Signifying in New Orleans: Notes on a Journey into the Imaginal

My trip to the March 2008 Callaloo retreat in New Orleans began, unbeknownst to myself, on January 9, 2008, when I wrote an irate (and of course never published) note to The New York Times protesting an op-ed by Gloria Steinem. In her January 8 essay, “Women Are Never Front-Runners,” Steinem argued that the Iowa victory that catapulted Obama to the front of the Democratic pack “was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark the ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members) . . . .[W]hy is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?”

I found this particular set of claims in Steinem’s op-ed to be historically delusional and dashed off an admittedly typo-hampered email that said as much. Trying to sound like someone writing in sorrow rather than anger—the sort of sort of person I imagined the Times would find fit to print, or at least be influenced by—I called it “very disappointing” that Steinem,

in the midst of a campaign that is forging a new political vocabulary for America, chooses to dredge up a rhetoric of race-and-gender competition that can be traced back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (Stanton once objected to black men’s receiving the vote before white women by asking “whether we had better stand aside and see ‘sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”¹) Steinem’s argument, furthermore, [is built around] glaring inaccuracies: For instance, in claiming that black men have gained positions of power faster than white women, she ignores the fact that there have been over thirty white female senators in the 20th century, while Obama became famous in part because he is only the third black senator to serve since Reconstruction.

Cut to New Orleans, Thursday, March 6: A morning of discussion, during which the tips of the exchanges between the likes of Joyce Ann Joyce and Rinaldo Walcott sometimes quivered in the air like the tips of fencing sabers, was followed by an afternoon of marvelous readings by Emily Raboteau, Angie Cruz, Nelly Rosario, Fred D’Aguiar, and Mat Johnson, who shook off a tremendous hangover to read a hilarious story about racial identity—the very subject he said he’d been up into the wee hours drinking and discussing. Afterwards, hungry for the city where Louis Armstrong had ridden as King of the Zulus and, more importantly, had composed a masterpiece of the same name, I decided to walk around the mansion-filled neighborhood near Tulane University while the rest of the Callaloo troupe took the tour bus back from the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life to their hotels. On the way out of Lavin-Bernick, I noticed posters advertising a speech that very day, in that very building, by my nemesis, Ms. Steinem. In spite of my terror of speaking in front of groups of people, a fantasy of standing up during the question and answer section of her speech to confront Ms. Steinem began to percolate in my head. No amount of walking and gawking at mansions that looked as if they had never heard of Hurricane Katrina could shake my less-and-less hostile, more-and-more curious thoughts of attending the Steinem lecture.

I hit the hall where she was to speak a full ten minutes early, while most of the many hundreds of chairs were still empty. However, by the time Ms. Steinem appeared, thin as a thinking reed and dressed down in what looked from the back of the hall like a dark sweat shirt and slacks, the room was packed with an audience that appeared to be about 95% female and 90% white. This is the audience that had responded to Ms. Steinem’s op-ed with gratitude and praise. Never before had I felt the oddity of being male, with that crazy Y chromosome dragging one...