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A Black Woman-White Woman Gap

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Writer Says Clinton Campaign Adds to Polarization

 

“It’s worth remembering that Clinton started the race with a large base of black support. Then she made it easy for black women to abandon her,” Marjorie Valbrun writes in the June 2 issue of Newsweek, referring to Hillary Clinton‘s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“For months now, black women supporters of Barack Obama and white women supporters of Hillary Clinton have been engaged in a low-grade war of words to gain the upper hand in a campaign defined by one recurring question: does race trump gender in the elections? The result, now that Obama is the all-but-certain nominee, is a racial polarization that he will be hard-pressed to overcome,” writes Valbrun, who writes for theRoot.com and worked at the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun.

“Black women have naturally fought back, among them the novelist Alice Walker, who weighed in with a widely debated essay about race and the campaign. Essays and counteressays continue to appear online in various news and discussion sites, op-eds abound in newspapers around the county, the blogosphere sizzles with emotional debate. The more points each side makes, the more entrenched the positions have become. Détente now seems out of the question. The relationship between black and white women was never that strong to begin with. Sure, we’ve had a few good moments here and there, and we have meaningful relationships with individual black or white girlfriends, but there has always been a stubborn divide. That divide is now a chasm of resentment.”

Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, sees the divide between black women and white women as one of the fault lines shaping lives, experiences and social tensions.

“It’s a fault line that has consequences from everything from the debate over affirmative action, welfare, [and] this election to the O.J. Simpson verdict,” she told Journal-isms. “In the last case, I’m not sure if you remember, but Marcia Clark,” the prosecutor, “thought she had a very strong rapport with black women so she loaded the jury up. What she didn’t consider/most likely even know, was that most black women have had a black man in their life who has unfairly, and sometimes brutally, been targeted by the police,” Maynard continued. “It’s a digression, but one that once again points to how this divide plays out in every corner of our country.”

Not even Oprah Winfrey is immune. “Ms. Winfrey’s public support of Senator Barack Obama for president may have cost her support from white women backing Senator Hillary Clinton,” Edward Wyatt wrote Monday in the New York Times, citing lower ratings for the show as one of “A Few Tremors in Oprahland,” in the words of the headline.

Valbrun’s short essay is part of a Newsweek cover package, “Obama, Race and Us,” that features contributing editor Ellis Cose; former Rep. Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn., chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council; Richard Rodriguez, author of “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”; a “Memo to Senator Obama” by Evan Thomas, and a new Newsweek poll.

Valbrun’s was not the only piece over the holiday weekend to address the conflict between African Americans and some white women Clinton supporters, who have escalated their charges that their candidate has been a victim of sexism.

In Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” section, Debby Applegate recalled that in 1869, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton “were torn apart by the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, which stipulated that the right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Gender remained a perfectly legal reason to keep someone off the voter rolls. . . .

“Stanton felt shocked and betrayed that, once again, women were being left behind while black men advanced. When Douglass reluctantly supported the 15th Amendment as written, Stanton responded with a series of furious attacks, ridiculing the idea of giving the vote to the ‘lower orders’ of men, including blacks, Irish, Germans and Chinese, while native white women were denied it. Her campaign to reject the amendment created a bitter schism in the long alliance of abolitionists and suffragists, and within the suffrage movement.”

The Newsweek package is replete with advice. Rodriguez urges Obama, “talk to Hispanics as a brown man who has made his way through a black and white America.”

Cose argues that it is possible “we have finally arrived at the point where race, even as it remains a potent factor, is far from the only or most important one.”

Winning rural voters, Ford says, means “getting out to schools and factories, coffee shops, fairgrounds and houses of worship.”

Among the suggestions in Thomas’ open letter to Obama, written with Richard Wolffe, Suzanne Smalley, Holly Bailey and Sarah Kliff, is that “taking a stand for affirmative action based on socioeconomic class rather than race would send a powerful signal.”

(Interestingly, one of Obama’s earliest supporters and a possible vice presidential candidate, Sen. James Webb, D-Va., has maintained that constitutionally, only African Americans are eligible for affirmative action.)

The magazine reports, “Newsweek pollsters recently created a ‘Racial Resentment Index’ to measure the impact of race on the 2008 election. White voters were asked a series of 10 questions about a variety of race-related topics, including racial preferences in hiring, interracial marriage, and what they have ‘in common’ with African-Americans. About a third of these voters scored ‘high’ on this index; 29 percent of all white Democrats did. Overwhelmingly, these Democrats are the ones most likely to defect to John McCain in the fall.”

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Disagreement Over Newsworthiness of RFK Gaffe

According to John F. Harris, editor of the Politico newspaper and Web site, “This weekend’s uproar over Hillary Rodham Clinton invoking the assassination of Robert Kennedy as rationale for continuing her presidential campaign is an especially vivid example of modern journalism as hyperkinetic child — overstimulated by speed and hunger for a head-turning angle that will draw an audience.

