Sunday, June 1, 2008

Quoting Jezebel

Jezebel is a blog that maybe you have heard of. It's good, and flawed in its ways like all blogs. What I like about it is the stuff it does as a watchdog on the sexism vs. racism debate among democrats. Particularly striking was a piece today that was a counterpoint to an OP-ED piece Geraldine Ferraro wrote. The counter can be found here. Excerpted below is the best point of the critique:
Racial resentment, Geraldine, is racism. Why can't you see that? People coming up to you and complaining that they can't complain about black people is them complaining for being looked down upon for being racists! And, yes, their time ought to have passed, it should pass, they should learn and understand that racism should have no place in our society and as a party leader, a stalwart, a barrier-breaker you should be breaking it to them that "getting treated fairly for being white" means losing sometimes, and sometimes it means losing to a person of color. It means you are not always going to come out ahead, it means that the advantages your fathers or mothers faced 40 or 50 years ago (or less long ago than that) because of the color of their skin should disappear and you should lose to better-qualified candidates of color and then you should not ever, ever even in the dark recesses of your small, reptilian brain think "Well, that's what affirmative action has wrought in this country," because that, Geraldine is racism. And it's there, and it's palpable and the fact that you are the educated white Reagan Democrats standard bearer for how sexism is worse than racism and it's not really racism if it's just "racial resentment" makes me sick to my fucking stomach.

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