March 27, 2008
Clinton and Obama in Anthropological Perspective
Our own Justin E. H. Smith in CounterPunch:
Will there be no end to this tiresome "national conversation" as to whether a black man trumps a white woman, or vice versa, on our nation's list of the wronged? One possible end might arrive, of course, when another white man is elected in November and American politics returns to business as usual. In the meantime, I would like to join the conversation, if only in order to bring to light the inanity of the relevant comparison, based as it is on a presumption of analogy between two social groups that are distinguished, conceptually and in reality, from the dominant group for entirely different reasons: in the one case, the distinction is based on a relatively short, 500-year history of economic subordination; in the other, it is a consequence of an evidently universal structural feature of human societies.
A few disclaimers. First, disciples of the Robin Morgan-school of feminism will probably fail to appreciate that the disanalogy between race and gender may be acknowledged without abandoning one's feminist principles, even if these principles inform a feminism of a very different stripe: one that does not seek to justify masculine domination on normative grounds, but that nonetheless is genuinely concerned to take it seriously as a deep-rooted, rather than recent and superficial, phenomenon. Second, I confess I will be doing what, at least since Simone de Beauvoir, we have been told we must never do: conflating sex and gender. Of course, "male" and "female" are not just biological categories. They are also social categories, and they have vastly different connotations from culture to culture. They do not always correspond to the biological categories they are presumed to denote.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:38 AM | Permalink
Comments
APPLAUSE!!!!
Posted by: Felix E. F. Larocca MD | Mar 27, 2008 7:48:09 AM
You bring up so many things that are obvious immediately after one hears them, Justin, but that I had never really thought about. Brilliantly done. Bravo.
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Mar 27, 2008 8:51:54 AM
Yet another Obama supporting piece posted on 3QD wrapped in seemingly logical wisdom, but not really so. Where are all Clinton supporters who can write something supporting Hillary's bid for presidency.
Posted by: Amera Raza | Mar 27, 2008 2:59:52 PM
Very true.
And here is why Hillary cannot give a speech on gender as Obama did on race.
Sorry, Amera. There is no logical, even seemingly logical way to support Hillary's candidacy and she is making it harder by the day. And I say that as a second wave feminist who dearly wishes to see a female president of the US in my life time.
Posted by: Ruchira | Mar 27, 2008 5:00:46 PM
Ruchira -- thanks for the link to that essay. It's great to see someone teasing apart racism and sexism, instead of just flinging the words around as if they mean something clear and definite, and we all know/agree on what that is; also as if they're interchangeably the same kind of phenomenon. I think they're similar but not identical phenomena, and we would do well to spend more time trying to understand how/why.
That's a long conversation for another time, but for now, thanks again for the reference.
Posted by: JanieM | Mar 27, 2008 5:31:50 PM
What a wonderful article. Thank you, Justin -- deep down in the Leibniz Archive as you are.
Amera, like Ruchira I'm a feminist, and I know very few women who aren't. My only friend who is still supporting Clinton, however, is refusing to talk with Obama supporters about her choice -- she thinks we are committing a treachery against feminism by not supporting the woman in the race. That that woman is Clinton is not what matters. Whoever HRC is, she's a woman, and that's all that matters. So I am coming up a little short on ideas as to why, other than being a woman, Clinton deserves the nomination. If you have some good reasons why you think her personality, character, and life history have prepared her to be the woman president who would help to make it normal and natural for all the women who followed her, I would very much like to hear them. My view is that the first woman must be the right woman, and that the wrong first woman will make it hard for another to be elected for many decades. I can't see that as a victory for feminism. So I hope you'll write about why you think HRC is the right woman.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 27, 2008 5:50:30 PM
"...the racial divide in American society is both a more pressing and a more tractable problem than the sexual one because there is an objective reality onto which talk of the difference between men and women maps, more or less accurately, whereas there is nothing, but nothing, of serious objective interest in the distinction between "races." Talk of race is based on a bogus and discredited ethnography, whereas women really are, on average, about 30% smaller than men; women unlike men are capable of giving live birth; women have a different average life-span than men, different fertility patterns, different illnesses. Some researchers, such as Simon Baron-Cohen, believe they have discovered the neurological basis of certain behavioral differences between men and women."
