She Wasn't Having It (foul pranks and management shrugs)

Yesterday, I Tweeted a story related by my partner after he spoke with a woman he works with. As I've received permission to share, I am posting it here with a few additional details. I am keeping all names anonymous so neither my partner (“Joe”) nor his colleague (“Donna”) encounter any backlash.

Joe and Donna work at a major international financial company; it’s one of the leading financial institutions in the world. Their particular office, a smallish one, is located in a thriving, corporate-centered city. It’s also a city where 30% of the population lives in poverty. Many employees commute daily from NYC, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and surrounding areas. Joe, a 54 year old white man, is one of those commuters; Donna, a 61 year old African-American woman, does not. They both arrive at the office quite early in the morning, so they tend to talk quite a bit.

Joe is one of the company’s Web workers; Donna is one of the company’s custodial workers—in fact, she’s the only full-time daily custodial presence. Yesterday morning, Joe saw her for the first time in a while, and he asked how she was. Donna responded, “Disgusted.” 

A few weeks before Christmas, Donna had a routine day taking care of the building’s various offices until she tended to the programmers' office floor. She vacuumed the corridor, and then she entered the men’s room. There, she saw a napkin in a urinal, along with a note reading, in caps, CLEAN THIS UP. Donna lifted the napkin, which covered a pile of feces. She was, naturally, shocked that someone had shit in the urinal and laid a napkin over it, but that abrupt, demeaning, order for her to clear it away was too much. She spun on her heel and left the room.*

Donna went to her superior to complain, but he brushed it off and said she should ignore it. Refusing this response, Donna then went to her superior's supervisor, who also said she should ignore it. Following that, Donna went to Human Resources. HR also suggested she ignore it. To Donna, the implication appeared to be that one or two of the programmers, the majority of whom are young men, were merely playing prankster, so she should not take it seriously. "Boys will be boys," etc. (I completely understand this impression because who among us wouldn’t think it would be funny to prank a middle-aged Black woman by shitting in a urinal and ordering her to clean it up?)

Donna fetched her coat and bag, and she left. She walked straight off the job. Donna refused to return to work for several days, during which time she phoned her union representative. As you might expect (for whatever reason), the union didn’t dismiss her complaints; they contacted HR directly. Donna’s union told the company that, should she return to work, in no way would she, nor the company, tolerate ill behavior by other employees.

The company assented to the union’s terms, but the precise conditions of Donna’s return are vague (I’m hoping a raise is involved. She makes $9.00 an hour. Nine dollars an hour to put up with this type of thing). Donna did return to her job, but she remains disgusted and disheartened. She is looking for work elsewhere.

Donna is impressive. Her actions, and sense of worth, are stellar, and her union’s actions are commendable, the company’s most certainly isn’t. Several levels of management shrugged off the incident, which signals approval of the “prank.” A prank where one or more well-paid, young, male commuters felt comfortable directing Donna to clean up their filth.

*in my original series of Tweets, I wrote that “she did her job,” i.e., cleaned the filth, before going to management. I later corrected that as my partner told me “Hell, no. She left it there. Who knows who cleaned it up.”

Hillary Clinton, Baby Boomer Feminism, and Whistling for Dogs.

When Hillary Clinton entered the race to the White House, she encountered numerous vicious ad feminem misogynist attacks, and she still does. Many have women reacted to the Clinton-bashing by for a new women’s movement, a new fight for full equality. This call to action, however, has generated an unappealing debate between historically oppressed groups that echoes with the 1960's tensions between sex and race.

In a well-considered article, "Race to the Bottom," The Nation's Betsy Reed writes, "feminist sympathy for [Clinton] has begotten an "oppression sweepstakes" in which a number of her prominent supporters, dismayed at her upstaging by Obama, have declared a contest between racial and gender bias and named sexism the greater scourge." Indeed, and it's ugly. Consider Gloria Steinem pointing out in an opinion piece that black men got the vote well before women did.

