Too Good To Not Share | 2 Sisters Call Out White Feminists

Hillary's Scarlet O'Hara Act: Why Some Of Us Aren't Buying It

by Melissa Harris Lacewell

"Media have cast the choice in the current election as a simple binary between race and gender. But those who claim that black women are ignoring gender issues by voting for Barack just don't get it. Hillary cannot have black women's allegiance for free. Black women will not be relegated to the status of supportive Mammy, easing the way for privileged white women to enter the halls of power.

Black feminist politics is not simple identity politics. It is not about letting brothers handle the race stuff or about letting white women dominate the gender stuff. The black women's fight is on all fronts. Sisters resist the ways that black male leaders try to silence women's issues and squash women's leadership. At the same time, black women challenge white women who want to claim black women's allegiance without acknowledging the realities of racism. They will not be drawn into any simple allegiance that refuses to account their full humanity and citizenship.

Black women want out of the war. Black women need health insurance. Black women need decent schools for their children. Black women need a strong economy that creates jobs. Black women need help caring for their aging parents. Black women want a Democratic win in the fall. Sisters chose Barack on Tuesday because they believe he can deliver these things and that is much more empowering than just having a woman in the White House. "

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is is associate professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University.

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"Reprising, or rather, updating her 1970 classic essay, "Goodbye to All That," Morgan thought to do a Gloria-Steinem-like comparison between the sexism that Senator Hillary Clinton has suffered and the racism that Senator Barack Obama has apparently not suffered since, of course - if we are all to believe the crap that we spew forth - it does not exist since he is obviously doing so well in the campaign. In her statement, included on the Women's Media Center website, Morgan argues that "not since the suffrage struggle have two communities—joint conscience-keepers of this country—been so set in competition, as the contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) and Barack Obama (BO) unfurls." Like Steinem, Ms. Morgan also seems to have an obtuse and myopic view of history since, last time I checked, for all the hand-wringing over black men gaining the right to vote before white women, not only did black men not get the chance to even exercise the right to vote before they were quickly strung up on trees, but white women certainly didn't help the situation, as they were implicated in these lynchings and - WORSE! - began arguing for woman's suffrage based on the premise that white supremacy could only be ensured if white women (and not any other woman) were granted the right to vote. Why bring up any allusions to this racist history!"

Do take a moment with these fine women. These clips are just the tip of some inetersting analysis.