality, would vote for anyone reasonable compared to the president they have had for the past eight years. Those being polled had no one else to choose except perennial outlying contenders like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. If you had asked Democrats if they would agree to change the constitution and make Arnold Schwarzenegger President, they probably would have said yes in lower, but significant, numbers.

My point is that the Clinton candidacy could only have degraded over time, barring no challengers at all, and that gives the false impression that she is less and less vital as a candidate, when in fact that is not the case. Her positions have become more complex, and more progressive. Obama's positions continue to mimic those of other candidates. He too has moved left, but his policies are unoriginal and less well framed, particularly since he has chosen to differentiate himself from Clinton by articulating himself as the voice of a movement (a people person) rather than a policy maker (politican.) People who believe that movement politics are the way out of a neo-liberal impasse in the Democratic party (my friends, to whom I dedicated my primary vote for Obama) have faith that the innovative policy making will come later. I hope that this is right. But it also creates the danger that should the "movement" not push Obama into the candidacy, that they will have little left in common with each other or with the Democratic party.

The candidate with the most money does not necessarily win.That big money donors bypassed the electorate to hand-pick candidates was a central criticism in the next to last chapter --"Who Are the Secret Kingmakers?" --of Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 blockbuster, A Choice, Not an Echo. Ironically, the conservative movement Schlafly spoke from and to revitalized the Republican party in the 1970’s and 1980’s by replacing one set of kingmakers (northeastern liberal Republicans like the Rockefellers) with others (rabid right-wingers like Richard Scaife and Adolph Coors.) One thing that has changed the terrain is grassroots fundraising, which I would suggest makes it possible to level the playing field somewhat. This has helped the Obama insurgency, not just because small donations add up, but also because a campaign can use its data on small donors -- who are they, how many, where do they live -- to go to big donors and get them to pony up for a candidate who is developing a powerful, demonstrable base: small donations simply give you better data on actual voters who are supporting a candidate than large donations from the same old party fundraisers can. Hence, I would argue, the small donors can alter the giving patterns of the "kingmakers." Big donors who originally gave only to Clinton are now hedging their bets and giving to Obama as well because of the traction he has demonstrated, not just through primary victories, but through small donation data.

Another hypothesis that needs to be tested is this: that if there is something slightly noxious about a candidate, being rich makes it worse. The Romney candidacy seems emblematic on this point. I know, we have to control for the fact that the Mormon thing made him odd to people, and that he was a shape-shifter as a conservative. Also, as Paul Begala said on National Public Radio, that he is widely perceived as a "big phony." George Bush seemed like a big phony to slightly more than half the voters in 2000, and not to slightly less than half, so this might be less of an issue by itself. However, Romney -- unlike Bush, Jon Corzine, Mike Bloomberg, and others -- was not able to buy the nomination, nor did his deep pockets persuade the party apparatus at any juncture that his candidacy was viable.

The pollsters can't give us reliable, hard numbers the way they used to. One feature of this, as my historian colleague Dr. Victorian pointed out, is that there are large numbers of young and not so young people who no longer have land lines, and that pollsters have no way of getting to cell phones systematically. This becomes a huge issue with a candidate embraced by the young since those of us who have done phone-banking know that it's not "Who do you like?" that is always the most important question. "Do you plan to vote?" is at least as important. But has anyone but me noticed that, while white people are consistently being broken out by gender, black voters are not always broken out by gender, and Hispanic voters and working class voters rarely are? This suggests to me that pollsters are unfamiliar with how to work with gender difference except among the group they have been working with since telephones made polling possible in the 1920's, comfortably well-off white people. Or middle-class white people. Whatever you want to call them. And in the same vein, it seems that the activism of people of color, as voters and donors, is outpacing the knowledge of pollsters and political scientists about how to discuss these groups as necessarily internally segmented audiences. Catch up, boys and girls.

Conservatives are just as worried about weirdos as liberals are worried about weirdos or conservatives. Frankly, I find this comforting. McCain's surge to the candidacy, when he does not poll well among conservatives at all, suggests that conservatives are working actively against a Mike Huckabee candidacy at this point. Yes, conservatives tend to want lower taxes and less government. But it's rare that they suggest eliminating revenue collection altogether. If you watch CNN you have probably seen the Huckabee ad where he tells you dead seriously that he plans on closing the Internal Revenue Service by Presidential order as soon as he is inaugurated. In itself, this is a wacky idea, and makes you wonder how he intends to either continue prosecuting the war in Iraq or bring the troops home (heck, maybe we'll just leave them there!) But it also makes you wonder -- what else would he close? Is it time to start stockpiling canned goods again?

