Black Feminists Don’t Owe Hillary Clinton Their Support

Over the course of the last few days, I have been accused of both protecting and vilifying Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The reason for this is as simple as it is complex: People of color, especially black women, have to hold so many things in tension regarding race, gender and class that depending on whom they find themselves in conversations with, it appears as if one facet is being prioritized over the other. This is why, when we’re speaking about Hillary Rodham Clinton and the major two-party political system, it’s imperative that we make it plain.

Clinton’s candidacy is evidence of why intersectionality is so critical, because for black women existing on those fault lines of race, gender and class, not much improves for us regardless of who is in the White House; nor does it matter for which party we carry the banner.

This does not equate to support for the Republican Party, though I’ve had that accusation hurled at me as well. Marco Rubio’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard; Ted Cruz is like some political science experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong; Donald Trump’s rallying cry should be, “Heil Trump!”; and Carly Fiorina, the lone woman in the pack, is traipsing about making references to fabricated Planned Parenthood videos that look as if a 14-year-old techie created them in iMovie.

The racist and misogynist policies they propose are dangerously regressive and primarily serve wealthy white, Christian men holding on for dear life to maintain their supremacy.

Still, Clinton herself has said that she and Republicans get along just fine when she’s in office. Both Clinton and Bernie Sanders—the largely beloved senator from Vermont and her Iowa co-front-runner—have been vocal about their nonsupport for reparations. Both of them have the same weak stance on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and our country’s complicity in it. They also support drone warfare, just like President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush before them.

The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—which Hillary Clinton lobbied for, Sanders voted for, Vice President Joe Biden authored and President Bill Clinton signed—shows why black women shouldn’t just follow the Democratic Party by default, even if the front-runner is a woman.

Mass incarceration and its tentacles have been disastrous for black America. On everything from HIV and AIDS to poverty, crime, limited access to a quality education, destruction of families, and recidivism most often due to difficulties finding and maintaining employment, the law has been disastrous.

Then, in 2008, when Clinton faced off against Obama in the Democratic primaries, she trafficked in the bitter racism that such structural inequities cement in the hearts of white Americans. From the New York Times:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” [Clinton] said … citing an article by The Associated Press. 

It “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. […] These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.”

Her call to bet on bigotry to win a Democratic election matters.

As a friend pointed out, Hillary Clinton has some relatively progressive ideas, including equal pay for women and health care as “a basic human right,” which is still not universal health care but is more to the left than the Affordable Care Act, which is nothing more than Romneycare lite. Yet she has been conservative on welfare reform, also known as TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Third-way politics, to which Clinton subscribes, is progressive on most social issues and to the right on most economic issues, reaffirming the capitalist structure that keeps people of color oppressed, while lulling some into believing that substantive progress is being made.

Nothing about this necessarily makes Clinton a “worse” Democrat than Sanders or her predecessors; it just undergirds my contention that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the same on many issues that disproportionately affect people of color—including the women whom Clinton claims to champion.

Certainly, not all the women are white, and this brings us back to those blanket charges of sexism and how they fail to take into consideration the lived experiences of many women of color.

What’s funny—and not “funny ha-ha”—is how some white feminists who ride for Clinton as hard as Bernie bros ride for Sanders have been silent about the criminalization, sexual assault and police brutality that black women and girls face. Despite this, they expect us now to be all sister suffrage “Vote for women!” or risk being deemed traitors to gender equality.

Cocooned in the white privilege that many of them deny, this type of white feminist expects black feminists with legitimate concerns to push those concerns aside for the so-called greater good—a good, to paraphrase both Harriet Tubman and Viola Davis, that exists over a line where there are “green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to us … but we can’t seem to get there no-how. We can’t seem to get over that line.”

Be clear: HRC has faced and continues to face extreme sexism. The misogyny is palpable. If she were a man, she would be finishing her second term and prepping for the Supreme Court by now. She can run with the big dogs and win because women know how to get it done. What exactly she’ll get done, however, is up for debate.

So I say this without centering Bill Clinton’s presidency—even though she played a critical role in his administration, which is just one part of her political career. I say this without talking about his morals or her hair or her “cankles,” or her penchant for pantsuits, because anyone who does that will do it to any woman, at any time, from corporate America to the corners of America. I say this without insisting that she needs to smile more or be more approachable, less formidable or less intimidating:

“Abuela” Clinton has some issues that screaming “sexism” just won’t fix.

And there are ills within the Democratic Party that evoking the GOP bogeyman just won’t cure.

I get it; it is terrifying. This good-cop, bad-cop routine that Republicans and Democrats have perfected is convincing. But we will never really break this system—because it’s not broken; it’s working exactly as intended—if we allow our votes to be held hostage by identity politics and cosmetic diversity. There are questions that we need to ask ourselves, hard questions that we need to be free to ask our elected officials, without apology or caveats.

Is black unemployment high and are black business opportunities low? Yes.

Are incarceration rates high? Yes.

Is reproductive-health-care access severely restricted for low-income women of color, particularly in the rural South? Yes.

Is the privatization and tokenizing of education that allows for the closure of public schools around the country making it harder for low-income students of color to receive a competitive education? Yes.

Are police officers killing and raping us? Yes.

Are our children being subjected to poisoned water? Yes.

And that’s just a sample questionnaire. I’ve heard a lot of “indict the system” black revolutionaries and so-called allies say, “If we don’t vote Democrat, a Republican will be in office and Armageddon will be upon us.”

Well, Armageddon is already here, and this Democratic-or-GOP, lesser-of-two-evils seesaw has done nothing but make us dizzy.

So how do we stop it? I don’t know, but I do know that my ancestors didn’t march and martyr themselves for me to be held hostage by my vote simply because a woman is running for office, who not only actively participated in laying the groundwork for some of these conditions but has also not convinced me that she is sincere in her claims that she will fight Congress for policies to rectify them.

It may be an unpopular stance to take in some feminist circles, but my vote is worth much more than that. Democrats and Republicans, through damaging economic and punitive policies, have marginalized, oppressed and killed too many people of color, specifically black Americans, and I refuse to let them assassinate my political imagination, too.

I refuse to let them strangle my belief in the improbable—an America in which black women and the people we love are no longer targets trapped in the crosshairs of a weaponized political system—just so a woman can walk through the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as commander in chief, as powerful and poetic as that may seem on the surface.

If that makes me a bad feminist, so be it.