The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Waiting for the Singing To Begin

So here we all sit, waiting for the lady in the pantsuit to go ahead and sing. It's going to be hard for anyone who cares about equality and multiculturalism and common ground and all that jazz to feel joy at the end of this slugfest, regardless of where they stand. For a long time, I felt bruised by the Clinton/Obama wars, but now I just feel numb, and that worries me more. 

Reading Geraldine Ferraro's irrational screed in the Boston Globe this weekend, which Marjorie so brilliantly deconstructs today on The Root, did not make me bewildered or angry or chagrined. It made me tired. I just shrugged and turned the page. Whatever, Geraldine. Keep on raging against the dying of that light.

For the life of me ,I simply cannot see this rampant, bludgeoning sexism that Ferraro and her ilk keep spewing about. Sexist incidents, yes. Sexist columnists and sexist commentators and some idiot with a shirt - yes. But some kind of wholesale, bloodthirsty sexist take down of Clinton? No. One condoned, snickeringly, by Obama and his crew? No, no, no.  (And I won't even address Ferraro's laughable charge that white working-class folks can't relate to Obama and his wife because of their education but somehow can relate to Bill and Hillary, who apparently attended community college on 4-H scholarships. As far as I know.) And so, not seeing it, my inclination is to brush the dirt off my shoulders and say to Ferraro and all those other Angry White Women out there: Get a frickin' grip.

What stops me is only this: Too often I have stood in that painful place where all around you people (white people, mostly, in my case) insist that your interpretation of your own experience is incorrect. You're too sensitive, you're overreacting, yeah, that's what I said, but it's not what I meant, you just don't understand.  I know as well as anyone that just because a huge and particular swath of humanity does not "see" something doesn't mean it does not exist. As Tim Wise points out, in this point-by-point essay on white denial, even in the early 1960s—a time at which America still operated under homegrown apartheid—most white Americans insisted racism did not exist or was not a major factor in the lives of black folks. Gallup polls show that nearly two-thirds claimed to believe blacks were treated the same as whites in their communities, while 85 percent said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education.

The power of human beings to block out what they do not wish to see is astonishing.

So I want to be careful here.

Still, I just don't see it.

And, heartbreakingly, I'm so numb I just don't care.