[Peace-discuss] Pitfalls of identity politics

[C. G. Estabrook]

Ishmael Reed's Tour De Force on Race and Gender in America

An excerpt from "Ma and Pa Clinton Flog an Uppity Black Man":

     Having been educated at elite schools where studying The War of the 
Roses was more important than studying Reconstruction, the 
under-educated white male punditry and their token white women, failed 
to detect the racial code phrases that both Clintons and their 
surrogates sent out -- codes that, judging from their responses, 
infuriated blacks caught immediately. Blacks have been deciphering these 
hidden messages for four hundred years. They had to, in order to survive.

     Gloria Steinem perhaps attended the same schools. Her remark that 
black men received the vote "fifty years before women," in a Times Op-Ed 
(Jan.8) which some say contributed to Obama's defeat in New Hampshire, 
ignores the fact that black men were met by white terrorism, including 
massacres, and economic retaliation when attempting to exercise the 
franchise. She and her followers, who've spent thousands of hours in 
graduate school, must have gotten all of their information about 
Reconstruction from "Gone With The Wind," where moviegoers are asked to 
sympathize with a proto-feminist, Scarlett O'Hara, who finally has to 
fend for herself after years of being doted upon by the unpaid household 
help. Booker T. Washington, an educator born into slavery, said that 
young white people had been waited on so that after the war they didn't 
know how to take care of themselves and Mary Chesnutt, author of "The 
Civil War Diaries," and a friend of Confederate president Jefferson 
Davis's family, said that upper class southern white women were so slave 
dependent that they were "indolent." Steinem and her followers should 
read "Redemption, The Last Battle Of The Civil War," by Nicholas Lemann, 
which tells the story about how "in 1875, an army of white terrorists in 
Mississippi led a campaign to 'redeem' their state -- to abolish with 
violence and murder if need be, the newly won civil rights of freed 
slaves and blacks." Such violence and intimidation was practiced all 
over the south, sometimes resulting in massacres. One of worst massacres 
of black men occurred at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. Their crime? 
Attempting to exercise the voting rights awarded to them "fifty years," 
before white women received theirs. Lemann writes, "Burning Negroes" met 
"savage and hellish butchery.

     "They were all killed, unarmed, at close range, while begging for 
mercy. Those who tried to escape, were overtaken, mustered in crowds, 
made to stand around, and, while in every attitude of humiliation and 
supplication, were shot down and their bodies mangled and hacked to 
hasten their death or to satiate the hellish malice of their heartless 
murderers, even after they were dead.

     "White posses on horseback rode away from the town, looking for 
Negroes who had fled, so they could kill them."

     Elsewhere in the south, during the Confederate Restoration, black 
politicians, who were given the right to vote, "fifty years before white 
women" were removed from office by force, many through violence. In 
Wilmington, North Carolina, black men, who "received the vote fifty 
years before white women," the subject of Charles Chesnutt's great 
novel, "The Marrow of Tradition":

     "On Thursday, November 10, 1898, Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, a 
Democratic leader in Wilmington, North Carolina mustered a white mob to 
retaliate for a controversial editorial written by Alexander Manly, 
editor of the city's black newspaper, the Daily Record. The mob burned 
the newspaper's office and incited a bloody race riot in the city. By 
the end of the week, at least fourteen black citizens were dead, and 
much of the city's black leadership had been banished. This massacre 
further fueled an ongoing statewide disfranchisement campaign designed 
to crush black political power. Contemporary white chronicles of the 
event, such as those printed in the Raleigh News and Observer and 
Wilmington's The Morning Star, either blamed the African American 
community for the violence or justified white actions as necessary to 
keep the peace. African American writers produced their own accounts -- 
including fictional examinations -- that countered these white 
supremacist claims and highlighted the heroic struggles of the black 
community against racist injustice."

     Black congressmen, who, as a rule, were better educated than their 
white colleagues were expelled from Congress.

     Either Gloria Steinem hasn't done her homework, or as an ideologue 
rejects evidence that's a Google away, and the patriarchal corporate old 
media, which has appointed her the spokesperson for feminism, permits 
her ignorance to run rampant over the emails and blogs of the nation and 
though this white Oprah might have inspired her followers to march 
lockstep behind her, a progressive like Cindy Sheehan wasn't convinced. 
She called Mrs. Clinton's crying act "phony."

     Moreover, some of the suffragettes that she and her followers hail 
as feminist pioneers were racists. Some even endorsed the lynching of 
black men. In an early clash between a black and white feminist, 
anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells opposed the views of Frances 
Willard, a suffragette pioneer, who advocated lynching.

     "As the president of one of America's foremost social reform 
organizations, Frances Willard called for the protection of the purity 
of white womanhood from threats to morality and safety. In her attempts 
to bring Southern women into the W.C.T.U., Frances Willard accepted the 
rape myth and publicly condoned lynching and the color line in the 
South. Wells argued that as a Christian reformer, Willard should be 
speaking out against lynching, but instead seemed to support the 
position of Southerners."

     Ms. Willard's point of view is echoed by Susan Brownmiller's 
implying that Emmett Till got what he deserved, and the rush to judgment 
on the part of New York feminists whose pressure helped to convict the 
black and Hispanic kids accused of raping a stockbroker in Central Park. 
After DNA proved their innocence (the police promised them if they 
confessed, they could go home), a Village Voice reporter asked the 
response of these feminists to this news; only Susan Brownmiller 
responded. She said that regardless of the scientific evidence, she 
still believed that the children, who spent their youth in jail, on the 
basis of the hysteria generated by Donald Trump, the press, and leading 
New York feminists, were guilty.

As you might guess, there's much more, with Reed's observations about 
the tendency of some feminists to conflate white women with women, and 
the reaction of African Americans to the coded attacks upon Obama, 
constituting essential reading. As he acerbically observes, mainstream 
feminists don't appear to be very concerned about the black and brown 
deaths in Iraq, deaths that have resulted from a war that Hillary 
authorized. But sadly, as Reed explains, that's entirely consistent with 
the history of American feminism.

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