After politweeting and retweeting Clinton’s Super Tuesday 2 victory while also worrying about the late breaking news about Mary-Kate Olsen I am exhausted.

It isn’t the excitement of the race, but the kinds of discussion being brought out to contain the potential crisis of having a black man or a woman for US president that exhausts me. My skin crawls because of the way race and gender are being pitted against one another. This is wrongheaded. Not just in a moral sense but also in an historical, rational sense.

Let me break it down for the North American and European reader who doesn’t give a tweet:

Race is about power. It has never been about skin colour and never will be. If you assume that it is you are falling into the essentialism envelope that fuels cultural and social violence. Skin colour importance was invented to justify and rationalize exploitation of people. It doesn’t have any universal truth meaning.

Race is about power, but the way we talk about ourselves to each other, we belie ignorance of that truth. The social currency of the concept of reverse racism is one disgusting example. There is no such thing as reverse racism because race is about power. See, you wouldn’t accuse a four-year-old child of abusing an adult. That is because we accept the difference in social and cultural power between an adult and a child. We, however, deny the maintenance of a social hierarchy that effectively oppresses people who are not of the so-called normal (read white) race. So it makes sense to us that an African-American can be racist towards a white person. But she can’t. Race is about power, not skin colour. A person of colour has never had access to the social and cultural power of a white person and so, does not have the power to be racist. Every time you make that mistake it harms people.

This week Gloria Steinem spoke out in support of Hilary Clinton. She spoke about gender as being more of a challenge than race in an effort to explicate her endorsement. Arg.

It is disappointing when a popular feminist spokesperson gets it so harmfully wrong. Feminism is about race, class and gender inequalities, not either or. Not because women are benevolent and good but because race, class and gender are interlocking. Each depends on the other to remain coherent in our social system. It is not a competition, it is not additive or subtractive. A black woman does not suffer two times as much as a white woman or a black man.

Some fun readings:

• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger
• Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule by Ann Laura Stoler

Writing and thinking about these ideas are my moral imperative and, the lens through which my Web 2.0/ 3G /semantic web analysis is conducted. So while twittering and microblogging I’ve returned to an unsurprising conclusion:

Even if Obama or Hillary are elected president they still won’t win the war of essentialism. Their wins are small victories in a fight for systemic overhaul.

Now I can go to back to more important things like de-twittering the evil rumours that Mary-Kate has had a nose job. Lies, all lies!

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Posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 3:00 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.