Tag: Geraldine Ferraro

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

I begin this essay keenly aware of the fact that, before the end, I am probably going to strike a nerve with someone.  A part of me feels that I ought to keep some of these thoughts to myself out of respect for the recently deceased.  In ordinary circumstances, I would.  But in today’s news cycle, sandwiched as the story is between a war in Libya and a nuclear disaster in Japan, if I don’t speak my mind now, I’ll likely not get a second chance.  So I might as well say my peace.

With President Obama being a major disappointment in some corners, it was perhaps inevitable that Hillary Clinton loyalists would exercise their right to second-guess the inevitable nominee.  Anne Kornblut’s column in The Washington Post entitled, “When young women don’t vote for women” is but the latest effort to chastise young feminists and young women in general for not being more supportive of the first female candidate to make a serious run for the White House.  The column, regrettably, also invokes the counter-productive liberal guilt complex construct of the Oppression Olympics to make its point, which is something I thought we had recognized does nothing to unite and everything to divide.  Pitting women against African-Americans in some kind of twisted priority system has been the demise of many worthy organizations and the beginning of arguments that inevitably lead to raised blood pressure.

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Geraldine Ferraro, Torrance Daily Breeze, March 7, 2008

It now appears that Geraldine Ferraro’s now-famous first sentence was at least partially right, albeit a week or so early.  If Obama were a white man, he would not be in the position he is today: not, as Ferraro would have it, a position in which he receives the uncritical positive regard of much of the population,  but one where he is being called to answer for the attitudes and actions of the entire Black community.  Her fourth sentence proved prophetic as well: the whole country has been caught up in the concept.

The question before us, and before the superdelegates, is whether the third sentence was also true: is he very lucky to be who he is?  Again, contrary to Ferraro, that does not mean lucky to be Black, but is he lucky enough — by virtue of both eloquent argument and personal example — to be able to defuse the effect of his being symbolically associated with those Blacks whom much of white America most hates and fears?

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