The Women of Color-Blind Constitution

The phrase “history repeats itself” is a popular but false saying. History does not so much engage in repetition in spite of its unlearned mistakes as it reimagines itself by spinning them as well-intended triumphs. So it is during each election season. In 2008 when Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama faced off for the democratic presidential nomination, they were the physical manifestations of equal franchise. Each was the stumping, walking “type” of the 19th and 15th Amendments, respectively.  Senator Obama became the rhetoric of a color-blind Constitution in the form of a Black man, Clinton the rhetoric of a gender-blind Constitution in the body of a White woman.  Just as in 1870 and 1920 when the 15th and 19th Amendments were passed, in 2016 women of color are not in the politicians’ physical bodies or imaginations.

Gendered opposition to the 15th Amendment sought to elevate White womanhood by underscoring perceived intellectual deficiencies among Black people that rendered them unqualified to vote.  Many White suffragettes believed that White women were better prepared to vote than all Black people, male or female. Securing the vote for Black men demanded women of color choose between loyalty to race or gender, thus fracturing body and psyche where both were inextricably united. Hillary Clinton’s “It’s 3 a.m.” campaign advertisement echoed 19th Century claims of White female supremacy with a twist; White women were now the favored protectors of society, especially its children, all of whom needed protecting from Black men. Orlando Patterson wrote in The Red Phone in Black and White about watching the Clinton ad: “I couldn’t help but think of D.W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of A Nation,’ the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad – as I see it – is that the person answering the phone might be a black man [Barack Obama], someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.” In 2008 as in 1870, women of color chose race as a defense against racism. Like those women of color asked to march behind male allies and segregated from white suffragettes in the 1913 suffrage parade, we refused segregation and chose to march to the beat of President Obama’s drum even as its heartbeat fell out of synchronicity with our own.

Now in 2016, Hillary Clinton asks women of color to choose her as our color-blind representative female Presidential candidate, while remaining deaf to a drumbeat compelling her to dance with intersectionality.  The U.S. prides itself on “firsts” and reimagines them as ending our enduring inequities. In 2009, we inaugurated our first Black President and promptly declared our Nation “post-racial.” We would declare sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy defeated if we elected our first female president.  However doing so would perpetuate the women of color-blind Constitution where we are banished to the gap between the 15th and 19th Amendments, the shadowland between race and gender.

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law