About me, she wrote in The New Republic magazine, edited by a Marty Peretz, a man who once said that black women were "culturally deficient," that my black women characters weren't positive enough. For running afoul of this feminist "blueprint" for writing that she tried to lay on me, her views and those like hers were repudiated by Joyce Joyce, a black critic who deviates from the party line.
I also reminded Ms. Morgan that the Ms. editorial staff reflected the old plantation model, even though its founder, Gloria Steinem, said that she's concerned about the progress of black women. White feminists had the juicy editorial Big House positions, while women of color were the editorial kitchen help as contributing editors. A few months later, Ms. Morgan resigned as editor and was replaced by a black woman, but not before taking some potshots, not at misogynists belonging to her ethnic group, whose abuse of women has been a guarded secret, according to feminists belonging to that group, but at Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas (incidentally, when the white women who ran for office as a result of Ms. Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas arrived in Congress, they voted with the men).
Robin Morgan had her secretary respond to my recent letter and from the letter I gather that Ms. Morgan hasn't changed her mind. I'm a worse misogynist than the men in the Pentagon, and those who passed Clinton's Welfare Reform bill. I guess that bell hooks, another black feminist, who won't be invited by the men who run the Times to respond to Ms. Steinem, was right when she wrote in her book, Outlaw Culture, that white feminists are harder on black men than white men, but like other black feminists, from the 19th century to the present day, her point has been ignored by the mainstream media, who, when they view feminism, and just about every other subject, all they can see is white! (Except when
it's crime, athletics, and having babies out of wedlock!)
Feminists are harder on Ishmael Reed, Ralph Ellison (yes, him too), and even James Baldwin, that gentle soul, than on Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. Harder on Barack Obama than on Bill Clinton, to whom Gloria Steinem, a harsh critic of Clarence Thomas, gave a free pass when he was charged with sexual indiscretions by various women. She said that Bubba was O.K. because when he placed Kathleen Wiley's hand on his penis and she said no, he withdrew it. That when other women said no, he also halted his sexual advances. A letter writer to the Times challenged Ms. Steinem's double standard for white and black-men:
"Bob Herbert (column, Jan. 29) writes that Gloria Steinem said that even though Paula Jones has filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton, Ms. Jones has not claimed that the President had forced himself on her. ''He takes no for an answer,'' Ms. Steinem intones.
Lest we forget, Anita Hill said no to Clarence Thomas. And her accusations nearly derailed his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Patricia Schroeder, the former Congresswoman, did not claim that ''somebody may be overstating the case'' when Ms. Hill accused Judge Thomas of sexual misconduct, but Ms. Schroeder claims that now in Mr. Herbert's column. Again the left inadvertently exposes its sliding scale of moral indignation."
Black feminists also charge that white feminists deserted them during the fight against Proposition 209, which ended racial and gender hiring in the state of California, even though Affirmative Action has benefited white women the most!
They charge that white women were missing in action during the fight against the welfare reform bill. It seems that the cheapest form of solidarity with which they can express toward their minority sisters is to join in on the attack on Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, and Clarence Thomas and Mr., a character in The Color Purple, who, for them, represents all black men.
Though Steinem accuses men of being mean to Mrs. Clinton, she expressed no outrage about surrogate Bill Shaheen painting Obama as drug dealer, or the innuendo promoted by Senator Bob Kerrey. Senator Bob Kerrey, who, apparently having made up with the Clintons, was recruited to associate Obama with what the
Right refers to as "Islamo fascists."
He said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama, and his father was a Muslim and his paternal grandmother is a Muslim." He added that Obama "spent a little bit of time in a secular madressa."
You'd think that the New School of Social Research would have fired Kerrey when he admitted to committing atrocities in Vietnam. Now this.
All of these attacks must be what Hillary Clinton meant when she warned her opponents," now the fun begins."
One of the charges made by some black feminists is that white women middle class movement figures embezzle their oppression.
In the New York Times, Gloria Steinem's using a hypothetical black woman to do a house cleaning on Obama was what these women must have had in mind. (Phillip Roth does the same thing; uses his black maid characters to denounce black history and black studies: "Missa Roth, dese Black Studies ain't doin' nothin' but worrying folks. Whew!)
Her using a black woman as a prop must have annoyed Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison who made blistering comments about Ms.Steinem during an interview conducted by novelist Cecil Brown and carried in the University of Massachusetts' Review, where Ms. Morrison made the harshest comments about Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, to date, even harsher than those made by black feminist Prof. Trudier Harris, who, as a result of her essay, published in African American Review, faced such a hostile backlash from white feminist scholars that she stopped commenting about the novel, which has become a sacred text among white feminists, who are silent about how women are treated among their ethnic groups. Steinem said that had Obama been a black woman, he would not have made as much progress as a presidential candidate and added that white men would prefer voting for a black man over a white woman because they perceived black men as being more masculine than they.
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