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5-12-08, 10:02 am
According to Sarah Churchwell, researcher of social issues and British literary critic, segregation of women still exists in the US in the form of a doctrine "of separate but equal" rights, while the racial problem is only class-oriented.
Sarah Churchwell is professor of the East Anglia University and author of a controversial book entitled The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Metropolitan Books, 2005. She regularly publishes articles and criticisms in the literary supplements of the The Times of London and The New York Times. She is also a frequent commentator on radio and television programs on literary and cultural subjects.
In 2007 an article she published caused an uproar. It was entitled "The depressing reality behind prizes to women", which appeared in the London Independent. It referred to the Orange Prize of fiction, in which she criticizes the call to literary contests on works written by women with women judges.
"I am pleased to learn that a woman novelist won a 30,000 British pound sterling prize. Good for her, whoever she is. But I must say that these prizes for fiction written by women irritate me enormously," the professor adds.
"In truth," she explains, "I should say that I deplore the fact that we live in a world which still requires special prizes for women and in which the judges are composed of women who give these prizes.
She recalls that in times when novels written by women abounded, many of these were included on their own merits in the lists of finalists and winners in Your browser may not support display of this image.the most important competitions. "Aren't prizes for 'women writers' inherently redundant, or at best obsolete?" she asks.
Sarah Churchwell answers herself: "In many ways that should be so, but the sad truth is that they continue to be a necessary corrective in a world that still believes in and sells something called "fiction by women," while books written by others are catalogued simply as 'fiction'."
In the article, Churchwell establishes a parallel between this form of gender differentiation and the doctrine of "separate but equal" which justified [racial] segregation on the basis of the assumption that equality could be guaranteed within a system that insists on the [innate] difference [between races].
This assumption paved the way for the atrocities that later became known as "Jim Crow," or the US system of racial apartheid.
The professor assures the reader that in 1993, then-President Bill Clinton made a speech nominating Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Justice of the US Supreme Court in which he praised her actions as having made the United States "a better place for our wives, mothers, our sisters and our daughters." Not a better place for all but a better place for women bonded to men.
In politics, professor Churchwell says, women continue to be treated as a group with special interests and some postulate that the election will be won or lost on the basis of the votes of women.
According to Churchwell, the election speech by Barack Obama which dealt with race relations in the United States has been considered brave, daring Your browser may not support display of this image.and risky; it is said that it constituted a political feat, the most important since Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamt that one day his children would be "judged for their actions, not by the color of their skin."
But Newsweek asks: "Will (Obama's speech on race) attract the white workers who tend to favor his opponent, or will it drive them away?"
Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist writes that in the minds of both blue-collar and white-collar workers, "Obama has gone from being a Harvard graduate to a Black Panther from a marginal neighborhood."
And here Churchwell asks: "What is the difference between a black Harvard Law graduate and a black militant from a marginal neighborhood?" "Social class," she answers.
The most significant of the Obama discourse is not that he has spoken of the racial subject openly, but that he has repeatedly and with reason characterized race as "a distraction on both sides of the racial divide."
For Churchwell, Obama cannot be clearer: race distracts attention from class inequities. If we assume the resentment of the working class as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race. Isn't it clear then that "the racial discourse" is also a class discourse?
Delving into the origin of these concepts, the scholar derives a theory that the "original sin" has to be sought in slavery which had both an economic and racial basis.
The legacy of slavery is the result of sustained political, legal and economic efforts to permanently link a broad sector of the population to poverty, and the Your browser may not support display of this image.systematic mystification of plunder through something called race, which serves as a distraction.
The black population in the United States continues to be part of a sub-class. There are rich blacks but they do not coexist with those from the sub-classes. The same thing occurs with the white sub-classes who don't rub shoulders with rich whites. The white sub-class and blacks share their hardships in the same manner that the black sub-classes enjoy many of the privileges of the whites.
This explains why William Clinton, 10 years ago, was proclaimed "the first black president" in an election campaign because he was the son of a single mother, born poor, of the working class, saxophonist, and a McDonald employee in Arkansas. The only element missing was that of color, according to Sarah Churchwell.
The irony is that, up to now, Obama's speech, which calls on people to not be distracted by the question of race, has had the opposite effect. For this reason, Sarah Churchwell invites him to follow the example of "the first black president" in declaring: "It's the economy, stupid!"
From A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
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norman markowitz
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05/12/2008 14:50
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As a Marxist U.S. historian, I think that both racism and sexism cannot be separated from the class struggle in the U.S. or anywhere else.
In the U.S. chattel slavery from 1619(the first importation of African chattel slaves) toi 1865 and the subsequent defeat of "Reconstruction" or the attempt to democratize the former slave states by providing the former slaves with the rights of citizens, has ben the central force dividing and defeating the working class movement over and over again. This is one important reason why Obama's campaign and victory can be of such enormous importance.
But women here were among the first industrial workers because they could(given their socialization) be exploited more effectively, treated as workers only until they could "graduate" to marriage. And they were denied political rights based on a different ideology(they were put on pedestals rather than hurled in the gutter) but the effects were pretty much the same. Last hired, first fired, unequal pay, sharp restrictions of advancement in the professions, all sorts of "extra work" garnered to produced extra profits for the capitalist class.
Also, Bill Clinton wasn't seriously called the "first Black president." although that term was passed around often humorously by mostly middle class African-Americans, in my memory
That I think was much more the result of his being a roguish Southerner(unlike the proper Jimmy Carter) rather than any working class background(he did go to Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar, after all). It also had little to do with his social/economic policies, which were the most conservative of any Democratic president in the 20th century.When it came to class questions, Bill Clinton was about as pro Labor as the politician whom he resembles most in terms of content(not form) Tony Blair.
Finally, it is"about winning back the ground lost over the last three decades and then some for labor and the whole people, stupid," not the Clinton slogan, "It's About the Economy Stupid" particularly when one remembers Clinton's disastrous failures politically and on economic issues in the interests of the working class
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