Ferraroh-no

While searching for some kind of context for Ferraro's comments, I came across this, in a piece delightfully named "Ferraro: 'They're attacking me because I'm white'", Ferraro apparently had this to say.
....[Ferraro] told a FOX News interviewer: “I got up and the question was asked, ‘Why do you think Barack Obama is in the place he is today” as the party’s delegate frontrunner.

“I said in large measure, because he is black. I said, Let me also say in 1984 – and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times – in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president,” she said.

Oh. I see. Well there's a very simple response to Ferraro's sentiments. Actually, there are several responses from recent history:
*Al Sharpton
*Carol Moseley Braun
*Alan Keyes
**L. Douglas Wilder
**Lenora Fulani
*Jesse Jackson
*Shirley Chisholm

This is a nice set, isn't it? I think it pretty handily tears Ferarro's point down. In her defense, she may have just been ignorant that other women had run for president before her. But even granting ego centrism fueled ignorance, she'd still have to have noticed Jesse Jackson since she ran against him, right?

I am always annoyed when my choices, attitudes, and principles are called "PC". It's such a dismissive and invalidating term. It suggests the person who holds such views did not arrive at them each individually through a process of reasoning, rather that she picked them up as a package off the shelf at "Philosophies R Us". And I kinda get the feeling this is what Ferraro is implying. That if I'm a liberal feminist, I'd vote for a woman because she's a woman. That if I'm a liberal and apparently more racially motivated than sex or gender motivated, I'd vote for a black guy because he's black.

Here's why I didn't vote for Clinton in my state's democratic primary (which I declared a party affiliation simply to vote in). Clinton is an old boys' girl. She has all the proper hand stamps, ones which the feminists I came of age with were expected to embrace simply because they came attached to someone a bit more estrogeny than your average good ol' boy. I don't want more of that shit. If I had, I'd have voted for Gore in 2000 (yeah, I'm one of those "assholes" who voted for Nader mostly because I wanted something ELSE). I was on the fence for a while, seeing most people who get as far as Clinton and Obama do in party politics with a very large degree of skepticism. I looked over both of their position statements on their websites the week before the primary and from what I saw, they looked pretty damned similar. The details were slightly different. Experience has taught me that expecting a politician to stick that rigidly to a set of campaign promises is foolish so I decided the minor detail differences which were likely to be most of them swept away in a tide of people and party pleasing further down the road were not going to be enough to sway me one way or another. Truly, what did it was disability law and the fact that the Obama campaign had seen fit to even bother addressing it (that the ADA needs to get some teeth put back in it after how federal courts have handled it) and the Clinton campaign didn't.

To me, this reaffirmed my already brewing view of Clinton as more old boysy than Obama. People whose lives have been so insulated that they never had to think about how shut out someone can be based on physical factors are not people I am going to support as policy setters or leaders. And that is that. Not race. Not sex or gender. Health and equal access and disability.

All that said though, I'd be a liar if I tried to claim that Clinton's apparent pandering to a certain kind of feminine quality (presumably either shared or expected by her possible voters) didn't annoy me on a personal level also. My guess is if I were black I might feel similarly about Obama when it came to constructs of race.

So back to Ferraroh-no. My search for context dug up this quote from her in 1988: "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."
From the same reference, Jackson punted back with his own below the belt (or bodice as it were): "Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."

I guess while it's still fair (pardon the pun) to say she was talking about race and racism in her recent comments, I need to update my reaction to her February 2008 commentary. I'm naive when it comes to shit like this. It seems in context, her later comments (above) and much, much earlier comments (more immediately above) do make it clear she was indeed saying something along the lines of "black people get it easy because they're, you know, black..." That she included in her recent comments that she was nominated as VP primarily because she was a woman, to me, makes her seem more an apologist than anything else. I guess chalk it up under another woman with (an overblown case of) imposter syndrome.

* = Two sources (1, 2) list these people as recent candidates for the US presidency.
**However, the above two sources do not give fully equivalent sets in that one names L. Douglas Wilder and not Lenora Fulani. The other names Lenora Fulani and not L. Douglas Wilder.
Thus, here are some extra references for Wilder 1, 2 and for Fulani 1, 2.