Dear Mr. President Barack H. "Stands for 'Hope!'" Obama,

What's happening to us?

You and I have been involved for about a year. I'd eyed you from afar at the DNC in '04, and hoped that something might happen. Then there was that crazy, intense period last spring, when we were definitely doing something, but neither of us knew exactly what - I mean, should I commit to you, or keep my options open for the first female president? Was what I was thinking, and I know you felt that - but, by June, we seemed to have it all figured out. I was committed, and not just in some bullshit "you'll do for now" way, which (I hate to admit) is how I've been with most other candidates. I could see a real future with you. 

That's why these past months have been so rough. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that my mental picture of your campaign was like this:


Whereas the actual pictures of your campaign have been like this:


Now, Jon Favreau may have many great qualities as a speechwriter, chief among which seems to be an ability to utilize the progressive rhetoric specific to his generation (it is mine as well, so I recognize it!) which Bush's disastrous presidency made popular even among people with no real commitment to social justice issues, while skillfully blending said rhetoric with some lyrical passages and some crowd-pleasing ambiguities, managing to convey a take on social issues and that particular subset thereof which we call "identity politics" which far outstrips that presented by any other President in terms of its intelligence, depth, and nuance, while cleverly distracting the reader or listener from the fact that nothing has been promised or even said outright. I know you like that. However, I always thought that you were more than just talk. Together, you and Jon convinced me that you knew what you were talking about - that you got it. If this photo is any indication, then Jon, at least, does not.

I get the feeling that I don't really know your gender politics any more, Mr. President. Maybe I never did. However, it says something that you kept Jon around, knowing - as you must have known - about these, shall we say, tendencies of his. What it says is not good.

That's not the end of it, either. The Larry Summers thing really hurt. I mean, it was such a betrayal. I tried to convince myself that you didn't know about his "girls are dumb" thing, but it didn't work. I mean, my mom knew about that, and she's hardly the type to spend 50% of her day surveying the feminist blogosphere like I do. You're clearly smart - my smartest President ever, I think - which means that, when you do things like this, I can't really convince myself that you "just don't know any better." You always know better. The question is whether you care.

Rick Warren, Mr. President? RICK WARREN?! Be honest: how little respect do you actually have for me? The worst, most humiliating part of it all is that I blame myself. I finally go ahead and trust a President - something I've never really done - and the next thing I know my friends are coming at me with news like this. Then you have the gall to defend yourself by saying that you "[disagree] with Pastor Warren on issues that affect the LGBT community." Um, great, me too, but what about issues that affect my community? You know: the one comprised of women? Women, whom your new BFF Rick believes should be in submission to their husbands (they will all have husbands in Rick's ideal world - even the Ls! - just as the Gs will have wives and the Bs and Ts will not exist), and to whom he would like to deny access to safe and legal abortion? Or does that not merit a mention - is that just one of those "other issues" you disagree on even though you don't apparently disagree so much that you can refrain from giving this man a crucial role in your inauguration (and your tacit approval thereby) because it's "bringing together all sides of the faith discussion in search of common ground?"

Mr. President, I'm tempted to say that you have found your common ground with Rick Warren, and it consists of being utterly dismissive and clueless re: women's issues, which at this moment both of you seem to be.

You know about my last Democratic Presidency, of course. Everyone knows about that shitshow. It was long, and intense, and although Bill and I had some good times - I'll always be grateful for the deficit - for the most part it was just scandal, scandal, scandal, all the way through. I had to overlook Paula Jones. I had to overlook Gennifer Flowers. It was fucking impossible to overlook Monica Lewinsky, although (sick to say) I tried. I was the very picture of an abused, codependent feminist voter. "I mean, I guess if you looked at these things from an outsider's perspective," I would say, "it might seem like my President is a misogynist with severe impulse control issues who exploits his institutional power in order to seduce or sexually coerce young women, engaging in sexist, demeaning, belittling cigar-in-the-pussy behavior verging on sexual assault, which I would find utterly revolting and unacceptable from any other man on the face of the planet. But you don't know him like I do. He really tries. And he's better than some of the other guys out there." Looking back at myself, all I can say is: YIKES.

I do not intend ever to get back into that place, Barack. I certainly don't intend to go there with you. As far as our Presidency goes, there will be a zero-overlooking policy.

So, Mr. President, here's the sand. I want you to watch me very carefully while I draw this here line in it. I'm going to be generous and say that you haven't crossed it yet, but you are close, very, very close, so close that the outermost grains of it are brushing against your shoe. You need to back away from this line, this line you have not quite crossed, at a speed so great it could break the sound barrier, if my support for you is to continue. Do something to show me you care. Lifting the Global Gag Rule would be a good start. I know this comes across as "needy" and "demanding" and all those other things us chicks are always being warned against - it creates a division in your party! people will be reluctant to ally themselves with you! blah! blah! blah! - but frankly, I'm a little tired of being ignored.

You do not want to cross that line, Mr. President. Hell, as they say, hath no fury like a voter base scorned. You think you had a tough time with Hillary? Just you wait.


Love,

A Lady Voter

UPDATE: Again! "Accidentally unoriginal posts" are the new "terrible sex puns" of this blog. Next week it will be "jokes that were old four years ago" and all the posts will be about Zach Braff. In summary, I guess what I am saying is: do not hire me, or consider me a person worthy of your respect. Also, read this. It's good. I guess she broke up with him before I did, but: don't all of your exes sooner or later sound the same? 

