My Train of Thought Through Philly, The Election, The “Badge” and Feminism

This past weekend, I visited Philadelphia. It’s been about five months since I moved to Brooklyn. I’m happy here, but it’s still new. Philly’s comfortable. I know it. I know where I’m going without thinking. I know its people, its places. I grew up in a small town and Philly has that type of feel. I haven’t visited once in the past months without seeing someone I knew or recognized within minutes of getting off the bus. I will always love Philly, I will always visit Philly.

On Friday night, as I got into town, Barack Obama had begun speaking at the Convention Center. I wasn’t due to arrive until 8:30, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to go. But it was a beautiful night, and as the cab my friend and I were in made its way towards some glorious, glorious sushi, our windows were down and all of the sudden, I heard what I knew was Obama’s voice. And started to cry. And then we got closer to the rally and I could hear what he was saying, not just a sound that I knew was his voice and the crying continued.

Because that’s what’s been happening to me ever since I was forced to work on Martin Luther King, Junior day, and spent hours at my desk watching and re-watching his address, and forgetting that their was a giant glass window in front of me that the whole office could see through as the tears poured down my face, all throughout me going “YES” and “THANK YOU” and “OH SHIT” and clapping and hiccuping and not realizing there was anything else going on right then besides me hearing Obama’s words. It’s what happened when he swept the Potomac and state after state and it’s what happened when I watched and read and re-watched his address on race relations. It’s what happens every time I remember the picture my Wifey directed me to on the Black Folk LiveJournal thread of Obama shaking hands with a young boy. I can’t fully explain the picture and I’ve lost the link. Obama has his hand on the boy’s head and they’re shaking hands and the child is looking at him with such joy and admiration and with a look that says “I’m going to grow up to be the President of the United States, too,” and Obama is looking down at him with a look that one commenter summed up perfectly as “Yes you can, son.”

So. Driving past Convention Center. Heard Obama for real not on TV or the radio. Cried.

The friend I was staying with lives in West Philly, about four blocks from my old apartment. Right before I caught my bus home, we drove to the H-Mart in Upper Darby, when we were both struck by the burning desire to buy seaweed salad in bulk. On the way there, we drove past a school I taught in during college. I worked there through the last presidential election and when Bush won, I called my mom, choking through sobs, at 3 AM. I wasn’t, per se, a giant Kerry fan, but a second term of Bush was not something my heart was willing to believe in. I burst into tears when a guy wearing a “Bush/Cheney ‘04″ shirt handed me a syllabus in Geology that morning and cried through an entire “Race and The City” class, as the professor shared his own pain with us.

But that afternoon, after class, when it was time to go teach, I pulled it together. I wasn’t going to suddenly be at peace with this, but I could put it aside for a few hours while I went to see my students.

And then I got to the school. Walked into the cafeteria, where all the kids were getting their afternoon snacks. Sat down. Two of my boys, climbed into my lap. They were both seven years old. And they were both crying. Not sobbing, not any type of big loud crying, just crying. With tears rolling down their cheeks

One of the boys looked at me and said “Miss Katie, my mom said George Bush wants us dead.” He looked terrified and my instinct was to say “No!” but before I could even remember to breathe, the other said “It’s true. They just fixed up the Army center down the block and they signed up my older cousins.”

And all I could do was hug them tightly and make sure they had tissue. Because when a seven year old looks at you with a tear-stained straight face and lets you know just how aware of his world and his life he is, you can’t tell him he’s wrong. Or try to lighten the mood. I wasn’t sure what to do, so we kept close to each other for the afternoon, working through homework, sometimes laughing, playing some games and sometimes being silent for a moment when one of our memories were jogged and we took a second to absorb what the country had decided. By 6:30 that night I was on a bus back to campus and they had both gone home with their parents.

So driving up that block, so close to the Primary Election, that was on my mind. Until I saw that every single house on that block had “VOTE FOR CHANGE APRIL 22ND” posters in their windows. With Obama’s picture. As did almost every other house we drove past in the neighborhood. And of course I cried again but my heart rose a bit. The difference between being there during an election whose outcome left children crying over the military recruitment pushes happening on their blocks and in their schools everyday, and being there to see poster after poster showing people believing there could be change in this election was heartening.

Did I think Obama was going to win Pennsylvania? No. But I wasn’t thinking about it at that point. I figured the margin wouldn’t be as big as the twenty-some points he was originally down in polls. I thought Philly would be closer than it was – and Philadelphia, if you didn’t know how much I love you, after the 65-35 vote you turned out, I hope now you do.

Throughout the time I was there, I was also mulling over tinfoil hattie’s comment about fighting over who is more oppressed and what the point in fighting over that is:

Why do we keep competing about who’s more oppressed, anyway? What appalls me is that there’s still such a white male monarchy that we are fighting for the crumbs of who has it worse. Get that? Who is more oppressed, more abused, more discriminated against, more hated?

Why are we still fighting for that badge? Because we have gained no ground in 250 years, in my judgment. Because that’s all we have to cling to. Who has it worse. That is horrifying.

And then I read about Bill Clinton saying Obama tried to play “the race card” on him in South Carolina. And how he pointed out that his “office is in Harlem.” And I almost threw my computer through the window at work.

So here’s my train of thought on the “who is more oppressed” debate:

I don’t see it as a badge to be won, or a title I imagine most oppressed communities are looking to compete for. I know what people are implying when they discuss “the race card,” but they make me violent as I question their sanity. Because for all the talk that goes on about the power of said theoretical card, I have yet to notice white people as a whole, and especially white men suddenly losing their status and power. To me, this issue is willfully ignoring history.

In Bill Clinton’s case, for example, when you 1. Claim that someone has played the “race card” against you and 2. Refuse to discuss it, that’s flaunting your privilege as a white man, and specifically a white man with a whole shit ton of power.

Ignoring history is the same thing as erasing it. Even if you selectively ignore it – a la Gloria Steinem claiming in her NYT Op-Ed that black men got the vote fifty years before all women. And on that note, the one thing that consistently boggles my mind is, of all supposed contenders in the Oppression Olympics, I can think of no group more consistently vying for the badge of winner than white women. And specifically white feminists.

Now, I am white, I am female, my heart bleeds day in and day out. I fiercely support social justice and equality and would call myself a Womanist ally but I have not called myself a feminist since I was roughly eleven. Not since I learned more about the history of the white feminist movement and its appropriation of movements for Women of Color. There are self-identified feminsts whose work I fiercely support. There are feminism-aligned causes I support. But I do not identify with feminism as a movement.

And as this election has been drawn out, in time with all that is going on the blogosphere in regards to Seal Press and Amanda Marcotte, in time with the experiences I had at WAM! in the company of many self-identified feminists, I stand firm in my decision to abandon the feminist title thirteen years ago.

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, go here now. Now. Now. This glorious page is along the lines of how I feel. And there’s so much. All in one place.