On Lipstick. Sigh.

Sometimes our political conversation is really stupid, and the lipstick thing is one of those. It started with Sarah Palin asking at the Republican convention what the difference between a hockey mom and pitbull might be. The answer was "lipstick".

That's quite funny, except that a religious wingnut guy wrote a book about the proper way to subjugate women with a version of that joke: "What's the difference between a Doberman pincher and a woman with PMS?" Answer: "Lipstick."

That's not quite so funny now, is it?

Now scroll forward to the present time and the discussion about Obama criticizing McCain's economic policies by calling them more of the same and by noting that if you put lipstick on a pig it's still a pig:

"I'm assuming you guys heard this watching the news. I'm talking about John McCain's economic policies and I said here's more of the same, 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. Suddenly, they say, `Oh you must be talking about the governor of Alaska!' "

As Atrios pointed out, McCain himself used the lipstick-on-a-pig comment in 2007:

McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's health-care plan, he said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.

"I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said of her proposal.

All kinds of people use that saying. It's just a saying. At the same time avoiding that particular saying at the present time would seem to be a good policy for the Obama campaign, just so that McCain doesn't get to grab the public conversation again. Maybe they should hire me to read through the speeches beforehand?

500 Billion Dollars

Sadly, it's not how much I make out of this here blog. It's the predicted size of the federal budget deficit when the next president takes over the reins. Gee, I wonder who spent all that money in the last eight years and how? The spend-and-owe Republican administration. To actually pay for the spending in Iraq was not the done thing because it would mean more taxes.

If you read the article I linked to a little further you will find those she-said-he-said impartial statements which drive me crazy:

A deficit of that magnitude could severely constrain the next administration's agenda, regardless of whether Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican candidate, or Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), his Democratic opponent, wins in November. Each has promised billions in new tax cuts or new spending.

Is it really true that there is no difference between the sizes of the deficits the two candidates would cause? No difference in how they'd spend the money, for what benefit and in what amounts?

I understand the point of that paragraph in an article which mainly discusses the meaning of the federal budget deficit. But the reader still goes away with the idea that it doesn't really matter which candidate gets elected, because they are both going to make the deficit worse.

The Animal House

Working for the Bush administration has its perks for some:

Government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with and received numerous gifts from them, federal investigators said Wednesday.

The alleged transgressions involve 13 Interior Department employees in Denver and Washington. Their alleged improprieties include rigging contracts, working part-time as private oil consultants, and having sexual relationships with — and accepting golf and ski trips and dinners from — oil company employees, according to three reports released Wednesday by the Interior Department's inspector general.

The investigations reveal a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" by a small group of individuals "wholly lacking in acceptance of or adherence to government ethical standards," wrote Inspector General Earl E. Devaney.

The reports describe a fraternity house atmosphere inside the Denver Minerals Management Service office responsible for marketing the oil and gas that energy companies barter to the government instead of making cash royalty payments for drilling on federal lands. The government received $4.3 billion in such Royalty-in-Kind payments last year. The oil is then resold to energy companies or put in the nation's emergency stockpile.

Between 2002 and 2006, nearly a third of the 55-person staff in the Denver office received gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies, the investigators found.

Devaney said the former head of the Denver Royalty-in-Kind office, Gregory W. Smith, used illegal drugs and had sex with subordinates. The report said Smith also steered government contracts to a consulting business that was employing him part-time.

It has sex in it! It might have legs as a news story!

It does remind me of a frat house atmosphere. It's also a good approximate example of the incestuous relationship that the U.S. political system sometimes enables between the regulators and the regulated. The word "incestuous" is used to point out that often the people who work for the regulators end up working for the regulated and vice versa, sometimes even switching sides several times. This is not desirable if the objective is to keep the industry properly regulated. If the objective is to skim off the most money and sex, well, it works until you get caught.

This case is not quite the same as it's more about government marketing than regulation but the disadvantages of extreme closeness and poor oversight are pretty similar.

So how much did all this cost to us taxpayers?

What's This All About?

The Blogger has a blog called womenagainstsarahpalin. Erin PDX noted that something odd was going on with the blog. I clicked on it and got first this page:

Possible Blogger Terms of Service Violations

This blog is currently under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations.

If you're a regular reader of this blog and are confident that the content is appropriate, feel free to click "Proceed" to proceed to the blog. We apologize for the inconvenience.

If you're an author of this blog, please follow the instructions on your dashboard for removing this warning page.


What would those violations be? And who has complained about them? I'm confused.

John Tierney: A Martian.

