on misogyny and "the black man's hour"

Music: Sigur Ros: Inni (2011)

A forth woman will step forward today to report that she was sexually harassed by a presidential candidate at 1:30 p.m. A friend and colleague at another university alerted me that she was expecting a term paper today from a student who would be arguing that this candidate is a "victim." This news got me to thinking about Susan B. Anthony.

As is well known---er, except, perhaps, by public high school students in Texas---black male suffrage was established in the 1870s with the 15th amendment. Support for the amendment split the "first wave" feminists into two camps: those who refused to lend their voices to the reconstruction legislation because it did not extend suffrage to all and those who supported the amendment as a kind of incremental progress toward universal equality before the law. These divided efforts would also split into federally focused and state focused strategies for women's suffrage. It would take over another forty years to establish women's right to vote in the United States with the 19th amendment (and shortly thereafter, establish an age requirement for voting too).

Anthony and Stanton's famous opposition to the fifteenth was met by other voices, many suffragists but also a number of vocal misogynists, that it was "the black man's hour," meaning that women should "wait" until their proper time. In hindsight, of course, it's easy to argue such arguments were shortsighted, however, we have to remember that each historical moment is more complicated and knotty when viewed from the crises of the future. After the Civil War, one can only imagine that in the late 1860s either a state or federal approach seemed viable---we celebrate all the suffragists for their strivings. Ultimately Anthony and Stanton were right (on political, legal, cultural, and theoretical grounds), but that's not to discount those suffragists who agreed with the strategy of incremental progress: they took that inch, and although it took too long, the mile eventually came.

Today the phrase "black man's hour" can be understood as shorthand for the ideology that underwrites it: the superiority of the male sex and gender and the secondary station of woman, whether "natural" or "cultural." Even writing such a statement seems absurd, and yet, we can certainly discern the ideology at work in contemporary politics: taking the admittedly facile representations of the mainstream media as a symptom, on the right, "black man's hour" references a commitment to the natural inferiority of women in arguments for a better world, while on the left the phrase references an investment in the cultural truism, however unfounded, that we gotta work within the system we got. As a rhetorician through-and-through (although I do not throw out notions like "truth" and so forth, my moorings are constructivist to say the least), it's often difficult for me to limit my thinking to the level of MSM jockeying and take this discourse on its own terms. I firmly believe "seeing is believing," and that visual regimes participate in the hegemony of patriarchy at a pretty deep (that is, early-in-childhood) level; this is to say, I think gender is lodged at a structuring, epistemological horizon of understanding. I recognize such a view is provocative, and I'm happy to discuss that, but even so, let me briefly take up the implications of the superficial (the rhetoric of reportage) to make a larger point about presidential candidate Herman Cain's harassing proclivities, a candidate who is slowly being revealed as a straight-talker whose refreshing candor is actually buoyed by a sense of male entitlement/exceptionalism (the direct links between masculinity and an ideology of exceptionalism, of course, need not be elaborated after Bush II).

It hasn't taken long, of course, for self-identified "conservative" pundits to step forward to suggest the allegations of Cain's sexual harassment is racially motivated. Last week Ann Coulter's Cain-raising on the media circuit garnered the most attention; she suggested not only were the charges born of racism, but that Republican "blacks" are far superior to Democratic "blacks" because of the scorn they must endure to be conservatives. As the bile duct of the RepubliChristian unconscious (Marx's observation about Hegel's dialectics being upside down comes to mind), we shouldn't be surprised Coulter would say something so (ironically?) racist. Still, as Ronald Martin's CNN editorial details, pundits have been giving voice to the "race card," saying what politicians already in power cannot say. Even Cain has suggested as much himself, and after this afternoon's press conference with the forth accuser, I expect to hear more of it.

The suggestion here, of course, is that this is the black man's hour. The suggestion is that the charges of sexual harassment are a deliberate, conspiratorial distraction from the power of Cain's conservative ideas. How else do we explain the persistent polling suggesting the harassment scandals are still a non-issue among Republican supporters? Early this morning a CBS pollster noted Cain's numbers are up, and that his "testy" defiance may even help Cain's campaign. One has to wonder: so, four women claim to have been harassed sexually, to have been inappropriately treated by Cain because of their sex/gender. Four accusers is four too many, of course. Sure, there's yet to be "hard" evidence released in the media, but it's just a matter of time. And so, why is it Cain's supporters are unwilling to consider the plight of the possible victims of Cain's unwanted advances?

Although there are more insidious forms of ideological machination, at least superficially, Cain's defiance and his persistent popularity reflects how ideology actually works. Ideology is "overdetermined," as the story goes, and works in ways more akin to a complex machine of moving parts than conspiracy, making critique something like "whack a mole" when one attempts to address ideology as the multi-headed Hydra that it is: one can claim the feel-good mantle of fighting racism while propping sexism. Ideology works this way, sideways, shifting the terrain almost always in the name of The Good. And it's not just in the case of Cain, in which the rhetorical structure of the "high tech lynching" laid by the Supreme Thomas twenty years ago has been redeployed again; it's rather a persistent and deep structure rooted in the nineteenth century that argues for equality in the gestures of inequality. Among those of the Left there is a great temptation to suggest "we" are somehow exempt from the ideological machine, but how soon folks forget the presidential campaign of 2008: remember, folks, Hillary Clinton suffered a similar fate, losing a bid for the presidency because it was, yet again, the "black man's hour." As bell hooks and countless cultural critics have argued both inside and outside of the academy, one cannot fight misogyny or racism or class disparity without recognizing their deep, interlocking and mutual implication. This is why Anthony was, in the end, right to resist supporting the fifteenth amendment back in the 1870s: equality is a total horizon, not merely a sum of discrete parts clamoring for recognition.