Equal opportunity smearing vs. Post-racism.

We’ve called our readers’ attention to the media treatment of Hillary Clinton as she  has been denigrated in ways feminists at least could easily predict; we tend to be all too aware of the sexist cliches being worked through by the press.

What racist cliches are showing up in opposition to Obama’s campaign?  Or has the United States entered the period of post-racism, as Daniel Shore was considering yesterday on NPR?  Might racial lines at least be getting blurry, as he suggests?

Well maybe, but not always perhaps quite as one might like.  At least one blurring is done by the cliche of the secretative, mysterious, dangerous and dark outsider, a  trope apparently applicable both to Arabs and African Americans.  And so the picture of  the dangerous Obama as the secret Muslim plotting against America from the inside has been seized upon.

An excellent post on a Religion, Philosophy and Ethics course blog draws our attention to the viral email about Obama that is going around and to the conservative US network that appears to helping it along.  Don’t miss their  link to a full report  here.

So Very, Very Not What We Need

NOW-NY has just issued an appalling press release.

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). “They” are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women’s money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.

This is not how anyone should argue. And it’s especially appalling coming from a large state chapter of a major feminist organisation. I will be so very, very happy if somebody reveals this to be a hoax. Please? Anybody?