I used to write about John Tierney's sexism a lot but then the New York Times removed him from the political stable and put him in the science stable and I read him less often, partly because I pretended that he would somehow have less scope for sexism there. Yes, I knew better. After all, he specializes in pseudoscience findings which are all about how women are inherently the way he would like them to be. Or something like that.

Anyway, he has written a piece about sex differences which starts like this:

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both sexes' personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing children and more time in jobs outside the home.

To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

So a science piece can start with talking about the Men-Are-From-Mars idea, as if it was something serious science had produced and not a part of general pseudo-psychological pop literature? That's a great way to increase my trust in what's to come next.

Do you know how I think John Tierney writes his articles? I think that he begins with the conclusions he wishes to reach, the ones about inherent sex differences acquired in some mystical and unknown prehistoric era. Then he goes and digs in research files until he finds pieces which support his beliefs. Then he upends the whole thing and pretends that he first read the science pieces and then came up with his findings. Such innocence, such purity! Such honesty!

And why would I think so? Because his findings are always biased in one direction. David Brooks does something similar in his opinion pieces, or that's how they strike me.

The job of responding to such pieces is difficult, because ideally the responder should know the all of the relevant field. But people who actually work in those fields tend not to get rewarded (with tenure or pay raises in academia) for responding to biased popularizations of science or pseudo-science. Instead, some of the odd fields of research have created their own walled enclaves within which all people seem to have the same biases, and the rest of the scientist try to ignore what they are doing.

That leaves the discussion to few brave amateurs (cough) who mostly don't have enough time to be educated in all the research going on in all the different relevant fields.

All that prelude is to explain why I address Tierney's piece on this blog, and the reason is largely so that someone will address it. At the same time, I do not have the resources that someone who actually works in the field would have and, once again, I plead for the professionals to step in.

So here we go: Tierney's thesis is that the more gender-equal a society is the more men look like they are from Mars and the more women look like they are from Venus. Men are competitive, aggressive, emotionally flat, and women are cooperative, timid and emotionally curved I guess. Yet the reason for these differences is not our different planetary roots but our different roots in prehistory!

And that prehistory must have had a division of labor between men and women though we don't have any direct fossil evidence from it. And that division of labor must have meant that women gathered and men hunted though we don't know if that's actually the whole truth. And somehow gathering required cooperation and hunting did not though it's fairly easy to imagine how finding a really good spot for juicy roots would be something you'd keep hidden from the other gatherers and though it's also fairly easy to imagine how hunting for big game would actually require cooperation between the hunters.

In short, I fail to see how cooperation would have become the selected-for characteristic more often in women than in men, and I also fail to see how it wouldn't have benefited both sexes to be able to be both cooperative and competitive, depending on the situation. In any case, only a guy who keeps his distance from women altogether could assume that women are not intensely competitive when needed.

What about the research that Tierney uses to back up his conclusions? I need to read all of it and then I need to read alternative research on international comparisons and what that research finds and then I need to compare the methodologies of those studies and so on. See how rigged this game is?

Who Should Pay For Rape Kits? More On Palin and Feminism.

In the year 2000 a little town in Alaska called Wasilla charged the rape victims for the cost of the kits used in collecting evidence so that the taxpayers wouldn't have to ante up. Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002.

Does this matter? Was it Palin's responsibility to know about the (to me atrocious) practice of charging rape victims for the forensic work? But this is the sort of news snippet that the conservatives use all the time: picking up news snippets and forming them into albatrosses to drape over Democrats in politics.

More importantly, this item also tells me that Palin isn't keeping an eye out for other women and most likely would not support feminist policies in general. Well, I know the latter from just reading about her ideas in general.

Are there any feminist benefits from having Palin as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate? Perhaps. Even Margaret Thatcher brought some such benefits with her reign, because people got used to the idea of a woman in power and that may have changed some prejudices. At the same time, a different woman might not have stated that she owes nothing to feminists (when she owed the very right to run for office to them not to mention the right to vote herself) and a different woman would not have created a cabinet in which she was the only female member. A different woman might have changed the society for the better in more obvious ways, too.

But having more woman-friendly policies is not a benefit I expect from Palin in the White House or near it, rather the reverse. She would not revoke the Global Gag Rule. She would not fight for reproductive choice. She would not keep the Supreme Court from becoming a permanent extreme right wing of the Republican Party, with all that means to the rights of women and people in general.

Tell Me How To Herd Cats

I've heard that trying to get liberals/progressives organized behind one large concept is like trying to herd cats. But we need some way of doing that, because we have no message discipline on the left side of the aisle, no way of making sure that the day's talking points are actually talked about.

