The Divide

A few observations perhaps made more forceful as a result of the elongated primary season. There is no substitute for having character and values. The extended long 18 month Primary season has provided a window on almost every nuance look, voice, subtle or not of Senator Hillary Clinton. The emergence of the electronic information age as a consumable formidable commodity and its emerging social network reiterates images globally and certainly across the breath of these United States in a matter of seconds. Downloads are stored and distributed and widely shared. We see up close and hold for critical inspection and analysis the Senator's campaign with a jaundice eye. There is no escaping the impression and conclusion that Hillary's candidacy represents selfish aggrandizement of the worst sorts.

Although it may be admittedly a refreshingly innocuous concept to team Clinton to consider, voters lackluster enthusiasm for Senator Clinton's campaign had more to do with her own lack of character as well as her loose acquaintance with the value of veracity. Her under performance had more to do with her being out hustled organizationally particularly in the early caucus and primary states than to any residual boy’s club sexism. Now we are privileged to entertain more of the Senator’s mendacity. This assertion that she had to over come being a woman is simply not born out by the fact of Senator Clinton's early front runner status and lead in the polls including support by Black Americans respondents in the early primary states. Feed the public discourse with anything that advances the careerism of this New York State Senator. Now we are advised that Mrs. Clinton embellished her brand as a result of a 50 state Democratic primary and that she will be a leading moral voice of rectitude in the Senate for working people. Former Senator Daniel Monyham, a better model of what the representative from the great state of New York should be, would have called this self-interest transformation blarney.

Coming of Age in the 1960's and an eye witness of sorts during the "Black Rebellion Movement" in Berkeley, California in particular and the San Francisco Bay Area in general, I recall vividly that the Women's Movement had among its early leaders, a Black Woman, Aileen Clark Hernandez (BA Howard, MS work New York University and the University of Oslo; leader in the International Garment Workers Union; U.S. Equal Employment Commissioner; NOW Vice-President, 1967-1970; President of NOW, the National Organization of Women, 1970-1971); and yes even lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, where I met her in 1969. One could imagine that this kind of mature women's leadership would not have be so easily blind to the defects of Clinton in support of a kind of reverse sexism, namely that it is time for a woman to be president even if she is a rogue or worse.


Many Bay Area Black Women and Black Men collaborated collectively attempting to fashion a "Black Intellectual Tradition" that would support the political, economic, and social forces that were then arrayed against powerful elite’s in this country that had sustained and ratified both actively and by benign neglect the subjugation of African Americans. The present power elite to overcome is the numerical larger women's vote. It appears in retrospect that vast amount of money largely held by white women in trust and foundations as inherited wealth played a transformative role in the women's movement shifting its orientation from issues of economic and social justice and civil rights into the white feminist movement that you have today. Even its 1960’s intellectual progenitors, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, and Germaine Greer propagandized in a number of popular magazine at the time, the myth of 'White Women's' entitlement adroitly substituting the real experience of the Black Woman's oppression for the more malleable ersatz propositions: equality of men and women proposition and abortion rights.


In 1979 Aileen would note "I have become increasingly distressed by the growing alienation of minority women who have joined feminist organizations like NOW," Hernandez wrote in an open letter to her sisters in the women's movement. "They are truly the `women in the middle,' isolated within their minority communities because of their espousal of the feminist cause and isolated in the feminist movement because they insist on attention to issues which impact heavily on minorities."


Thus the national debate shifted from civil rights to women's rights. In this fishbowl view of history, Senator Clinton and presumably white women over 50, believe that she has a right to be President, it’s simply the woman's turn. The Democratic Presidential aspirations of Mrs. Clinton have been unabashedly about the maintenance of this 'White' power relationship. Power not yielding willingly to power, these constitutional differences are settled through hard combat, hopefully without arms in a representative democracy although even representative democracies sometimes degenerate into a Hobbs's state with armies marching in the night. We will survive these current eruptions of blatant racism as well as reverse sexism and become stronger as a nation and stronger as a Multi-cultural Community as we forge and build new coalitions and foster more intimate relationships which each other in the 21ST Century. Peace Out.