- Pointing to body size as a significant difference between the sexes, but not between races, is simply disingenuous in the extreme. The same point could be made about people of different races, most starkly for example with Masai and Pygmies, but simply in general. Also, at least when it comes to facial recognition, I believe it is true that the brain actually parses race more quickly than it does sex.
- Why should Baron-Cohen’s observation of behavioral differences between men and women "count" as intractable but not the significantly larger racial effects seen in IQ tests? Surely if one could be cultural so too could the other. (The neuroimaging, as is so often the case, is irrelevant. Any intellectual difference, whatever the origin, must reside somewhere in the brain. Unless you're a dualist, there's no way around that)
- I thought the principal "sides" in the two debates mapped at least schematically one to the other, though the race question is obviously more emotionally fraught than the sex one.
Maybe I'm just bitter, but being an Obama supporter apparently now means you can split the difference between Larry Summers and James Watson.
Posted by: D | Mar 27, 2008 11:50:04 PM
Yeah, I gotta agree with D, here, there's a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand happening, here. I'd go even further and say that pointing to "objective realities" does absolutely nothing to settle this debate.
Think about it: people are different in lots of ways. Some types tend to be taller (Danes tend to tower over Mexicans, men over women), some smarter (Jews regularly demonstrate superior IQ scores over... well... everyone else) et cetera. The question of the Seriousness of race issues vs. gender issues is not settled by any of these purely descriptive facts. The question is only settled by the level and duration of injustice done to certain groups, and by the extent to which our equal functioning as a society is impeded by these injustices.
You can spin "objective" facts either way. Observe: because women are fairly universally subjected to patriarchy (as Smith notes), they deserve a woman president. Modern injustice against blacks is only 500 years old... compared to 15,000 years of patriarchy, that's a drop in the bucket! Let's give Hilary a chance to symbolically right this ancient and pervasive evil!
You see what I mean. Not only does this kind of analysis pick-and-choose what sorts of facts are supposed to be relevant to normative questions, but it's not even clear that any facts are decisive.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 28, 2008 12:15:32 AM
Thanks to everyone for the insightful comments. I'll just respond here to the more critical ones.
D is right about body mass being as relevant in the comparison between certain "racial" groups as it is between men and women (though it also sets Pygmies apart from the Masai as much as it does from Danes, which seems to confirm my point about the arbitrariness of a "racial" classification that puts the first two together on the basis of, what?, their other "negroid" features? Which ones? Relatively darks skin is the only one I can think of that they both share, but again, if that's what "racial" groupings come down to then I am as "black" as Thurgood Marshall.) I should have focused on what I take to be the real source of the sexual division in society and left it at that: namely, different reproductive roles.
I didn't say Baron-Cohen's work is "intractable," just that it requires good arguments in response. I note also that it's been quite a bit harder to debunk than pseudoscientific apologies for racial inequality like The Bell Curve.
I take IQ tests as measuring mostly ability and willingness to take an IQ test. When I was a nihilistic teenager, I took one and earned a score of 30, which I take as proof not that I was (and am) severely mentally disabled, but that I strongly resented being made to take the test in the first place. Mutatis mutandis, I suspect this affective factor would be enough to easily explain the difference in IQ test results between socially alienated African-Americans and eager-to-please college-bound white kids.
One more time, Nick: I said that there is a distinctly American 'original sin' that could be easily atoned for if descendants of the slaves were to gain direct access to the apparatus of power. Patriarchy is not a distinctly American original sin, and in any case the election of a woman president --especially when that woman president is arguably a proxy for a man-- would not serve to overturn the patriarchy in the same way that election of a black president might serve to overturn the American racialized class system.
Posted by: Justin Smith | Mar 28, 2008 5:18:18 AM
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