What It Looks Like

So, yes, I burst into tears last night, but now I want to tell you why.

A few days ago I wrote this:

Most people do not belong to the (incredibly small) demographic of white, straight, middle-class men at which most "mainstream" media is targeted; most of us will, at least once per day, be smacked in the face with a message that tells us we are unimportant or inferior, and most of us learn to shrug those messages off.

I was thinking about the election when I wrote that. I was thinking about the election, and I was thinking about the most basic and most urgent task that I engage in every single day: looking at that white/straight/middle class/male narrative of America - the atmosphere through which I move, every day, absorbing its countless messages that only those people truly belong in this country or this world, that only they matter, that only they can ever be imagined when we say the word "American" or even "person" - and understanding that for what it is, and talking back to it. I don't do this because I want to; I do it because I have to, in order to believe that I belong in this world.

There were two men who shaped the course of my education: Sekou Sundiata and Gary Lemons. Sundiata taught me to write. He insisted that I learn the necessary discipline and technique, while acknowledging that writing was - or should be - only one facet of a greater engagement with the world. He told me that your message is your instrument: it doesn't matter how beautiful that instrument is if you can't play it. Lemons shaped the nature of my political engagement. On the day I met him he stood in front of the classroom and told us about his childhood: his father's violence, his mother's pain, and how he learned to internalize racism, which told him he was worth nothing, and sexism, which told him that black women were worth even less. He spoke of political engagement as a life-saving action, a recovery, which allowed him to overcome the ugliest aspects of his own socialization and work to heal the same wounds in others. I do not engage with this theory because it is intellectually interesting, he said, I do it because without it I would be insane or dead.

I knew that it was true. It was true for him, and it was true for me. I was falling apart that year. I was living with the memory of my father's violence, and my mother's pain. I was coping with the ways that I had swallowed the misogyny embodied in that family dynamic whole, and had treated myself - or allowed others to treat me - as a piece of meat or a garbage dump because of my gender. I was coping with my departure from the very white, very racist community I had grown up in, and was uncovering unconscious prejudices and attitudes of entitlement in myself to which I had never consciously admitted - and I had never had to admit them, because within that very white, very racist community, they were simply normal.

You want to talk about hope: I will tell you about Gary Lemons and Sekou Sundiata. I do this theory because without it I would be insane or dead; your message is your instrument, so learn to play it. These men were never easy on me, or on any of their students. They called me out, over and over again, for sloppiness in my work, for errors in my arguments, and for exhibiting a privileged, entitled white middle-class feminism which reified the system I claimed to be working against. I owe them more than I can express.

Lemons, who had been openly critical of the school's student diversity and faculty hiring policies, was fired a year after I met him; he had served at the college for more than a decade. Sekou Sundiata died last year.

So, yes, directly after Obama's victory speech, I excused myself from the room, and I went out onto the sidewalk, and I cried, harder than I have cried in years. It was not about the Democrats winning, or about me getting what I wanted, which was a Democratic win. It was about the fact that people have given their lives to this work, and many have suffered for it, and many have died, and some may have believed, as they died, that it was worthless. Many have developed, as I have, an ugly cynicism - we push for things that we don't honestly believe can be achieved, so that, when we lose, we don't mourn. We just say, what more would you expect from this country? I want you to believe me that, when I cried last night, I was grieving. I was also feeling that cynicism lift from me. I was realizing that it had been so, so, so heavy.

The narrative is wrong. It has always been wrong. "People" and "Americans" and "America" do not look like forty-three white married men of means. They look like this:












Yes, evil still exists. No, electing Barack Obama did not magically solve racism or end the dominance of the master narrative. Yes, we have a lot of work to do. You know, last night, this kid showed up to the party:

He is still going to grow up in a world where his success and his comfort are prized more than those of others, because of his gender and his race. He will still see that people who look like him occupy the most respected and powerful positions far more often than people who do not. He will still be taught in schools where the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of people who look like him are considered "canonical" or "foundational" or simply "great" works, with no identity-based qualifier, whereas the contributions of people who do not are typically described as "great works by women" or "great works by African-Americans" or what have you, rhetorically and conceptually separated from pure (white, male, straight) "greatness." He will still be encouraged to consider his successes as entirely his own, without taking into account the privileges and support networks that people who look like him necessarily inherit, which have made his success not only possible but likely. He will still live in a world where it is unlikely for him to gain the critical apparatus necessary to understand his own privilege, or the empathy necessary to join others in dismantling the institutions and assumptions which make it possible. He is still, most likely, going to make things harder for the rest of us, without entirely knowing what he is doing, or why.

I know this. I know this because I am a white, straight, college-educated, middle-class professional, and I am constantly extended privileges that I do not deserve, and I am constantly encouraged to simply embrace those privileges as my birthright. It is easy, safe and comfortable for privileged people like me - and lots of people are privileged, like me - to affirm and reinforce the structures of oppression; it is painful, dangerous, and difficult for us to resist them. But I believe that, in order for last night's victory to happen, millions of people had to vote against their own privilege. They had to defy that master narrative for long enough to cast their votes. I hope that we are able to continue this; I hope that we continue to reach past the politics of pure self-interest. I hope that boy is going to be able to carry this moment with him, and to serve its spirit. He is going to need good teachers.