A final note: this is utterly impressionistic, but have you noticed that while both Obama and Clinton are battling for a very active demographic of poor voters, each of them still talks relentlessly about what they will do for the "middle class?" It is a truism of American history that, since the 1950's, working class and wealthy people have collectively identified as "middle class," but do poor people working three to five jobs as a family still identify as "middle class?" What's the deal here?

A final, final note: which candidate will be the first to say that FEMA is lying when they say they didn't know that people living in trailers filled with formaldehyde and other chemical products were in danger?

Things I Think About As We Approach The Tsunami Primary on February 5

Here are the things that do not worry me at all.

That Barack Obama smoked pot. The only thing I can say about this is: Oh. Please. Stop. This -- and the severe penalties that people can be exposed to for taking naked pictures of their toddlers at the beach and having them developed at Walmart -- are perhaps the worst residue of the Reagan era's conservative cultural backlash. Being honest about getting high is, in my opinion, one of the things that makes this man genuine in his approach to others -- it's no wonder that young people like him! And I can name at least one prominent conservative intellectual/pundit, a man who helped get us into the Iraq war, who I got high with repeatedly in college. So shut up already. Clearly getting high is not a barrier to power.

That Hillary Clinton is a racist. This is truly absurd. Hillary and Bill have been profoundly progressive on race, Bill as a white governor in a state that -- under former governor Orville Faubus -- was for a short time the poster child for massive white resistance to desegregation. And Barack Obama has offered us proof of what he said in last night's debate was his great weakness -- a lack of executive experience -- by not putting the hammer down on this right away. I am quite sure that he does not believe in the kind of attack that was launched by people in his campaign in response to Senator Clinton's remarks about Dr. King. Now the Clintons are not so progressive on welfare, education, unionization or fair trade. But those are different -- if related -- issues, and not what Senator Clinton was attacked about. Which, to my mind, means something about the political intent of those who attacked her.

That John Edwards has a large, expensive house. Has anyone evaluated the Clinton bungalow lately, in lovely Westchester County? How about the Obama homestead in pricey metropolitan Illinois? And perhaps the founder of modern liberalism -- not to mention the welfare state itself -- Franklin Roosevelt: what was his net worth, and how many houses did he own when he became President? President Reagan? That newish Bush ranch? And let me just say -- you could easily spend $400 on a haircut. Someone needs to ask Hillary what she spent on her most recent color job.

That Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Honestly, as an exiled Westerner, I kind of like him for this. Do you know that Mormonism is the only true American religion? As a queer, I've never seen polygamy as entirely bad -- only abused as an institution. And why would Mitt Romney be a worse president than Mike Huckabee, who believes that the world will be devoured in fire and chaos, with the Devil walking the earth, and that only those who have taken Jesus Christ as their Saviour will survive and be taken to heaven to live with their loved ones?



Here are the things that do worry me.

That every Democratic candidate is solid on civil unions that convey equal rights for gay and lesbian people, as well as gay and lesbian adoption and child custody, but all candidates have tacitly accepted that marriage for queers is a political poison pill. Ok -- I don't believe in marriage as a way to convey equality. I don't believe in marriage at all as an institution that is inherently good for anyone. But really -- if civil unions and marriage would be the same in every way in a Democratic administration, why would we keep the two legal statuses separate (but equal)? This is the kind of thing that causes me to sympathize with gay men and lesbians with whom I otherwise have nothing in common: letting them get married undermines our society and economy -- how?

That Barack Obama doesn't think his lack of administrative experience/ability is an issue. Honey, that's why they call it "Commander in Chief," and the President's quarters "the Executive Wing." And no, you can't just say you will hire the good people who will run the government for you, you will supply great ideas for change and it will be ok. Who are these people? Will we be electing them?

That Hillary Clinton says things like the Martin Luther King statement and doesn't think it will come back to smack her in the fanny. The Clintons are too damn smart and too ready to demonstrate it: that caused people to hurt them before, and it will cause people to hurt them again. And of course Hillary was historically correct: what activist actually does move legislation? Did John Brown, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Tubman end slavery? Did SDS bring the troops home from Vietnam? All you have to do is read Robert Caro's terrific third volume on Lyndon Johnson (which only goes up to 1960) and you know what the woman was talking about. The Senate sat there for twenty years watching mass black protest in the South and violent white resistance to that protest and did almost nothing. It took a President who knew how to control the Senate to get voting rights and civil rights legislation passed. Hillary is talking about the moral authority of the presidency, but she is also talking about raw, statist power. And in politics nowadays we are supposed to talk about political power in user-friendly ways that mask and mystify its real nature.

That media outlets get to decide for the rest of us citizens who is a legitimate candidate and who is not. Lucky for democracy, the kickin' Dennis Kucinich is taking this on by suing NBC over his exclusion from the televised Nevada debate. My question: what happened to the League of Women Voters, who used to sponsor these debates?

