Archive for February 11th, 2008

Against either/or feminism

Published at February 11, 2008 in feminism, politics/government and racism. 2 Comments

Most folks have probably read Gloria Steinem’s op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” Hopefully folks have also gotten to read, listen to or watch the subsequent Democracy Now! debate between Steinem and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, in which Harris-Lacewell took Steinem to task for many of the points she makes in her op-ed. If you haven’t gotten to take a look at the debate, I highly recommend it. Here’s just a taste of what Harris-Lacewell has to say:

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.

Today I read another great response from Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler to “either/or” feminism: a feminism that deems a vote for Hillary Clinton to be the only truly feminist choice. Steinem’s op-ed echoes the arguments of this sort of feminism which, when taken to its extreme, results in the kind of malarkey that the New York State chapter of NOW put out there when it called Senator Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama “the ultimate betrayal” of women. From Crenshaw and Ensler’s essay in the Huffington Post:

While denying any intention to square off racism against sexism, the “either/or” feminists nonetheless remind us that the Black (man) got the vote before the (white) woman, that gender barriers are more rigid than racial barriers, that sexism is everywhere and racism is not, that a female Obama wouldn’t get nearly as far as a Barack Obama, and that a woman’s vote for Clinton is scrutinized while a male vote for Obama is not. Never mind of course that real suffrage for African Americans wasn’t realized until the 1960s, that there are any number of advantages that white women have in business, politics and culture that people of color do not; that all around the world women’s route to political leadership is through family dynasty which is virtually closed to marginalized groups, and that the double standard of stigmatizing Obama’s Black voters as racially motivated while whitewashing Clinton’s white voters as “just voters” constitutes the exact same double standard that the “either/or feminists” bemoan. The “either/or” crowd surprisingly claims that the two Democratic candidates are more alike than different, yet those who gravitate to Obama find their motives questioned and their loyalties on trial.

94,000 votes to go uncounted in Los Angeles

Published at February 11, 2008 in politics/government. Closed

From Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican: more than 94,000 votes from Los Angeles County are on their way to being uncounted thanks to yet another flawed ballot design, supplemented by a healthy dose of inadequate training and information given to poll workers. From the LA Times:

Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries.

What he never learned in class was that in addition to selecting a candidate, these voters were required to mark a bubble on their ballots indicating which party primary they were voting in. . . . It wasn’t until midafternoon on election day that he and his fellow poll workers learned of the extra bubble, but by then it was too late. Many nonpartisan voters had already cast their ballots, including Nola himself.

So far, no recount is being planned, and the Courage Campaign has a petition up to demand a physical recount of all of the ballots. However, the ballots were so poorly designed that even if a hand count was conducted, it might not be possible to figure out for whom votes were intended; the candidates’ names weren’t on the ballots themselves and the ballot was designed so that bubbles for the first threediffering candidates for each party used the same bubbles.

Huh? I mean, come on – who the hell checks these things before they’re put in voters’ hands? Does anyone? How hard could it really be to design a clear, easy to use ballot? This is yet another example of how, for a nation that loves to lecture other countries about how wonderful and amazing and imperative democracy is, we are astoundingly, monumentally ineffective at conducting the business of democracy here at home.

Follow-up: Latino voting angst

Published at February 11, 2008 in boricua/latino, people of color and politics/government. 3 Comments

I’ve been itching to write this follow-up post to my post on Latinos voting for Clinton, especially after noting that somebody at the NY Times linked to it. (Thanks!) But, as usual, life beyond blogging got in the way. So here it is, albeit a few days overdue.

Since writing that post I’ve done a bunch of research and reading (with help from the folks who commented.) Here’s some of what I’ve found most insightful and enlightening.

Roberto Lovato has been writing a whole lot about Latinos and the election over at his blog, Of América. In one recent post, Lovato points out that, though the media spin focused on the general trend of Latino support for Clinton, Obama has begun to pick up speed with the Latino community:

Preliminary results of the most intense primary in recent memory indicate that predictions of a monolithic Latino “firewall” for Clinton have fallen short. The candidates split key Latino states in different parts of the country. Clinton won states like New York and New Jersey while Obama won states like Colorado and Illinois. Exit poll results also demolished widely-held notions that Latinos are unwilling to support a black candidate. Obama succeeded in dropping Clinton’s Latino advantage from 4-1 (68% to 17% according to a CNN poll conducted last week) to 3-2 last night. And in almost every Latino-heavy state that voted Super Tuesday, Obama received more than the 26 percent of the Latino vote he got in Nevada just 2 weeks ago.

