Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

Subscribe Online

Why Hillary Clinton's Loss Has Nothing to do With Sexism

Testosterone is Not to Blame

By TIM WISE

Hillary Clinton is finished, and contrary to the insistence of many of her supporters, sexism has had virtually nothing to do with it.

Gloria Steinem was wrong in her now infamous New York Times op-ed a few months back. Clinton's problem was not that she was a woman and that 'women are never front-runners' (indeed, just a few weeks prior to Steinem writing those words, Hillary had been just that, not that facts matter, I guess). Her problem was that she exuded, as did her husband even more than she, a sense of entitlement, a sense of being owed the Presidency, a sense that--as I've heard so many white women say these past few months--'it's our turn,' as if philogynous voting behavior were the moral duty of women everywhere.

Please understand, when I say that sexism has had nothing to do with Clinton's electoral demise, I don't mean to suggest that there were no men out there who voted against her because of sexist, even misogynist views. I have no doubt there were. And it is certainly true that Clinton faced repeated denigration by male media pundits who played upon gender stereotypes and sexist imagery in their criticisms of her. All of that happened, to be sure, and it is indefensible (Interestingly, the worst example of misogyny probably came from Clinton supporter James Carville who suggested that Hillary has more balls than Obama, and ya' know, balls are just what the world needs more of).

But the media's sexism, and even the sexism that resides to some extent in all men in this culture--not because of some inherent evil, but because of the conditioning to which we've been subjected and to which we've usually capitulated--had almost no effect on the overall vote totals in the Democratic primaries. In most states, Clinton received roughly half the male vote: about what you'd expect in any primary where you have two candidates whose policies are so similar, and where the ideological differences between them are so small. And in almost every state, Clinton won more than half of the white male vote, often much more. Though she failed to win very many black men to her side, it's hard to chalk this up to sexism, given the presence of a black candidate in the race, whose chance at victory naturally has excited folks in the African American community, just as Clinton's chances logically fired up millions of white women.

To believe that her defeats were due to sexism--as if to say, but for sexist male voters, she'd have won--would require one to believe that in the absence of such a pernicious bias, she could have expected to win, say, 6 in 10 male voters: a result unlikely in any primary season, where voters are choosing between two pretty equally liberal candidates. Although sexism may well have helped defeat Clinton in the general election, had she made it that far (since, at that point, many men would have sadly been attracted to the hyper-militaristic candidacy of John McCain), given the choice between Clinton and Obama in the primaries, there is simply no evidence to suggest that gender played a significant role in tipping the balance of votes in his favor and against her.

Indeed, in several states (like Pennsylvania, for instance), among men who said that gender mattered to their votes, most actually voted for Clinton. In other words, there were at least as many if not more men who liked the thought of electing the nation's first woman president, as there were those who repelled from the concept. Although this would likely not have been true in November, the presence of enough liberal white men in the Democratic primaries made gender a net wash for Clinton, if not a net benefit.

Of course, many Clinton supporters will say that the rest of the men lied. Some will insist that most of the men who said gender didn't matter to them were phonies, maybe even a bunch of Neanderthals, who probably gave all their buddies high-fives at the strip club later that night, joking about how they'd fooled the exit pollsters. Whatever. Hey, it could be, and probably was a dishonest answer for some. But again, once you look at the actual vote totals it becomes obvious--however surprising it may be for some--that the numbers of persons whose votes were cast against Clinton for sexist reasons couldn't have been that large: after all, no male candidate in a race between two men, where both were similar in terms of their policy ideas, and where both had similar voting records, could have expected to do much better than half the male vote, which is essentially how she did in this race. For sexism to have been the dispositive factor, it would have to be shown that Clinton lost the votes of men that she otherwise would have received, but for her gender--an utterly impossible task, because it simply isn't true.

In fact, here's the biggest irony of all: what Clinton's acolytes ignore is that had her final opponent this year been a white man, she would likely have received fewer votes from white men than she has received against Obama. Meaning that, if anything, Clinton has benefited more from white racism in her quest for the nomination than she was ever harmed by male chauvinism and misogyny.

