Back in the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, his Rainbow Coalition had a slogan, “Our time has come,” and the people who opposed them had theirs: “Black people are going to vote for him just because he’s black.”
They said it as if it were the worst and most stupid thing imaginable. Why, oh why, would a black person vote for a black person?
Probably for the same reason that white people vote for white people. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not as simple as racism. There is a difference, and that difference is why when blacks vote for blacks it’s not “reverse racism.”
We have a representative government, more or less, so it makes sense to vote for the people whom you feel represent you. You may say that it’s policy and ideology that represent you, not a particular kind of person, but I would argue that in fact there is something profound about experiencing race or gender as a member of that particular race or gender. A couple of years ago, in a beautiful, powerful speech against Georgia’s Voter I.D. law, State Rep. Karla Drenner (D-Avondale) said that she couldn’t possibly know what it felt like to be black because she had never lived a day without white privilege. It could as justly be said that not one black person there at the Capitol could know what it is like to live as a white woman. Indeed, there are things that Asians, Latinos, and gays know about their experience of life that others may read and study but never understand in the bone-deep way that they do.
The term “identity politics” has come into high vogue in the past decade, what with all the fuss in the Netherlands about Muslim migrants being out to get white Europeans and silly nativists in the United States nattering on about Latino migrants plotting to blow us all up between working shifts at our favorite restaurants—even liberals use “identity politics” pejoratively—but for under-represented minorities, nothing makes more sense than voting for someone like yourself. If you are a member of an under-represented minority, in order to get elected and work effectively once in office you must, at the very least, have the backing of your own community. That is a minimum requirement for obtaining and using political power. If you don’t have that—let’s say for example that you are a black woman who is a Republican, so it’s unlikely you’re going to get the black community to support you—then your only line of access to power is through the patronage of powerful members of the majority. You can go that lonely route, but it requires an unyielding degree of loyalty to your patron—think Condoleezza Rice—whereas if you have the backing of your community you may entertain some doctrines they don’t necessarily agree with but since they didn’t vote for you based on your ideas in the first place, you have a little more freedom. The nice thing about that is that if you’re someone like Barack Obama, you can bring your community with you into the consideration of ideas that previously were not very prominent on their political agenda.
Obama doesn’t just talk about black issues. He talks about a wide range of issues and though some are the same old liberal stand-bys, not all of them are. In fact, at least up until the choice of their polarizing running mates, this election season was a contest between two centrists. Republican John McCain and Democrat Obama are both centrists, a realization that came as a great relief to many Americans the morning after the Feb. 5 primaries. But Obama, however much he appeals to whites, still relies on the support of black voters. And there is not one thing wrong with that.
In fact, women voters could learn a lot from black voters. Regardless of when the 15th Amendment was passed, in practical terms most blacks in America could not really vote and have their votes count until 1964. So, in terms of the reality, when women got the vote in 1920, they got it 44 years before blacks, and yet blacks have come much further than women politically. Blacks have wasted no time in making sure that they vote for blacks and get the numerical representation in local, state and federal offices that is proportionate to their population. Some have held their noses and voted for blacks whose positions or personalities they didn’t particularly like, but they understand the importance of having substantial numbers in government. Identity politics have helped them tremendously to make up for hundreds of years of discrimination on American soil.
Women, on the other hand, have often refused to vote for women. Their argument, which sounds completely fair and levelheaded, is that they shouldn’t vote for someone just because she’s a woman. It’s an argument that gets a lot of support from men. It may, to a large extent, stem from the phenomenon of what writer Mary Gordon calls “being chosen”—women want to feel that men like them, that they are somehow esteemed more highly than other women. And since men usually vote for men, this means that women have to vote for men, too. Unfortunately, this puts us all in Condi’s lonely spot—relying on the male majority for our power. Don’t get me wrong, I think Condi is an extremely intelligent woman who has made astonishing gains toward peace in an administration that hasn’t always, strictly speaking, been focused on peace; she’s certainly a scholar of whom the black community should feel quite proud, but if you can’t see how isolated Condi is, you don’t have your eyes open. And women have always been this way, voting for men and following their lead, because men are right about us being backstabbing bitches, aren’t they? Well, are they? Since when do you ask the fox to assess the trustworthiness of the chickens?
Women don’t play identity politics and this is why America has the worst family leave policies in the industrialized world. This is why we still make 24 percent less than the men who do the same jobs we do. None of that will change until we start voting for women. We simply do not have the numerical wherewithal to change our lot with only 16 percent of the members of Congress being women. It will take at least eight years to make our representation there proportionate. Given the fundraising required, it will probably take longer. The only short-cut to making up for that lack of representation in the legislative branch is to swing the weight of the executive branch—that means voting for a presidential ticket with a woman on it.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘Oh, god, no, not Sarah Palin, she’s a reproductive rights relic. She has no compassion for women whose pregnancies are not of their own choice.’
I support Roe v. Wade, a ruling which said quite clearly that the state has no interest in the first trimester of a pregnancy—in other words, if a woman wants an abortion in the first three months it should be allowed without question. But I can’t go beyond that, I just can’t. I base my timeline not only on Roe, but on my own personal experience of pregnancy. I will never forget that moment when I felt my unborn son acknowledge me when I was about four or five months pregnant. I don’t assume that every woman has that experience, but I would like to point out that even the Bible—and I’m not a religious person but I used to be devout—refers to the “quickening within the womb” and it doesn’t refer to it happening immediately post coitus. Which makes sense, given that many hundreds of thousands of pregnancies are spontaneously aborted within the first trimester—we call them miscarriages and they happen naturally. However, I don’t think that abortion should be legal for the entire duration of a pregnancy, either, and I’m not alone. No less a feminist than Alida Brill told me "We should not have abortion on demand at 8 months as a form of birth control and assume that all pro-choice people will agree with this.”
But, we also have to face the fact that there will always be cases where abstinence isn’t even a consideration, cases of rape and incest, cases of children who have become pregnant, and in those cases we need the right to abortion perhaps into the second trimester. I’m not being an absolutist about this. I think a baby that kicks in his or her mother’s womb deserves the protection of the state. But I’m asking you to open your mind to the possibility of a painful compromise that will ultimately put women in a much more powerful political position. If we can find protected common ground on abortion we can be the voting block we were meant to be. Undivided we will be undefeatable.
If ever anyone is going to wrest a compromise from the right on this issue, it’s going to be now when they are vying for the presidency. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when compromise matters most it is least pleasant. With 51 percent of the population, women have a sizable voting block in this country, if we would act like a voting block for change. What if we essentially brokered a deal with McCain-Palin and said, ‘We can put you over the top, but you’ve got to give us some room on abortion. We can come off the claims to late-term abortions, but in exchange you’ve got to promise not to interfere with Roe’s protection of our first trimester rights. No tricks with Supreme Court appointments, we want to hear it in public, loud and clear.’ What if we did that? What if we finally weighed in with our vast voting power and brokered a deal? There are many, many more moderate women than there are religious right wing males. Other groups play identity politics to their advantage, why can’t we? Of course, to do that we’d have to have a National Women’s Caucus, and we don’t. It’s been defunct for years. SP