Excellent! Very clear headed critique – the real issue is the power structure, not only who participates but who decides who participates and how we are “allowed” to speak of them.

However I would suggest a caveat. Though there is no doubt that “race” and gender are flash points, I think progressives have to be careful not to fall into the trap of knee-jerk reflexive reaction. I think that it is just as absurd to support a female or “minority” candidate as such as it is to vote against them as such. I think a wonderful opportunity was missed by much of “progressive media when it failed to pose “what if” choices to various luminaries, e.g. what if candidates were Barack Obama v Condoleeza Rice, or Dennis Kucinich v Alan Keyes, or Hillary Clinton v Condoleeza Rice or, you get the point. – hypotheticals to help isolate for purposes of elucidation the real importance of various factors we incorporate in our choosing processes. For me, it’s pretty clear that neither female gender nor “minority” status are any guarantee that a particular candidate will actually be good for females or minorities, not only as such but simply as human beings.

Having examined the candidates positions on the issues, it seems to me that neither one proposed anything close to what we needed in the field of health care, economic or environmental policy or foreign affairs. Either one is better than McCain, but only marginally. But what if the candidate with better approaches than any of these “major” candidates happened to be a white male. Would/could any of the progressive media (PM) even consider, let alone acknowledge that fact? What if the our new Dem. candidate actually serves the very power structure Ms. Flanders decries better than another independent candidate who might be a white male? Could PM even examine the possibility, let alone acknowledge it if it were so? Until we have that discussion we will remain extraordinarily vulnerable to that power structure – a structure that feels it can effectively mask its hegemony by simply vesting it in a female/minority candidate – and blind to the fact that (s)he actually represents the interests of that structure better than any of the “ole white guys” who are running.

Ms. Flanders is right, we need to “stop being obsessed with white people”. But we, as progressives, must also stop being obsessed with the idea that ONLY a female or minority can/will get us out of our mess and that we can’t afford to be bothered with those annoying “little” details such as whether or not the bridge they will build will get us over the moat, or dump us in with the alligators – again. PM cannot truly claim to speak truth to power until it looks in the mirror and speaks to itself about such things, and having done so, speaks to us about them as well.

By Aquifer on June 9th, 2008 at 12:04 pm