If Obama Is a Woman, and I Vote For Clinton, Am I a Man?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


One would think Maureen Dowd had cornered the market on silly-beyond-belief gendered nonsense about Sens. Clinton and Obama. One would be wrong; Newsweek wants to vie for that crown:

It has been a rarity in modern political life: a wide-open race for the nomination of both parties. But whatever happens from here on out, this campaign will always be remembered for the emergence of the first serious woman candidate for president: Barack Obama.

Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

Yes. The same tediously stupid way.

You have to listen to comedian/civil rights activist Dick Gregory “apologize” to Bill for black people making him think he was black if you’re having trouble putting the latter bit of twaddle to rest, but what of the new twaddle?

This—Obama is a ‘woman’ cuz he’s all nice and stuff—seems like yet another example of how Obama isn’t ‘really’ black. (He can’t be. He isn’t scary.) That makes him acceptable to whites since ‘black’ men are dangerous and uncooperative and, to put it mildly, not team players. The hardest kind of racism to combat is the kind that pats the ‘good’ Negroes on the head and sets them up in opposition to the black masses, signaling that ‘they’ (the black masses) may remain safely marginalized. Pretty obvious wink-and-nod from one white to the other. And you wonder why ‘we’ still feel discriminated against and despised. Kaleaph Luis, at GenderYouth.org sums up this feeling with sad succinctness in a recent post. He’s right to be sick to death of the requirement that black men be hard, gangsta, and oppositional to be considered men.

“In fact, most of the young black men with whom I have deep, personal relationships that exhibit the very same “female” characteristics that Newsweek attributes to Obama: they take an inclusive approach to problem solving, are generally optimistic about life, are modest about having all the answers, and are comfortable with teamwork.

For us, Obama is not a new phenomenon. He’s not a “female” one either. He’s us. Alas, we are used to our real selves being erased by the gangsta masculinity that society too often seems to expect of young black men, or by the surprise it exhibits when we break the mold.

With all the familiar statistics about young black men about academic underachievement, incarceration, and underemployment, it may be hard for mainstream culture to believe that we, in Sen. Joe Biden’s immortal prose, actually are “articulate and bright and clean.” Let me assure you, we’re already here. Calling Obama the female candidate just recycles the same tired, old stereotypes of masculinity that deny us—and him—a precious opportunity to redefine and expand definitions of manhood for young men.”

Likely, Newsweek was just trying to be cute, like Dowd does in most of her columns—playing word games while our society slowly implodes. But the reality underlying this type of thinking is far from ephemeral in its effects on black lives; the masses of black men, not being wunderkinds, are dangerous. Uncivilized. Justifiably marginalized.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate