It's Not as Simple as White Trumping Black or Man Trumping Woman

By Patricia J. Williams, The Nation. Posted March 19, 2008.

It was delightful, those early days when Republicans were in fractious disarray and the Democratic field bloomed with interesting candidates like a pasture full of daffodils -- any of them! All of them! Bluebirds sang. We were rolling in good will. Now, however, John McCain has unified the right with a lizardy, smothering oil of "my friend," "my friends" and "hey listen, pal." And Democrats are chewing each other's legs off. Instead of discussion about substantive positions, a distressingly large proportion of the debate is epitomized by an e-mail I received from a good friend: "In my state, a black man trumps a white woman and that's that. So what do you suggest?" Here's what I suggest.

1. Black Jack does not always trump White Queen and vice versa. The problem with the formulation of race-gender "trumping" is that it flattens Obama's and Clinton's complexities -- their relative eloquence, her vote on the war, whether some voters love him because he's "so un-black a black man," their stances on civil liberties. It's the kind of bad logic that led some people to expect that then-nominee Clarence Thomas wouldn't be all that conservative because he's a black man. It's just bad algebra. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are black men, but it's hard to imagine them "trumping" Clinton. Similarly, it's not at all clear that Obama would fare as well against a more nimble and oratorically endowed female opponent, like the late Ann Richards, for example.

2. There is no profit in styling a competition of oppression. One ubiquitous subtext of the black man-trumps-white-woman calculus is that it's easier to be a black man than it is to be a white woman or, even more reductively, that sexism is worse than racism. It works alongside right-wing claims that racism isn't a problem anymore. That in turn fuels the not-so-coded diminishments asserting that Obama is getting "preferential" treatment in the media; that he's simultaneously "entitled" and "elite" yet "unqualified" and "not ready."

Here's an alternative way to think about it. Take the unnecessarily polarizing comparative out and stop this inanity of ranking. We can all acknowledge that Clinton has been drubbed with the foulest sexist stereotypes since Anita Hill. It is true that Hillary nutcrackers are sold in airports and that there is not yet an accompanying Stepin Fetchit version of a Barack Obama doll. But that hardly means we live a country in which racist imagery is ipso facto kinder and gentler than gender stereotypes. Turn on the TV and watch Flavor Flav perform goggle-eyed minstrelsy more demeaning than in the Jim Crow era. Pick up the newspaper and read that one in every fifteen black adults is incarcerated. So cheer up: from sex trafficking to the disaster in New Orleans, there's sufficient suffering to go around.

3. There are multiple narratives of sexism and racism. Stereotypes are malleable. They can be hybridized, coded, shifted across demographics, conjoined with other isms like class or ethnic prejudice, foregrounded or backgrounded. The "trumped white woman" version of sexism, for example, ignores the degree to which Michelle Obama is often described in terms depressingly similar to those of Hillary Clinton: she's too outspoken, not domestic enough, going to tank her husband's candidacy by not knowing her place. Similarly, if few are openly hurling the N-word at Obama, what to make of Bill O'Reilly's hankering to "lynch" the missus instead? And why would anyone think that Barack Hussein "Osama -- oops, I mean Obama" is getting a free pass from our new-age profiles in prejudice? There's also the complication of how we inject class into narratives of race and sex. Any black person not categorizable as "underclass" has historically been sorted into one of two categories: (a) an upper-class person whose blackness is eliminated or (b) an uppity black whose personhood is eliminated. A large shadow of that anxiety-provoking split hangs over Obama: he's the "articulate, clean" exception washed of all relation to race. And he's also the daring "race man," the opener-of-doors for whose physical safety the community prays.

See more stories tagged with: gender, race, barack obama, hillary clinton, elections

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »