By Sikivu Hutchinson
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary
Clinton rode a wave of feminist zeal.
Touted by Gloria Steinem and other marquee white feminists as the
antidote to “the patriarchy”, Clinton strode onto the national stage with her
women’ s rights bona fides largely unquestioned. Flash forward and the adulation has waned. As evidenced by last night’s debate, Bernie
Sanders’ left flank challenge has exposed Clinton’s
corporate/centrist/imperialist underbelly and made her scramble for the populist
street cred she lacks. Cautiously
rebranding herself as a “practical” progressive, Clinton touted family friendly
policies, an end to mass incarceration (motivated by the challenge
she’s gotten from Black Lives Matters activists), subsidized college tuition, universal
pre-K and defense of women’s health as bread and butter issues she’d fight for.
In a nod to her traditional base, she attacked
the GOP theocracy’s cowardly assault on Planned Parenthood.
Yet, as the economic climate worsens for communities
of color, generalized white feminist shibboleths on women’s rights won’t cut it
for women of color. For example, the
Democrats’ narrow focus on income inequality and equal pay for equal work (a half
step that would exclude women who work in low-paid historically female jobs)
ignores the massive race/gender wealth gap which separates white women and
women of color. While Clinton and
Sanders blasted the big banks and the disaster of deregulation, there was no
mention of the devastating impact of predatory and subprime lending on
communities of color—policies that disproportionately
affected black women and have decimated black wealth.
Over the past decade, the wealth gap between black
women and virtually everyone else in the U.S. has widened to epic levels. According
to the NAACP, in 2012, “Wealth for black
women under age 65 was $100, amounting to a penny of wealth for every dollar of
wealth owned by single black men and a fraction of a penny for every dollar of
wealth owned by single white women or men.” Because African American women bear
a greater child care burden, this disparity is not mitigated by the larger numbers
of women of color in higher education relative to men (a factor which conservatives
and others cite as an example of how sexist discrimination is nonexistent). As Nia Hamm writes
about a recent Congressional Black Caucus economic report,
“When African-American mothers — more than
half of whom are raising their children on their
own — can’t financially support their
families, the consequences often have long-lasting and devastating implications
for their communities.” Further,
women of color are less likely to work in jobs that have wealth-generating fringe
benefits such as defined benefit retirement plans or paid sick leave.
The nexus between poverty, wealth and opportunity is
also reflected in the criminalization of black girls and women. Nationwide, African American girls are 14% of
the youth population but constitute
34% of the juvenile incarcerated population. When white girls attend America’s schools they
don’t have to fear being pounced on by school police or local law enforcement
for not conforming to gender norms. As
the African
American Policy Institute has noted, black girls are subject to pernicious
double standards about their race/gender identities. And they are systematically funneled through
what the Human
Rights for Girls organization identifies as the “sexual abuse to prison
pipeline”. While prison pipelining
ensnares youth of color of all genders, girls of color who are sexually abused
are more likely to wind up in juvenile jails and experience a cycle of re-victimization
that may result in commercial sexual exploitation. Nationwide, black girls have some of the
highest rates of domestic sex trafficking victimization.
But when it comes to the status of black women in
the U.S., the intersection of sexual violence, economic inequality and mass
incarceration is seldom addressed in national policy forums. From the wealth gap to sex abuse prison
pipelining, white women and girls actively benefit from black female
criminalization. When white girls are perceived as brainy and/or
non-threatening in schools with zero tolerance policies they automatically
benefit from the wages
of whiteness. When campaigns
against sex trafficking minimize or don’t focus on the epidemic of sexualized
violence against black girls and women, white girls and women are the default
victims of choice.
Both Clinton and her right wing evil twin Carly
Fiorina illustrate the perils of white role model feminism and the optics of
empowerment. Rounding out her self-portrait
in last night’s closing statements, Clinton extolled her “blessed” status as
one who came from a humble background yet was able to seize the rugged
individualist promise of American capitalist opportunity. Missing was a nod to the civil rights and
social justice legacies—most notably affirmative action, which white women have
been the biggest beneficiaries
of—that facilitated her success and helped consolidate
white middle class postwar wealth. But
of course, Clinton’s narratives of progressive sisterhood only extend so far.