Indeed, racism--the force that Steinem and other white second-wave feminists insisted would be less of a problem for Obama than "sociopathic woman-hating" would be for Clinton (to quote writer and feminist icon Robin Morgan)--almost did make the difference in the primaries. Although that racism has been insufficient thus far to derail Obama's success, it has indisputably been a more potent force in terms of dictating voting behavior among whites, than sexism has been for determining the votes of men.

To wit, exit poll results from several states, including California, Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, all of which indicate that the margin of Clinton's victories in all of these was either equal to or smaller than the numbers of white voters who admitted that race was relevant to their vote, and then cast their votes for Clinton. In California, for example, Clinton beat Obama by 416,000 votes, but based on the percentages from the exit polls, there were 442,000 for whom race was important to their decision and who voted for Clinton. In Indiana, Clinton's margin of victory was only 19,000, but based on the exit poll there, nearly 100,000 whites voted for Hillary, because of race. In Ohio, Clinton won by 220,000 votes, but based on the exit polls, there were 246,000 whites who voted for Clinton at least in part for reasons of race.

In other words, but for the votes of whites who were willing to admit that their votes were at least in part cast for racist reasons, she may well have lost all of those races, and the nomination battle would have been over far sooner. There is simply no way to interpret the vote of a white person who says "race matters to my vote" and then votes against the black candidate, other than as an act of racism, just as there is no way to interpret the vote of a man who says "gender matters to my vote" and then votes against the woman, other than as an act of sexism. When you consider the likelihood that far more whites voted against Obama for racial reasons than would be willing to admit it--a proposition bolstered by decades of research indicating that whites typically downplay their racial biases to pollsters--the relative importance of racism compared to sexism in this race becomes readily apparent.

If we assume that two similar candidates would, in typical circumstances (that is to say, yet another race in which two men were vying for the nomination), roughly split the vote among white voters, as they would among men, then we can see quite clearly the effects of racism on Obama. Although he managed to win roughly half the white votes in a few states, in most places he received only about a third, and sometimes quite a bit less. In state after state, this racial gap amounted to tens of thousands (often hundreds of thousands) of votes, totaling more than enough in several cases to cost him victories in those places. Even if we allow that every white woman who voted for Clinton had understandable, non-racist reasons for voting for her, rather than Obama--and indeed, most would have voted for her had her opponent been a white man, just as they did here--the numbers of white men whose votes were cast for racial reasons would have, in at least some states, been sufficient to alter the outcomes of the elections. And for certain, even in those states where the racist votes would have been insufficient to change the final outcome, there is no question that they diminished the size of his wins and made larger his defeats, in ways that have allowed the primary season to drag on month after month.

None of this is to say that racism is a more important social problem than sexism: both are entrenched and pernicious impediments to equal opportunity, and both relate to one another in any number of ways. This, it should be noted, is especially true for women of color, whose status as equal partners in womanhood (and whose unique experience as women in a racist society), is often ignored by white feminists. In fact, in this election, the call from various feminist quarters for women to stick together on the basis of sisterhood (and the anger often aimed at women of color for not doing so) took for granted that black and brown women experience the society only or mostly as women, rather than equally as folks who can't qualify for the perks of whiteness: a taking for granted that, in and of itself reinforces both patriarchy and white supremacy, by erasing women of color from consideration altogether.

Perhaps the defeat of Hillary Clinton will expose for all the underlying racial supremacy at the heart of much white feminist analysis. Perhaps it will allow the development of a more complete and thorough analysis of patriarchy and the way it interrelates with white supremacy to divide and conquer groups that often have common interests. Maybe it will force white women like Hillary Clinton to confront their privileged mindset, their sense of entitlement (which flows uninterrupted and almost effortlessly from the fount of whiteness to which white women have had access, in spite of patriarchy). Or then again, maybe it will just lead white women to become pissed at black folks, who they'll be encouraged to view as having "stolen" the Presidency from them.

It wouldn't be the first time that a group of white liberals had missed the point, after all.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com

This essay originally appeared in Lip.

 

 

 

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