That Mike Huckabee reminds me a lot of Huey Long. Or Henry George. Watch him talk, why don't you?

But can I say that I do just love politics? I really do.

Look! A Black Woman; or, Re-interpreting the History of Black Men and White Women in Politics

I read the Sunday New York Times in this order: sports section, Styles section (quick jump to the "Modern Love" feature, then a scan of the marriage announcements to see if there is anyone I know who is Doing It), "A" section, Metro section, Connecticut section. If, as I do, you live outside the metropolitan area -- in Connecticut, Minneapolis or Bahrain -- the magazine and the Book Review come on Saturday. This is not only distinctly un-festive, it causes us in this household to miss Sundays with the paper and deli from Russ and Daughters on East Houston Street in New York. But it matters less than it might have in the past.  I have come to dislike the Magazine and the Book Review section; the former is badly edited from my perspective and the stories inane, while the latter tells you nothing you wouldn't learn from looking up the book on Amazon.com.

I almost never read the "Week in Review" section. I don't know why, except that I spend enough time on the internet that by Sunday I often feel that I have absorbed enough commentary on the week's news. Except today.  For some reason my aging eyes picked out the names of history colleagues Sara Evans, Joan Scott and James Patterson, who were asked to comment on the Hillary Clinton - Barack Obama primary contest. This was timely for your Radical because, after soliciting the opinions of many young friends over the last ten days, I had just decided last night to give it up that John Edwards will be my party's nominee. And even though the Connecticut primary is so irrelevant and our blue state status so predetermined that candidates only come through to collect money from us, I feel that I need to begin to develop an opinion nonetheless, and one that addresses the political terrain as it is developing. So I point you to the front page article in today's Week in Review, Mark Leibovitch's "Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course," which pursues the question of whether the "white woman" or the "black man" should "go first" as a path-breaking presidential nominee.

I would like to propose that it doesn't matter whether we nominate the white woman or the black man, since they both have utterly bourgeois values and neither one provides much of a new direction -- both will have a horrendous burden awaiting them, and I think there is a good chance that neither one will be able to do much more than stop the bleeding.  Which would be a relief, but not progress, as it used to be perceived.  I would also propose that what it means intellectually or politically to be a "woman" or "black" or "gay" is something we should be long over, given such luminaries as Phyllis Schlafly, Clarence Thomas and the extended Cheney clan.

So let's start somewhere else.  As a queer feminist, I would like to tackle the binary we are being asked to make a decision about here, and propose that while identity politics can help us critique policies that have prevented movement on the large number of imperfections in our democracy in recent years, we have also hit the limits of identity politics in this election. It may truly not make a difference whether we choose Clinton or Obama. In the general election, either the Republicans will do the sensible thing and nominate McCain -- in which case it will be a dogfight -- or they will nominate anyone else and it won't. And all three prospective presidents will have trouble governing -- for different reasons, none of which will be related to race or gender.

But since I wanted to vote for the white man whose politics represented a significant shift to the left, and this has pretty much been taken off the table, I hoped the article would give me something to think about. Which it did -- except, of course, what it caused me to ruminate on is how journalists deploy history badly to imagine the significance of current events and perpetuate false choices. And I don't blame this on the historians, mind you: any of us who has been interviewed for a newspaper article knows that it is the rare journalist who comes to us to learn something.  Mostly they are looking for good quotes to beef up the story they already wanted to write. Evans, Scott and Patterson do a skillful job of teaching a large audience by delivering the quotes that Leibovich used. Perhaps the most masterful is this analytical point by Joan Scott, in which she sums up three books worth of feminist political theory in one sentence: "How do you become a universal figure," i.e., a president, "when you represent movements that have claimed the right of equality for you in your difference?"

So despite what the historians gave them, the article misses the point in its unwillingness to address the difficult questions here, one of which is the missing -- and impossible figure -- of a black woman as a contemporary political leader, and what that means. The article writes the possibility of a black woman out immediately by looking to the nineteenth century rift between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass over the Fourteenth Amendment as a suitable parallel, noting that despite their differences, the women's movement and the movement for African American civil rights moved forward together from the 1860's onward.  

This is simply misleading and untrue, except in a very general sense. The only reason this analysis has credibility is because of a skillful, entirely modern political phenomenon which should lead us back, as Joan Scott suggests, to the emergence of difference as a category through which similar political claims could be made by disempowered identity groups, working in loose coalition and using each others' victories in the courts and in Congress to amass credibility. By the 1970's, as Alice Kessler Harris has shown, American feminists had long decided to pattern their claim to citizenship on the modern civil rights movements, as would gay and lesbian activists after them. This, and Sara Evans' path breaking scholarship on the direct links between the movement for black civil rights and second wave feminist organizing, has caused many casual observers to articulate the relations between the two movements as harmonious and their issues as comparable in the twentieth century, an argument that is significantly troubled if you look at the struggles between white women and women of color in the feminist movement from the mid-1960's on. "One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women's movement," wrote the members of the Combahee River Collective in their 1974 Statement "As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women's movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue."

