and Some of Us Vote: A Remix

BlackProf
by Salamishah Tillet

I spent the better half of Tuesday afternoon, listening to and reading the transcript of Barack Obama’s speech on “race.” Obama’s address was thoughtful, progressive, eloquent, brilliant, moving, and insightful. He did all the things I wanted him to do, acknowledged the founding “sin” of American slavery, shifted the burden of racial reconciliation from the shoulders of African-Americans to the larger American citizenry, and spoke about the past and present consequences of white rage and black disillusionment.

What Obama did, is what President Bill Clinton did not do in 1993. When faced with the mounting pressure from conservatives about his nominating law professor Lani Guinier to be Assistant Attorney General of Civil Rights, Bill Clinton begrudgingly claimed he was unfamiliar with Guinier’s theories on proportional voting and affirmative action. Much like the recent caricaturing of Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a racial demagogue, mainstream media publications like the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek collapsed reigning stereotypes of black militancy and welfare recipients and labeled Guinier a “quota queen.”

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…… African-American women not only lie at the intersections of racism and sexism, we also constitute the most important site of coalition building and embody the possibilities of the democratic experiment. More than twenty-five years after Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith published “All The Men Are Black, All The Women Are White, But Some of Us are Brave,” instead of ignoring the reality of how race and sex collide in America, let’s use these moments of convergence as the springboard to talk about race and gender in America.

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