Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

15. Hillary Is White

15 Hillary Is White1 Zillah Eisenstein At the time of this writing it already seemed pretty certain that Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee in the fall. Even though this was the case, and maybe because this was so evident to many of us, it seemed more crucial than ever to clarify how wrong-headed Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been. Otherwise, feminists of all sorts would be left with a bad taste of feminist racism to deal with, once again. I was looking ahead to help build the possibility of a newly invigorated multiracial, multiclass based feminism/womanism both here and abroad. At this post-Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia presidential primary moment few TV pundits and newspaper journalists appeared to wonder or worry about the particular exclusion of Black women from election discourse. Instead, most eyes, and especially Hillary and Bill’s were focused on the so-called (White) “hard-working working class.” Hillary’s preoccupation with White voters was a dead giveaway of how she thinks about gender, and being a woman. Gender is white to her, like race is Black. Bill and Hillary Clinton threw Blacks to the wind as a last-ditch strategy for victory. They thought they could play the gender card with its history of whiteness and win. And here lies the rub. As election rhetoric evolved, Hillary Clinton became “the” woman who wanted to break the glass ceiling of/for gender. But the truth is that at the same time Hillary became more of a “woman” per se, and therefore more of a feminist, she also became more “White.” She could ignore her own race, in a way that Obama could not, because of the normalized privileging of whiteness. In this instance, White is not a color, but the color, the standard, by which others are judged. So, Hillary silently, inadvertently but also knowingly, used her color to write her meanings of gender and mobilize older White women and angry 79 80 / Who Should Be First? White men by doing so. She presented herself as a woman but her real power in this instance was her whiteness. Misogyny—the fear, hatred, punishment, and discrimination toward women remained a detriment for Hillary. However, her whiteness coded and continues to code her gender with this privileging of racialized power. Usually, if a woman is White, the term White is not spoken alongside the term woman; there is thought to be no need. One only specifies color when it is not White. And, women are assumed to be White if not specified otherwise, especially if you are speaking about gender inequities, or women’s rights, or feminism. Forget the reality that Black women in the United States, first as slaves, and then as domestic laborers, factory workers, working mothers, and civil and human rights activists have long been the trailblazers for women of all colors. During the presidential primaries, Hillary would speak of herself as a woman, and then would speak separately about race, as though she did not embody both at the same time. She has as much “race” as Barack, but her race was not a problem for her like it was for him, even though it may not have been as much of a problem as she tried to make it. Her whiteness privileged and pitted her gender against his race. She encoded her whiteness as central to her gender, and to her kind of feminism without saying a word. Hillary reawakened and newly rewrote the history of nineteenth-century U.S. feminism that pitted Black men getting the vote against White women’s right to the vote. Women’s rights rhetoric, since September 11, 2001, has been used in similar fashion to justify the bombing of Brown people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Feminism has a history of being bankrupt on this issue of White privilege , so there is little new here. Yet, women’s rights come, or should come, in all colors. Obama says he wants to embrace the “newest” notions of race and with them, the racial progress that has occurred. He is not post-racist, but recognizes “newly” raced relations, as they exist at present. He delivered a much-hailed speech on race although he did not, and does not wish to be a racial candidate. He recognizes that the country has new–old racial hierarchies with complex new meanings. He embodies these meanings being that he is both White and African. At this same time...