Hillary participates in the oppression olympics

Through Cara, I see that Hillary is wading into the oppression olympics pool.

Q. Do you think this has been a particularly racist campaign?
A. I do not. I think this has been a positive, civil campaign. I think that both gender and race have been obviously a part of it because of who we are and every poll I’ve seen show more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American, which rarely gets reported on either. The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable or at least more accepted. And I think there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when and if it ever raises its ugly head. But it does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists.
Q. Isn’t that how it’s always been though.
A. Oppression of women and discrimination against women is universal. You can go to places in the world where there are no racial distinctions except everyone is joined together in their oppression of women. The treatment of women is the single biggest problem we have politically and socially in the world. If you look at the extremism and the fundamentalism, it is all about controlling women, at it’s base. The idea that we would have a presidential campaign in which so much of what has occurred that has been very sexist would be just shrugged off I think is a very unfortunate commentary about the lack of seriousness that should be applied to any kind of discrimination or prejudice. I have spent my entire life trying to stand up for civil rights and women’s rights and human rights and I abhor wherever it is discrimination is present.

I’m just really so sick of it. Between hearing it from mainstream feminist organizations, the media, and even people in my own life – why is it so hard to talk about the extreme sexism that’s surrounded Clinton’s campaign without declaring that it’s so much worse than racism? How is this possibly useful?
There’s a little story I was hesitant about blogging, but I think that the time calls for it – because in the last few weeks it seems as if the oppression olympics have hit an all time high, and it’s really fucking bad for feminism.


I was contacted by a well-known mainstream women’s organization about participating in a panel/press conference about sexism in the media’s campaign coverage. I wasn’t able to make it, so I suggested a couple of other bloggers – Jen, and a young women of color from another blog (I’m not naming her because she doesn’t know I suggested her for the panel and I don’t know if she’d want to be identified in this mess.) I received an email back from the organization’s contact person saying that these bloggers weren’t acceptable because they “trumped race over gender.” (Jen had written a post on Geraldine Ferraro that she found objectionable, and I’m not sure what the deal was with the other blogger I recommended.)
What followed from there was a bit of a fight over the phone in which I was told that they’d like me to find a young women (preferably a young woman of color) who would be willing to talk about sexism but not bring up race, because that’s not what this panel was about. I was horrified – not just that they were peddling in some serious tokenizing, but also that they were saying that they wanted a young feminist perspective, when what they really wanted was a young feminist perspective that adhered to their platform (one that only used a gender lens).
In any case, after a bit of back and forth, I ended up saying that I just wasn’t the right person to help them. I bring this anecdote up because it really just epitomizes (for me at least) what I wrote about in my Nation article about institutional feminism and how the lack of intersectional analysis is really mucking things up.
(And I’m not naming the organization because the woman I spoke with was a consultant, and I have no idea if her perspective was indicative of the org’s.)

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