So this is where we need to look at history -- and our current dilemma about the Clinton-Obama primary campaign -- far more critically. Four historical arguments that might better inform our thinking are:

1. The nature of support for expanding the franchise has always depended on who would benefit, and that has to be placed in the context of class politics: in the 1860's, it was the Republican party who first used black votes and then used a powerful white male war veterans' apparatus, the Grand Army of the Republic, to pursue support for a set of expansionist national policies that were dedicated to putting money in the pockets of national elites.

2. Voting has always, more or less, been a corrupt and inexact practice in the United States. It became idealized in the post- World War II period because of the contradictions between the violence of mass black disenfranchisement and United States foreign policy claims that articulated voting as a major point of distinction between democratic and communist forms of government (see, for example, founding contributor to Legal History Blog(ger) and historian Mary Dudziak on this topic.) In the United States, however, black people and poor people have been perceived over the long term as the source, rather than the means, of this corruption in a way that white women -- often viewed as the conscience of white men -- have not. When black men in the south proved not to be as corruptible as the Republican party had initially hoped, activating their own political networks independent of the national Republican party, and negotiating locally, first with southern Democrats and then with third-party movements, Republicans and Democrats agreed between themselves in 1877 that the black franchise in the south was "corrupt" (see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Belknap Press, 2003). And it is no accident that white women's votes were seen to have a "purifying" influence by 1921, when the historians of the Dunning school had "proven" to a national political elite that black men's votes were the epitome of corruption.

3. White women have been perceived as exceptional in the category of "women" over the course of United States history:  for example, the modern perception of welfare recipients as overwhelmingly women of color living their lives on undeserved charity, or the choice of white feminists to emphasize their whiteness as a qualification for full citizenship prior to 1921. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her allies, as the central movers of a bourgeois nineteenth century women's movement, capitalized on the perception that they were exceptional among the mass of women, and that their whiteness entitled them to political privilege.  They were racists, in the modern sense, because like most educated, middle class people, black and white they did not believe in the universal franchise. They believed that the enfranchisement of millions of new citizens -- former slaves or immigrants -- corrupted the political system because their educational and biological inferiority could be easily exploited by others. They were what coalesces late in the nineteenth century as "liberal racialists," who believed that black people would eventually be prepared to shoulder social and political responsibility, but that slavery had delayed that project for an indeterminate amount of time. One was not simply a "racist" in the nineteenth century: racialisms were a complex set of beliefs that criss-crossed class, gender, and often "racial" groups themselves.

4. Bourgeois black men who aspired to political office in the nineteenth century, many of whom, like Barack Obama, were bi-racial, and many of whom were the acknowledged or unacknowledged sons of planter elites, have also historically believed that they were exceptional among the greater mass of black people, both those who were poor and undereducated, and those who were women. And, frankly, nineteenth century white feminists were not wrong to perceive themselves as having been left at the altar after the Civil War by black male politicians, who believed that their opportunity for the vote would be lost if they "feminized" their claims by insisting on bringing their white, feminist allies from the anti-slavery movement with them. This, I think, muddies the water significantly as to whether white women are the only villains of this sordid little historical tale. If you admire pragmatism, it was probably the right thing to do; if you admire principle, it was not.

OK, so to return to the present -- what is really at stake in the Clinton-Obama contest? What is at stake, I would argue,  is not the merits of the two candidates (who are distinguishable, but barely, and it's hard to even know how Obama's slightly more liberal stance would play out in post-election political realities.) The real anxiety here for the Democratic party is whether "women" and "blacks" -- the most sought after political blocks of votes over the last half century-- will actually hold together as political groups and which candidate will maximize their impact.   Can the reduced number of  "black" voters who have not been disenfranchised by modern forms of voter purge be counted upon to turn out and vote for a Democratic candidate who is a white woman?  Will Obama be perceived as "black" by voters who still view American blackness through a history of enslavement that Obama cannot claim? Will "women" stay home if they are thwarted again in their quest for political equality and power?  And what I propose is this: that both candidates pledge that whichever one of them wins the nomination, that they will run together as a ticket. This, in my view, does two things. It might get us back to ideas -- rather than inane debates about whose political rights matter most -- and it would demonstrate that each candidate is truly willing to put the nation's best interests at this crucial historical moment ahead of careerism and selfish personal gain.

And by the way, if you don't recognize her: the woman at the top of the page is the late, great, Shirley Chisholm. She was the first African-American woman to be elected to Congress, and in 1972 she became the first black woman to run as a major party candidate for President of the United States.