One of the articles that I’ve appreciated most is Gregory Rodriguez’s take on the “Latinos don’t vote for Black candidates” myth that set the tone for much of the media coverage of the Latino vote in recent weeks. That notion was brought into the media spotlight by a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, who told a reporter from the New Yorker that “the Hispanic voter … has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support Black candidates.” When asked about Bendixen’s comment in the Democratic debate held before the Nevada primary, Clinton says that rather than representing a view held by her campaign, Bendixen was “making a historical statement.” In truth, however, history demonstrates that Latino people vote for Black candidates with some frequency. Rodriguez debunks the idea that Latinos generally don’t support Black candidates with multiple instances of Black candidates winning large portions of the Latino vote in mayoral and congressional elections. He also asks and answers an important question:

So what would the Clinton campaign have to gain from spreading this misinformation? It helps undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types, and it jibes with the Clinton strategy of pigeon-holing Obama as the “black candidate.” (Witness Bill Clinton’s statement last week that his wife might lose South Carolina because of Obama’s growing black support.) And two, no Latino organizations function in the way that, say, the Anti-Defamation League does for Jewish Americans. In other words, you can pretty much say whatever you want about Latinos without suffering any political repercussions.

Matt Barreto and Ricardo Ramírez also addressed the topic in another piece from the LA Times’ Opinions section. Barreto and Ramírez stress that “the Latino vote in 2008 should be viewed as a pro-Clinton vote, not an anti-Obama or an anti-black vote,” driven largely by the name-recognition that Clinton has gained in her sixteen years of national political prominence. However, they also point out that Obama has not been doing as good a job as Clinton in actively reaching out to Latinos, though he’s been stepping things up recently.

In short, while Obama has become well known in a relatively short time among political observers, he did not rise to national prominence among Latinos until this campaign. Moreover, this name-recognition advantage for Clinton was enhanced by a strong and aggressive advertising and outreach effort by her campaign and a string of high-profile endorsements. She has hired an independent Latino pollster and aired significantly more Spanish language radio and television ads. This must be contrasted with the Obama campaign’s anemic and particularly ineffective outreach effort to the Latino segment of the electorate. Even Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a prominent Latino supporter of Obama, has criticized the presidential candidate for insufficient outreach to Latinos.

Zentronix over at the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop blog has some good analysis on the Latino and Asian American support for Clinton:

Emergent voting blocs respond to leaders in their community. If the candidate wins the leader, she wins her followers. Insurgent voting blocs instead respond to calls for change, and may focus more on single issues or agendas. If a candidate stakes out a good position, she captures the community. Hillary played the politics of emergence.

Early, she locked down important leaders in the Latino and Asian American communities. In Los Angeles, that meant securing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s support, and the predominantly Latino unions that have supported him. She also landed the support of Fabian Nunez and Dolores Huerta. In San Francisco, that meant seizing on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s popularity amongst Asian Americans. She also captured a who’s who of Asian American elected officials starting with Controller John Chiang and moving on down. Just as important, Hillary’s campaign locked up a huge number of the leading Latino and Asian American party operatives–the people who actually deliver the voters.

… Clinton’s main advantage is that she has the access to power and the party structures that deliver promises to officials and operatives. Obama doesn’t. Emergent politics favors individuals seeking power. Think of it this way: Hillary, the woman candidate, is bringing Latino and Asian American leaders into the old-boy’s network.

And finally: on her blog Multiplicative Identity, author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez takes the authors of a January NY Times article on the Latino vote to task for an infuriating sin of ignorance committed by far too many in the media: treating the terms Black and Latino as if they were mutually exclusive.

Immigrants from the Dominican Republic made up the largest single immigrant block to the city of New York in the 1990s. Five out of every six Dominicans are of African descent. Many Puerto Ricans are also of African descent. There are great movements afoot in popular culture throughout the Americans to make the link between Africa and Latin America – from Grupo Niche singing of blackness in the salsa classic “Etnia,” to the Nuyorican Poets rapping about being BlackTinos … How it is that the editors and reporters of the nation’s leading newspaper … can completely ignore the significant segment of this country’s Latino population that IS BLACK is beyond me.

So, that’s a roundup of what a bunch of very smart people are saying about Obama, Clinton, and the Latino vote. Coming soon: some of my own thoughts on the topic.