The conservatives do that all the time, and naturally the way they do it is jack-booted and unpleasant to watch. But it works, just as repetition and focusing on only a few items at a time works at school. We, my dear friends, are all over the place and this makes us less efficient.

It's not at all necessary or desirable to go to the ugly other opposite end, but it would be nice if the liberal/progressive side had more think tanks and more jobs with money for people who are good at making liberal/progressive points. It would be nice if there were more pulpits for liberals and progressives, pulpits which actually can be seen above the roar of Republican soundbites. It would not only be nice; it would be very important. And Rachel Maddow is great, but she doesn't have to be the only liberal political pundit with her own television show, you know.

I was thinking these thoughts when reading the opinion columns in some newspapers today. When something truly silly or disgusting crops up we appear to have no mechanism for answering that. None.

All this goes tenfold for feminists. Whenever women are attacked with some spurious pseudoscience, for example, we should have an organization which can quickly get hold of people who can respond. We don't have those organizations.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Bob Herbert is very good on the liberals' fear of fighting for their cause.

Mood: Irritated

I'm not happy with the political chatter these days, because it is orchestrated by the Republicans. What is it about the Democrats which makes it so hard for them to pick their own topics for discussion? And yes, I'm including myself in that criticism.

Not sure. But there's something odd about the so-called liberal media which doesn't allow any actual liberals in its programs, never mind actual left-wingers. And there's something odd about the way wingnut soundbites become the topic of conversation in the media even if they're nasty and pointless and have nothing to do with the politicians they are used to attack. Yet the reverse appears not to happen. Just compare the attention Obama's minister got and the attention Palin's church and its rather weird policies get. Or rather don't get. It should be easier for the media to discuss Palin's religious views, too, given that she thinks God is her personal political backer.

We're all supposed to view the election of the president of the still-strongest country in the world as a soap opera. We're supposed to rate the people on such bases as whether we'd like to have a beer with them or whether we rate them as fuckable or whether they make us feel good because they are as ignorant or as stupid as we are.

It's all theater or ballet, and the only criticism one is allowed to make is about the performance of the players, not what they'd actually do when in power. If you try to discuss that latter bit (of some importance, really) then you are very very boring.

Four. More. Years.

My Suggestion For The Republican Election Slogan

McCain is trying to steal Obama's message of change with no change in any of the policies he advocates. We should steal the old Republican slogan:


FOUR MORE YEARS!


And remind the voters that this is exactly what would happen with McCain in the White House. Four more years of the bog of pointless and killing wars. Four more years of bad economy, jobs slipping abroad while voters are told they are whiners. Four more years of increasing theocracy of the kind Osama bin Laden would love to have. Four more years of diminishment, downfall, destruction and disease for this great country.

Too Opinionated

Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews are too opinionated for NBC. Glenn Greenwald notes that "opinionated" never hurt a Republican yet:

This has been going on for years. As I wrote in response to the uproar generated at places like The New Republic over the fact that MSNBC has now given an actual liberal, Rachel Maddow, her own show and is thereby jeopardizing non-partisan, objective, high-minded journalism:

Over the past seven years, the following people have hosted prime-time cable news shows: Joe Scarborough (MSNBC), Michael Savage (MSNBC), Glenn Beck (CNN), Tucker Carlson (MSNBC), Nancy Grace (CNN), Bill O'Reilly (Fox) and Sean Hannity (Fox). None of that seemed to bother the likes of [TNR's Sacha] Zimmerman. None of that was depicted as the downfall of objective journalism or the destruction of civil, elevated, high-minded discourse.

Several of those hosts had and continue to have atrocious ratings (Carlson, Beck, Scarborough), yet were kept for years.

Beyond that, network and cable shows routinely convene panels filled with right-wing views and devoid of anything remotely approaching liberalism, and that creates no controversy.

Not that Chris Matthews is especially liberal. But I find the power of the conservatives over the media astonishing. However much we wrote about Matthews' misogyny in his coverage of women in politics, all we got was a quasi-apology. The wingnuts get him for their dinner.

"Girl fight!" (by Suzie)

           Ugh. That's the headline on a CNN commentary about the Obama campaign using Clinton to fight Palin.

McCain has a strong woman? Well, the Obama campaign wants voters to know they’ve got one, too, and they’re going to deploy her to crush the moose hunting hockey mom from Alaska. In a strange twist of logic, the Obama campaign is touting the woman they passed over as the woman they need to beat the woman the other guy picked. 

          Clinton is speaking on behalf of Obama in my town tomorrow, but I'm not going. I'm hiding under the bed until the election and the hurricane season are over.

