Feminist Ultimatums: Not In Our Name

By Kimberle Williams Crenshaw and Eve Ensler . Posted February 5, 2008.

The rubble that was once the World Trade Center was still smoldering when President Bush issued an ultimatum that marked our foolhardy and tragic descent into war: Laying down the law, he declared, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Progressives, feminists, civil libertarians, compassionate conservatives and independent thinkers alike denounced the president's rant as a simplistic but frightening attempt to hijack the outpouring of grief felt world wide to serve his pro-war agenda. Thousands refused to be held hostage to this friend or foe logic in the face of considerable doubt and genuine disagreement about how to respond to the tragedy of 9/11.

It was in those early moments of our national trauma that progressive New Yorkers came together to say no to war and to refuse to lend our name to the intimidation and sabre-rattling that President Bush's "with us or a'gin us" rhetoric represented. It is thus a sad irony that years later, as our nation faces an opportunity to confront and perhaps end the human misery we have inflicted in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new iteration of the "with us or with them" rhetoric has emerged.

In seeking to corral wayward souls into the Hillary Clinton camp, the new players of this troubling game are no longer the hawkish Republicans but "either/or" feminists determined to see to it that a woman occupies the Oval Office. Drawing their feminist boundaries in the sand, they interrogate, chastise, second-guess and even denounce those who escape their encampment and find themselves on Obama terrain. In their hands feminism, like patriotism, is the all-encompassing prism that eliminates discussion, doubt and difference about whom to vote for and why. Armed with indignant exasperation, this "either/or" camp converts the undeniable misogyny of the media into an imperative to vote for Clinton. The balanced reflections and gentle warnings that were voiced months ago have been jettisoned for a one-sided brief about why voting for Clinton is the only sensible thing for women to do. Perhaps because there is a viable opponent who carries a competing claim to breakthrough status, the "either/or" rhetoric has become particularly fierce. While denying any intention to square off racism against sexism, the "either/or" feminists nonetheless remind us that the Black (man) got the vote before the (white) woman, that gender barriers are more rigid than racial barriers, that sexism is everywhere and racism is not, that a female Obama wouldn't get nearly as far as a Barack Obama, and that a woman's vote for Clinton is scrutinized while a male vote for Obama is not. Never mind of course that real suffrage for African Americans wasn't realized until the 1960s, that there are any number of advantages that white women have in business, politics and culture that people of color do not; that all around the world women's route to political leadership is through family dynasty which is virtually closed to marginalized groups, and that the double standard of stigmatizing Obama's Black voters as racially motivated while whitewashing Clinton's white voters as "just voters" constitutes the exact same double standard that the "either/or feminists" bemoan. The "either/or" crowd surprisingly claims that the two Democratic candidates are more alike than different, yet those who gravitate to Obama find their motives questioned and their loyalties on trial. Even long standing allies of the women's movement have been unable to escape the label of "traitor" for opting to support Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law at UCLA and Columbia School of Law.

Eve Ensler is the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, and the founder and artistic director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls (http://www.vday.org).

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