No, Geraldine, see, the problem was not that you were inappropriately being called a racist, it's that your idea of a defense of those charges was not to go back and apologize or clarify what you meant and then duck down for a couple of weeks, it was to attack people who were — whether rightly or wrongly in your mind — offended by your comments of being racists themselves.
--snip--
Geraldine, I literally cried in frustration that you can't see what you're doing to the Democratic party, to the women's movement, to the uneasy détente between the (almost exclusively white) old guard feminists and those feminists of color who have complained for decades about the short shrift their issues have been given in the larger women's movement. What, you hadn't noticed that? You titled your piece "Healing The Wounds of Democrat's Sexism" and then you rip open the flesh of Democrats' racist wounds — you do remember the fifties and sixties well enough, I assume, to recall which party's Southern Senators kept a federal civil rights law off the books for decades, right? And you side with the so-called Reagan Democrats, those bastards that frankly kept you from the Vice Presidency, in charging the party with reverse racism.
--snip--
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.
And I'm gonna add this, just so you don't point to me and say, well, there's someone who doesn't understand sexism. Is there sexism? Sure, God knows I've been turned down for jobs in favor of less qualified men, replaced men in positions and not earned as much, been hooted and hollered at on the street and been called all nature of diminutives in the work environment and out and had all manner of shit thrown at me my entire life for being a smart girl or a bitchy girl and all the rest of it. But do you know what no one has ever, ever called me? The N-word. Ask around, Geraldine, it's still in use. So, I recognize that I'm damn lucky not only to be a woman (because I love being a woman even if sexism exists for the rest of my life), but that I'm lucky that in addition to putting up with sexism I don't have to put up with racism. The fact that you don't recognize that makes me deeply, deeply sad and furiously angry at the same time.
It's past time for people like Geraldine Ferraro to shut up.
