Hillary and Obamaa Sign That
U.S.
is
'Far from Equality'
"Confronted
with the asset posed by Obama's negritude,
which is at once assumed and transcended, Mrs. Clinton and her husband have
tried, each in his or her own way, to send the young politician back to his
ghetto … by dividing the electorate of their party, the two candidates could
cause fractures that the one who is nominated cannot repair."
In nine months, the Americans could
elevate to the leadership of their country a White woman or a Black man, two
“minorities” in the political lexicon on the other side of the Atlantic. The
Democratic candidate for the White House at the end of a competition that may
well continue beyond the primaries on February 5 - “Super Tuesday” - when there
will be votes in over 20 states, will be either Hillary Clinton or Barack
Obama. With the Democrats in good position to win the presidency in November,
the possibility of the dominant Western power being led by a man of African
descent or by a woman is arouses curiosity on every continent.
If Mrs. Clinton enters the White
House on January 20, 2009, nearly 89 years after women's suffrage was
established in the United States, the march of women toward equality will have
reached a significant milestone. However, her election would be more of an
upheaval for America than for the rest of the world, where women have long
since come to power; earlier in Israel, India, the United Kingdom and Pakistan,
and today in Germany, Chili and Argentina. But if one of them reaches the
summit of the American “superpower,” it would be a lesson to those who still
doubt the capacity of women to lead or the willingness of the people to trust
them to do so.
Simone de
Beauvoir: One of France's feminist pioneers drew inspiration from her
American counterparts.
Viewed from inside the United
States, the election of a woman to the presidency would mark a change. Because
the women’s liberation movement has some of its roots there - in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir often referred to the achievements of the
American women - we sometimes imagine society across the Atlantic to be more
sexually egalitarian than it is in reality. Any discrimination on the basis of
gender is prohibited by law and punishable by the courts, but the resistance of
men to sharing power is no less strong.
In politics as in the economy, women
who have exercised power or who have held high level positions are rare. Only
one entered the presidential competition this year, where there were initially
15 men. Nancy Pelosi is the first woman in history to have risen to the post of
Speaker of the House of Representatives - of 535 Representatives, 86 are women
- after the victory of the Democrats in the 2006 legislative elections. Of 100
senators, only sixteen are women, including Mrs. Clinton. Of 50 states, eight
have female governors.
All of this means that the United
States is far achieving equality. The election of Mrs. Clinton on November 4
would be a qualitative leap forward rather than the culmination of a gradual
process. The extent the Americans are ready for this, or conversely, adverse,
is difficult to guess. But what's certain is that the senator from New York is
divisive.
According to the Gallup polling
agency, there are almost as likely to have a low opinion of her as those who
don't, while her Democratic challenger, Barack Obama, and his possible
Republican opponent, John McCain, both evoke largely positive reactions with a
small minority expressing dislike. It’s true that they are both centrists and
seek to appeal to independent voters, even those from the oppossing party,
while Ms. Clinton is conducting a more partisan campaign. But inspiring
hostility among half of Americans is not new. One must wonder if this isn't
due, at least in part, to the fact that she seems like a woman who is looking
for power … and who is capable of achieving it.
If Mr. Obama becomes the candidate
of the Democratic Party and if he beats the Republican candidate, it will be a
little over 40 years after the enactment of the law mandating respect for the
right of Blacks to vote, which was the culmination of a struggle to recognize
the dignity of Americans whose ancestors were forced into slavery, and which
began with the Civil War in 1861.
A picture of Barack Obama (right) with his
little-discussed Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, his sister Maya
Soetoro, and his mother Ann Dunham.
To be certain, the senator from Illinois
is not himself a product of this history. He was born in Hawaii of a Kenyan
father and a White mother from Kansas, who then took him to Indonesia. But he
chose to become an American Black and devote his life to the destiny of this
group when at age 24 he went to do social work on the South Side of Chicago,
one of the poorest and most violent urban areas in the United States.
Mrs. Clinton advertises the fact
that she's a woman, while Mr. Obama takes care not to appear like a minority
candidate. The numbers among female and Black voters explain this difference in
strategy, but they aren't the only factor. The senator from Illinois is trying
to walk the line between a candidacy of racial identification, which would mean
renouncing victory in advance, and the assertion of “post-racial politics,”
which would also be a losing strategy, because it ignores those who still
suffer from racism and its consequences. He wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope, “To think clearly
about race … requires us to see the world on a split screen - to maintain in
our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America
as it is.”
Mr. Obama is striving to be the
candidate of the American dream, that of a multicolored society of free and
equal men and women - a project that is aimed at everyone - and to be the
candidate not of a minority, but of all minorities - Black, Latin American and
Asian - who suffer the effects of not belonging to the founding and dominant
group that has its origins in Europe.
Confronted with the asset posed by
Obama's negritude, which is at once
assumed and transcended, Ms. Clinton and her husband have tried, each in his or
her own way, to send the young politician back to his ghetto. She reproached
him for invoking the memory of Martin Luther King while forgetting President
Lyndon Johnson, who signed the laws on civil rights and the vote in 1964 and
1965. For his part, Bill Clinton slyly recalled the success of candidate Jesse
Jackson in 1984 and 1988 in South Carolina, in order to put Mr. Obama's January
26 victory in that state, which has a large Black population, in perspective.
The Democratic race is thus
flirting with a dangerous competition between inequalities to correct or
injustices to repair. The risk is that by dividing the electorate of their
party, the two candidates could cause fractures that the one who is nominated
cannot repair.