Although Steinem’s point about males getting to arrive at the party first rings true, there's something ugly about her argument. It implies that "even black men got to vote before we did." Such arguments only remind people of the exclusivity of many liberal movements (and the associated identity politics) that maintain the status quo even as such movements wage war against normative society. Why weren't women of color largely drawn to the second wave of feminism? Because it was a white woman's movement. In an article 2001 article for Monthly Review, Barbara Epstein, an instructor at UCSC, wrote:

Though participants [of second-wave feminism] included women of color and of working class backgrounds, their route into the movement was through the same student and professional circles through which white middle class women found feminism. The presence of women of color and working class women did not mean that feminism was being adopted within these communities. Second wave feminists, especially in the intoxicating early years of the movement, tended to believe that they could speak for all women. Such claims contained a small grain of truth, but ignored the composition of the movement, which was overwhelmingly young, white, college educated, heterosexual, and drawn from the post-Second World War middle class.

The problem is that second-wave feminist arguments rested on assumptions that all women would share the same concerns as those who belonged to the white, straight, middle-class, well educated baby boomer generation. The belief that women, regardless of class or race, shared their concerns about sexual equality seems hubristic—especially as African-Americans and Latinos, among other groups, were still working towards equality. The argument seemed to be that once sexual equality was obtained, all else would fall into place--a little like “trickle down economics.” In other words, sex trumps race—and, apparently, it does for some white women. So much so, that some are bowing the racist “dog whistles” in order to get their gal ahead (see Steinem). As Reed suggests,

what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign's use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.”

Herein we see the second-wave’s notion of equality reasserting itself: there’s a hierarchy of oppression, and (white) women are at the top. In her efforts to shatter the greatest glass ceiling and become the first female president, Clinton must play on old racial tensions as well as pit historically oppressed groups against each other--Latinos and African-Americans, the white working poor against Latinos and African Americans, etc. Sadly, rather than encourage social or economic equality, Clinton's tactics only reinforce the status quo.

You have to feel badly for Clinton, for she must play contradictory roles so often in this race, including the macho, misty-eyed, feminist and the wealthy, urbanite, working class, small town girl. It’s a pity, a shame, that she’s been forced to call out the whistlers to provide the soundtrack for her White House bid.

Note: This post is a rush job and will be edited/revised later.

It's Clinton’s Sex, not Clinton's Gender.

I’m on a linguistic high horse today; please bear with me.

It’s a buzzword in the current campaign, but can we please stop referring to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s gender? That is, can we cease and desist from describing the Democratic competition as an historic event due to the candidates’ “gender and race,” of the conflict of/between “gender and race” amongst voters, and similar statements?

Let’s define our terms:

When we’re talking of human beings, "gender" indicates (normative) behavioral characteristics, as in masculinity and femininity.

On the other hand, "sex" indicates biological makeup. The female gender does not menstruate, endure menopause, nor undergo pregnancy. The female sex does.

The differentiation between sex and gender was “first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by British and American psychiatrists and other medical personnel working with intersex and transsexual patients. Since then, the term gender has been increasingly used to distinguish between sex as biological and gender as socially and culturally constructed. Feminists have used this terminology to argue against the ‘biology is destiny’ line, and gender and development approaches have widely adopted this system of analysis” (Esplen and Jolly). I would think that HRC, as a second wave feminist, would have noted this distinction between gender and sex that her peers struggled to question and define; e.g., are women innately nurturing, maternal, irrational, weak, and emotional? Are men inherently practical, stoic, authoritative, capable, competitive, and logical? Which set of characteristics suits Mrs. Clinton? Right. Gender = sex / sex = gender doesn’t quite equate.

Every time someone refers to Clinton’s gender, or of how women voters are concerned about one of their gender getting to the presidency, I'm inclined to cringe. This reaction might strike some as petty, or as pedantic, or (horrors!) politically correct, but precision in language is critical. Think of all the associations that resound whenever any particular word is used. Each time a commentator mentions Clinton’s gender in the presidential race, a connotative echo follows that reinscribes the arguments of how and why a woman should be distanced from leading a nation—because of her femininity. It’s a cliché, but Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, to name but two modern female leaders, should have dispelled such myths (honestly, do you think of Margaret Thatcher as a member of the female gender? As a woman, yes, but as feminine? ).

While discussing the role of sexism and attacking myths about female behavior in Clinton's White House pursuit, perhaps Clinton's supporters could help avoid exacerbating prejudice by not reminding folks, however implicitly, of the woman's gender.

Aside: Then again, replacing "gender" with "sex" might raise some unique problems: it probably wouldn't be wise for Hillary to say, "sex issues" haven't received the same "kind of attention" as racial concerns in the primary campaign, nor would using "sex" help enlist further support from undecided voters: what kind of connotations would “sex” raise when associated with a Clinton?