Kelly At Large #143
In which the author flashes back to 2016, and 2008 and...
Well, at least we don’t have to worry about a coup at the beginning of January. Trump won fair and square.
When I saw the results I felt like puking, flashed back to the Javits Center in 2016 when an excited chattering crowd in Pussy Grabs Back tee-shirts or white pantsuits gradually fell silent. And an older Black woman next to me, so happy to vote for Clinton to be the first woman president after the joy of voting for the first black president Obama, gradually slumped in shock as she stared at the screen.
Ana and I left soon after. In the street around the convention center there were whispering groups, largely of young black men, surrounding the windows of appliance shops watching the news on the TVs there.
It was a moment when Black Lives Matter was in full swing massively taking to the street, first to protest the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman, then to protest the police killings of Mike Brown and others. After the election I remember how rags like the New York Times headlined pieces declaring the election was a backlash to the movement, finding a correlation between votes for Trump and racist views. Nothing to do with misogyny. Oh no, not that. It was the racists. And of course, Clinton’s emails. Almost ignored were a series of well-researched articles finding a strong, maybe even stronger correlation between Trump votes and conservative, hateful views about women.
Now, in 2024, the narrative is already looking at everything besides sex, pinning blame on Biden for not quitting soon enough, asking how on earth Harris could have lost the working class vote, the vote of black men and of Latinos. Why she didn’t do better among progressives. Yes, how? Why? What a mystery!
I didn’t write much at all in this election cycle, overwhelmed with our newly medicalized lives. But in article after article before that election in 2016, my mantra had been, “Never underestimate misogyny. Never underestimate hate.” I’d watched Segolene Royale flounder against it in 2007 in France, then Hillary Clinton in the U.S. democratic primaries in 2008, then that dyke activist turned faithful Democrat and New York mayoral candidate Christine Quinn a few years later.
When Hillary finally won the democratic nomination I remember very well how so many in the left said they’d love to vote for a woman, just not this one, (her husband, Bill! her emails!) though somehow their support didn’t materialize either for the very female Elizabeth Warren when she ran in the Democratic primaries four years later, preferring to vote for the old white guy Bernie Sanders which meant handing the nomination to that other old white guy Biden.
Likewise, Harris received less than enthusiastic support for many reasons that would have been less persuasive if she’d been a man. After all, the imperfect Obama managed to win no matter that he campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as George W. Bush, endorsed many of Bush’s same anti-democratic policies on “Homeland” security, just to give two reasons that had me gnashing my own teeth.
Harris problems were almost foreseeable given that even an overtly pussy-grabbing president and a reversal of abortion rights in the U.S. due to his Supreme Court appointments were not enough to get a feminist movement off the ground in the U.S. And I’m comfortable predicting nothing will change in the future unless we grapple with the misogyny, not just among conservatives, but bubbling happily underneath the political center and left. More memes. More celebrity endorsements won’t do anything to touch it.
If we aren’t willing to get our hands dirty, we deserve what we get.
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo Kelly
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Les Odyssées de Fally Dogswell (original French), 2024 ISBN : 9781736155882 The Odysseys of Fally Dogswell (translated English), 2024 ISBN : 9781736155868 Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (original English), 2014 ISBN: 9781452941332