Pot calling kettle: I didn’t know they hung ___

Former Veep candidate Geraldine Ferraro decided to go off the Clinton surrogate reservation and make some highly questionable comments about Obama’s “peculiar situation” of being both black and a man.

From Daily Breeze.com:

When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro’s comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.

“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Wow. It’s a lucky thing. To be a black man. In America.

She’s talking about North America, right? Not that it’s easy to be black in Venezuela or anything, but she’s kidding right?

I’m a feminist. I’m proud of it. I think being a woman is dandy. But coming from the unique perspective of being both a woman and black that is by far the most ignorant statement I’ve ever heard. Name me one white woman or white man who actually wants to be a black person. Not one who wants to sing like one or dance like one or play jazz like one. Be a black person, as in live everyday as a black person in American society.

Just like people get offended when you suggest that God is a woman or that Jesus was black that tells you all you needed to know about being black or a woman, it’s an insult. But, and I hate to say this, I didn’t know white women had a higher rate of incarceration than the general population. I didn’t know that they had worse health care or died earlier. I didn’t know that they were more likely to die in gun violence and not live to be 25.

Apparently, as in tune as I am with the news of today, I wasn’t hip enough to know that being black ceased to be a liability. Please, tell that to the people who called for Obama to repudiate Louis Farrakhan but shrug as John McCain receives bear hugs from bigots. And while you’re at it, tell the folks who routinely bring up his juvenile drug experimentation as if he was a doped up child soldier in the Sierra Leone. Someone rush a note to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter with their “Barack, the Magic Negro” songs and “B. Hussein Obama” cracks. Please tell them, Geraldine. Spread the word.

I hate to have to say it, Geraldine, but I didn’t know they hung white women. Honestly. I wasn’t aware. I didn’t know they burnt your home down so when you and your family ran outside they could shoot you. I didn’t know that you had to get your head beat in on the Edmund-Pettis bridge just so you could have the right to walk across that bridge, peacefully, in protest. I didn’t know you had to experience the long series of ritualistic humiliations that only the benefit of blackness can bring you in America.

Things have improved in our country greatly since my mother was picking cotton in Arkansas as a child. And things have also improved for a white woman a good deal since the 1950s and 60s. White women aren’t tied to homes and children and attending their husband’s needs. You could have your own life. But things would have to reach an amazing level of progress to get to the point where being a black man in America is better than being a white woman. In America, skin color has always trumped gender. Black women, for example, were basically viewed as pack mules, not women. A female human designation wasn’t something you gave to a beast of burden. To this day, if something happens to you, be it rape, spousal abuse, murder, molestation, sexual harassment or imprisonment, you’re facing a whole lot of eye rolls and “don’t care.”

But we’re not so advanced to think that a black man gets any more attention if he’s a victim. Being black often means no attention at all if you can’t sing or you can play sports at such an advanced level that someone makes you a millionaire. So while Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren and countless cable news programs devote hours after hours of missing, dead, kidnapped, victimized young white woman of the week, if you’re missing while black in America, be happy if you can get your face on those little coupon fliers that come in the mail.

If that at all.

While Obama may not be some struggling, jive talking star NFL cornerback who came up out of the swamps of Florida on a scholarship to play football but not to learn anything, whose mother was a junkie and whose father was a ghost, while Obama may not be that guy who white people can both feel pity for while simultaneously using him as an example of what the rest of us shiftless Negroes should to, while he defies stereotype …

Don’t let the Harvard fool you. He still had to be a black person the whole fucking time.

So yes, Geraldine! There is a double standard. A lesser known white man running against Hillary Clinton would have lost a long time ago. A black man running against Hillary Clinton, technically, should be DOA too. But many African Americans are told constantly by their parents that good enough is not good enough. Even as Condi Rice will tell you, black folks were told you had to be twice as good as your white competition lest they find another excuse why you can’t do the job. So a black man had to do more than any white man could do. He had to overcome the fact that he was:

A) black

B) had a Islamic name

C) was a relative unknown

How is it that other women who’ve been in politics for years, who have worked hard for what they earned yet are not able to get to a presidential nomination throw down? Is it because it’s hard when you’re a minority to get a foot in the door? Doesn’t it seem like the only people who get the breaks are a privileged few who have famous last names and a whole lot of money?

Doesn’t it? Doesn’t that seem, I don’t know, unfair?Seriously, my white feminist sisters, we need to talk. Your girl fucked up, OK? Admit it. She ran a shitacular campaign,and now, instead of telling her to her face that she fucked up you want to bash Obama and try to twist things in an effort to equate white woman life with black man life. And don’t tell me how black men got the right to vote first because they didn’t even enforce that law in the south where most black people still lived. And those who tried to stand up for that right got motherfucking hung.

See? You don’t want to play this game with me, Geraldine. I can do this shit all day. You do not play the misery tango with black folks in America. You will get owned every time.

And how can a woman who has a famous last name, is a star in her party who her husband is the de facto head of, who raised goo gobs of money and locked up a bunch of super delegates while being a wealthy senator the whole time be the underdog? In what definition of the word is she being disenfranchised? She’s not. That’s not saying she doesn’t have to deal with sexism, because everyone is well aware of the press’ dysfunctional relationship they have with Hillary. But considering the jungle bunnisms of various conservatives it seems like they’re heaping out two scoops of bigotry for anyone who isn’t a white man.

I’m sorry. I can’t turn your candidate’s brand name and white privilege into votes. I don’t know why it didn’t work. Seriously, I don’t.

So, Geraldine, I’m going to be nice and cut you a break. Maybe, just maybe you meant what Papa Snob and I surmised. Maybe you were trying to say, inelegantly, that Barack Obama wouldn’t have this success as a white man because if Hillary was running against an unnamed white man the black vote may have split more evenly. But even this doesn’t hold up on second glance. Her last name is Clinton. She might not have pulled down 80 percent, but plenty-a-Negroes before she decided to burn the darkie bridge would happily have gave Bill’s wife 60 percent or more.

Hell, I’m pretty sure this was part of Hillary’s game plan. She was betting on Black folks remembering the good times with Bill and help her rise to the top like cream.

I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this, Gigi. I still think you would have made a good vice president in 1984, but you’re totally sounding like sour grapes in 2008.