We're looking for pitches/submissions of non-fiction and fiction (mostly non-fiction) to round out issue 2.
If you've got something, please get in touch via submissions [at] please-dont[dot]com.
And hey, look at this:
Lorrie Moore on Hillary Clinton
7 comments:
Quite a different take than Gloria Steinem's. I found Steinem's essay more interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that black men have been given many rights and privileges before white women -- voting for example. And based on that pattern, her essay makes me think America will in the end be more likely to vote for a black man for president before a white woman.
Steinem writes, "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter)."
That is truly an astounding sentence. Could anyone really write that sentence without any acknowledgment that black people's right to vote was, in most places, purely theoretical until after 1965? Without acknowledging that there have been only three black senators since Reconstruction (when there were two), and only three black governors? (There are *currently* 16 female senators and 8 female governors.)
Iowa, by the way, is 50% female and about 2% black. Clinton lost in Iowa -- to a black man with a Muslim-sounding name -- because of sexism? Give me a break!
Yeah, but Obama won Iowa, with all its women to boot. I don't see how that interferes with Gloria Steinem's point.
Should also acknowledge a) the 121 black congressmen who've been elected and b) that black and female are overlapping demographic groups. One of the five black Senators was female, 25+ of the congresswomen.
At any rate the Steinem argument (a point which has been frequently raised elsewhere) is about who gets there first, not about who gets there most often.
Personally I think this is an invented pseudo-conjecture based on both the less-and-less-meaningful-seeming Iowa results, and the improbable circumstance that the first viable (white) female candidate happens to be running against the first viable black (male) candidate.
(note the Jan. 8 date of Steinem's column, which would be less easy to write today.)
Just to be clear -- I agree with what Lorrie Moore wrote. But Steinem's essay did made me think.
Check this out.
That's an interesting poll, Grendel. But I wonder if people, when answering, were picturing generic representatives of those categories or if they pictured Obama and Clinton.
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