"It’s Our Time"

“It’s Our Time” may be the meme of the Democratic presidential runoff. Obama used it to powerful effect in his speech last night. Hillary supporters have been using it constantly to bolster their claim that Mrs. Clinton deserves the throne.

To all you rabid Hillary supporters – it’s your time when your candidate wins and, please, make sure I’m the first to know just when that happens. Until your candidate wins, it’s not your time. Obama didn’t deserve to win because he’s black anymore than Hillary deserved to win because she’s female. So, cut the crap.

Here’s another thought. No genuine feminist can also be a racist. Sexism is bigotry and so is racism. You can’t fight one form of bigotry and freely embrace another. And there’s plenty of bigotry to be found among Hillary supporters.

It’s difficult to read too much into blog comments but I’ll give you a few examples of what Hillary supporters have been saying:

“the little sooty tan man”

” it was our time little man, not a token black man”

“the flushing sound? thats your buddy husseins chances of becoming prez”

Hillary enjoyed the support of rank bigots of both genders but it was the depth of bigotry among women that took me by surprise. Now I’m not naive. I studied in the states and I’ve seen, first hand, more than enough racism among American women. What troubles me is how the feminist leaders didn’t step forward to denounce this sort of thing during the nomination campaign. Certainly they ought to have been fighting misogyny but also speaking out against the tide of racism that surfaced from their own gender. Instead they sat on their hands.

Genuine feminism cannot tolerate racism. So, what happened?

 

The Hate Vote

Americans have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money over the past half century to convince themselves that they had finally left behind their nation’s horrible racist history.

Even if Barack Obama should lose to McCain in November, he’ll have done his country an invaluable service by exposing just how alive and well racism is in today’s America, among Democrats as well as Republicans, even among some feminists who ought to be the last to tolerate much less embrace racial bigotry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls it “A Campaign to Hate.”

“Wherever I go — from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party — the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism — or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race — one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn’t even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

…So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. “