Ferraro Mania
by Guest Contributor dnA, originally published at Too Sense
Michael Calderone has this video of Geraldine Ferraro claiming black journalists, (and I assume she means black male journalists) of being surrogates for Obama and ignoring sexism on the trail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates points to this Jezebel post noting that Bob Herbert devoted a whole column to the subject, but they didn’t provide what I thought was the money quote:
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Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.
I suppose it’s safe to say that Geraldine Ferraro doesn’t read Bob Herbert, probably because she thinks that he only got his job at the New York Times because he’s black. And we know for a fact that Geraldine Ferraro really just doesn’t like black men. And it’s significant that asked to name an instance of sexism, all she could mention was conference calls with journalists that all candidates have.
But let’s take a look at what some other black columnists have had to say.
Eugene Robinson acknowledged a sexist bias in the media against Hillary months ago. Roland Martin said “I’ve heard men blow off comments about Sen. Hillary Clinton that are clearly sexist, and we do well to recognize that.” Earl Ofari Hutchinson has spent the past year shilling mercilessly for Hillary.
But you know what the key word in Ferraro’s diatribe is? It’s not even black, it’s “all.”
“All the black journalists”.
There actually aren’t very many of us in the news business, even in commentary, which seems to have a pretty low threshold for white Republican men. There are too many of us perhaps, for Geraldine Ferraro, who probably would have been hard pressed to name another black columnist.
What Ferraro is trying to do, and what Fox News is helping her do, is turn give “sexism” the subtextual meaning of “anti-white,” much the way folks on the Right who attack department stores for maybe, possibly including Hannukah but more likely referring to New Years when they put up banners saying “Happy Holidays” get incensed about “anti-Semitism” when the target is Amiri Baraka. So now instead of calling the Obama campaign “racist” by which they mean anti-white, they can just call it sexist and we’ll all know what it means.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Geraldine Ferraro - Just Why? at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture on 03 Jun 2008 at 7:00 am
[...] What I find fascinating about this op-ed is that it is titled “Healing the Wounds of Democrat’s Sexism” but only a few sentences actually relate to sexism. Instead, she rants about reverse racism. What the hell? Looks like dnA might be right about that code word thing. [...]