Nader and Ferraro: Left-Wing Racism and Right-Wing Feminism

June 25th, 2008 Posted in Of Interest

Here’s a legitimate criticism of the left: its identity politics can be a condescension to those it means to champion. Riddled with anti-racist and anti-sexist taboos on language, its politics doth protest too much. It’s quite a spectacle to watch a liberal white friend walk on eggshells around a black person because they’re afraid of saying something offensive. Human beings bring some expression of aggression to every real relationship (e.g., by teasing friends) — and so these stilted interracial friendships never get off the ground. The delicate, child-like victims must not be touched socially, because the line between good and bad touching can never be as crisp as the taboos demand.

None of this justifies the sense of many whites (on the right and left) that they are the poor wronged victims of affirmative action and the Politically Correct. They’re right to think that the relevant taboos are unfair, and they’re right to think that the woes of African Americans ought to be attributed less to their “racism” than to problems within some black communities. (That these problems are a legacy of slavery and segregation is not a measure of the collective guilt of every successive generation of whites). But beyond the restrictions on what views can be expressed in polite company, political correctness and affirmative action have little force outside of academia. You can hardly complain about what you’re not allowed to say around your progressive friends when you’re unlikely to have them anyway. And if you think that affirmative action is stinting your career (and preventing you from the riches that are your socially Darwinist capitalist birthright), then ….

The consequence of these taboos is the division among whites between those who have pseudo-relationships with blacks founded on guilt, and those who indulge a pathetic and juvenile racism behind closed doors — not primarily because they dislike black people, but because they overreact with what they think is a counter-cultural stand against the inauthenticity of political correctness. (I’m not denying here that there are such things as genuine interracial friendships on the one hand and hard-core racism on the other, I just don’t think that these are the norm).

So in an election year with a black presidential candidate, it shouldn’t be surprising to see the underlying racism of this dynamic spill over from all sides. And yet it is. I’m not one to cry racism, or even one to feel ashamed of my own fleeting racist sentiments — it’s the price of guilt-free whiteness. But I have to say that even I am fairly stunned by this year’s political climate — a virtual free-fire zone of thinly veiled racism. I’m not going run through the litany of right-wing Fox News-style offenses — we all know what they are. And as I argued a year ago., nor do I think that such sentiments are so widespread (or, where they do exist, so determinative of people’s behavior) that they will scuttle Obama’s presidential bid.

But in Ralph Nader and Geraldine Ferraro we have two very pernicious examples of what happens when one ressentiment-afflicted group has a close encounter with another. Without any cognitive dissonance, Ferraro can talk of Obama as an affirmative-action case at the same time that she cries sexism. With her she brings an entire coterie of deranged and frankly stupid political obsessives who make absolutely no secret of their left-wing brand of racism — their antipathy towards blacks (or “AAs,” as they like to call them) as their contenders for the mantle of ultimate victim-hood. Notice that this kind of resentment dovetails very neatly with that of conservative whites who feel burdened by political correctness and affirmative action — you will find the comments on these fringe left blogs indistinguishable from those of the right. That’s what’s so telling about the paranoid claim that Obama “played the race card” when he so carefully avoided it, or the strangely contradictory complaint that he didn’t make his race an overt part of his campaign as Hillary made sex a part of hers. But it’s especially telling when it comes to the accusation of sexism. Here we have the invocation of one left-wing taboo against another. Sexism is pitted against racism, with the righteous victim-hood of the former set against the chaffing, politically correct restrictions of the latter. You could sum up virtually all of the ranting of Clinton dead-enders with one sentence: “how dare you make me feel like a racist for calling you a sexist!”

Enter Nader. Never mind the easily refuted idea that Obama isn’t talking about issues important to African Americans (read some speeches). Nader has expectations of his black friends that go beyond the content of their character. They better not be trying to “talk white” in order to appeal to “white guilt”:

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader said. “Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.”

The core idea here is similar to Ferraro’s: Obama is where he is because he is black. But rather than acknowledge his benefactors — and the affirmative action largess bequeathed to him — he has snubbed them. He equally offends Ferraroan Feminism and Naderian Progressivism by failing to be The Black Man — the good Democratic Party Black Man who “talks black” and concentrates solely on the interests of his group and cries racism at every turn and blows up at some point and has no chance of becoming a real force in the Democratic Party establishment. What’s worse, Obama succeeded by precisely by not being appropriately black. The claim that Obama “played the race card,” for instance, actually amounts to a complaint that he did nothing of the kind, at least openly: he did it behind everyone’s back, the conspiracy theory goes, sneakily; he didn’t play fair, he was a black-in-white’s clothing. Rev. Wright and several other ploys were meant to uncloak him, tease the real black man out of him for all to see, so that every could see that he was just another Jesse Jackson, just another angry black man with a right to his anger but not to the presidency. Meanwhile, Hillary was the Good Democratic Party Woman. Hillary talked woman and never failed to remind us that being a woman was a compelling reason to vote for her and that women’s issues would be one of her special concerns. She made the appropriate complaints about sexism. How dare that “inadequate black man” try to seem above it all! How dare he transcend the proper, left-wing role that has been defined for him!

This is what happens when some on the left consign African Americans to conceptual ghettos in order to become their benevolent keepers and defenders: as long as they don’t try to break out.