“The truth about what Clinton said — and any fair-minded appraisal of what she meant — was entirely beside the point,” Harris wrote on Monday.

“Her comment was news by any standard. But it was only big news when wrested from context and set aflame by a news media more concerned with being interesting and provocative than with being relevant or serious. Thus, the story made the front page of The New York Times, was the lead story of The Washington Post and got prominent treatment on the evening news on ABC, CBS and NBC.”

 

 

It was also big news on the Sunday talk shows. And Clinton’s defense, along with her rationale for continuing her campaign — became a front-page exclusive for the New York Daily News.

“I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for — and everything I am fighting for in this election,” Clinton wrote.

Clinton had said, in explaining to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader why party unity was not a good reason to end her candidacy:

“You know my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere around the middle of June.

Replied an editorial board member: “June.”

Clinton: “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. Um, you know I just I don’t understand it. There’s lots of speculation about why it is.

On “Fox News Sunday,” even Juan Williams, one of Obama’s most consistent African American detractors, said, “I think you’ve got to be careful when you talk about assassination. There’s tremendous anxiety over Barack Obama’s safety, and I think it’s well based, and I think it’s — I was just talking with my family yesterday because I took the same position that Brit took, actually,” referring to fellow Fox panelist Brit Hume.

“I thought, ‘she’s mentioned this before, it’s no big deal, she’s just using it as a time line reference, according to Terry McAuliffe.’ I think it was true.

“But I must say, in the black community there’s overwhelming concern about Barack Obama’s safety in a sense that a black man rising to this height in American life could easily be the target. So I just think it’s best to stay away from that language.”

As if to underscore the point, Liz Trotta, a former editor with the Washington Times and reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Newsday, joked on Fox News Saturday about an Obama assassination.

Trotta was asked by the host, Eric Shawn, about the Clinton controversy and the 2008 race. As Editor & Publisher reported Sunday night, “Trotta, according to video, replied, ‘And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.’ She laughed.”

Trotta later apologized for what she called a lame attempt at humor.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, PBS journalist Gwen Ifill said, “One of the things we should learn from the last couple of weeks, for instance, President Bush talking about appeasement and then this week the assassination comment — is never talk about Hitler in politics and never talk about assassinations in politics. Exactly, why would you even suggest it?

“And the backdrop is what’s important — there is probably no one who has ever been in a room with Barack Obama, one of the huge rallies, or even just seen a photograph of it, what hasn’t cross their minds. If you’re of a certain age and survived and lived through these assassinations and assassination attempts, so the question, with the Clintons, especially, is we know that they are wordsmiths. We know that they very carefully think about what it is they say. She’s said this several times before.

“And so you have to think what did they think people would think? We’ve heard her campaign spokesman say things like, who knows what could happen? Well, they could suspend their campaign and still come back if something happened. That’s not what she’s arguing, and so, you know, unfortunately, it poked a sore that keeps existing throughout his campaign, and it never is going to go away.

“A lot of women feel that sores have been poked, a lot of African Americans feel sores have been poked. The future of party unity lies in them not continuing to reopen these scabs.”

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An Op-Ed Page “Too Male and Too White”

“The Post’s op-ed page is too male and too white. And there aren’t a lot of youthful opinions, either,” Deborah Howell, ombudsman at the Washington Post, wrote on Sunday.

“I have nothing against older white men; I’m married to one. And the nation’s power structure, often represented in Post op-eds, is white, male and at least middle-aged. But a 21st-century op-ed page needs more diversity.

“The 2008 numbers as of Wednesday: 654 op-ed pieces — 575 by men, 79 by women and about 80 by minorities. The lack of diversity is partly a matter of tradition; The Post’s longtime stable of regular columnists consists overwhelmingly of older white men. The op-ed page usually runs five pieces a day; four are from regular columnists. So only one of the 80 to 100 daily outside submissions gets in.

“Another reason is that women and people of color don’t submit nearly as many op-eds as white men do.”

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Short Takes

“Prominent Sri Lankan columnist Keith Noyahr, who went missing late Thursday, returned home this morning after being severely beaten, according to the editor of his newspaper and reports,” the Committee to Protect Journalists reported news on Friday. “Lalith Alahakoon, chief editor of English-language weekly The Nation, told CPJ by telephone this morning that Noyahr, who is also the paper’s associate editor, was receiving treatment at the National Hospital in Colombo. He was ‘mercilessly assaulted’ by an unidentified group that held him for about seven hours, according to Alahakoon. There were contusions all over his body and he was bleeding from one ear, but his injuries were not thought to be life-threatening, Alahakoon said.”

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