As The Fall Campaign Continues, Candidates Have To Get Votes Where They Can, Voters Force Them To Make Those Decisions by Anthony McCarthy

A lot has been made about the selection of Sarah Palin theoretically attracting self-defined diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton to vote for everything Clinton stands against and against everything she stands for. How can that latter assumption be anything but ingrained sexist stereotyping, an insult to the reasoning ability and seriousness of women who voted for her? Isn’t it a manifestation of the exact complaint continually repeated against the Obama campaign? I doubt these Clinton -> McCain-Palin voters are anywhere near as great in number as the media push-polls state. But I’ll resist the temptation to go into the fraud of opinion polling again. Quite frankly, after hearing them out and thinking about what they’re saying, I don’t think anything can be said to appeal to anyone holding that position now, in September of 2008. If anyone can tell us what Obama can say to them to get their votes it might be useful.

But voter blocks don’t exist in a vacuum. Other groups are also out there and can be won over. There is also an important opportunity for the Obama campaign in Sarah Palin’s extremism and McCain’s cynical use of her. A lot of marginal supporters among Republicans can be appealed to by the Obama campaign on the basis of the real dangers a very possible Palin administration. The idea that pro-justice, pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-healthcare, pro-economic sanity voters of any party affiliation would just fall in line and vote for McCain-Palin is just as strange as the speculation that Hillary Clinton’s former supporters would vote against her enthusiastically endorsed candidate this fall, in favor of her political enemies*.

As the election grows closer candidates will have to cut their losses as well as go for blocks of possible voters. They have to do that, they can’t spend time on people who aren’t going to vote for them. If you lose one group you have to look for votes from another group. Being intransigent cuts you out of consideration. Obama’s best hope for countering the cynical Palin gambit is by appealing to moderate independents and even Republicans who can be persuaded of the clear dangers of having her as McCain’s Vice President. Their possible support in November, when it counts, puts them in play. McCain might have made winning them to his side much more difficult when he tied his political fate to Palin.

Obama will be forced to put his attention where he might get votes. Groups that remove themselves from play in September will find themselves out of the focus of the campaigns. That is the way that electoral government works.

* It is well known that John McCain repeatedly told what passes as a joke in the Republican right during the 1990s, to the effect that Chelsea Clinton was so ugly because Janet Reno was her father. Many people have reported hearing him say it. McCain has certainly shown no respect to Hillary Clinton except when it’s convenient for him. His support for women's rights is, likewise, a matter of his political convenience. Palin dismissed just the complaints that those angry at Obama are giving as their reason to support the Republican ticket as “whining” and playing the female card.

By the way, I’d put Chelsea Clinton up against any combination of right wing Republican political brats any day. She’s better than all of them put together. That’s what counts.

Update: Response to an item just found in my hate mail file. No, I’m not going to going down the bottomless pit of competitive correctness here.

I’ll just say that Chelsea Clinton shows early promise of sharing many of the same qualities that made Eleanor Roosevelt among the most beautiful people of any time.

Recap by Anthony McCarthy

McCain’s Palin gamble benefits from his age and health problems. It’s appeal is based on the fact that her voters, the James Dobson allies and fans, will be hoping for him to kick the bucket as soon as possible after they’re sworn in. Short of dying, their bet would also pay off if McCain remains alive but in bad enough health for him to not be able to stay in office. Between the two of those possibilities, their gamble takes on even better odds. His age and health are some of the most obvious issues in his biography. There is no way that his campaign couldn’t have realized the part they’d play in this choice and its appeal to voters who weren’t enthusiastic supporters of McCain.

The good chance that he’ll not remain in office is an intrinsic part of the appeal to the Republican far-right who are the real target audience of the Palin selection. Those guys don’t want McCain, a lot of them would have stayed home on election day. Their gamble is that McCain WON’T remain in office for the next four years. They are also counting on at least the two or three Supreme Court vacancies which are all but certain in the next four years being filled by one of their own.

That makes his age and health a far greater issue than it was in the beginning. The attempts to put those topics off-limit by his campaign and the media are part of an attempt to put the most radically right-wing person in the presidency since the 19th century.

This is the most cynical presidential campaign gambit in our history. One whose chances are enhanced by the probability of the presidential candidate dying in office. This, friends, is what the death of democracy looks like, I thought it was worth saying again.

Can’t think of a more profound statement of loneliness than

Abbey Lincoln singing Left Alone.

Words by Billie Holiday, composition by Mal Waldron who plays piano in the recording. Arrangement by Julian Priester.

posted by Anthony McCarthy

How The Republican Far-Right Is Meant To See The Palin Choice by Anthony McCarthy

Largely unasked is the question of how the people McCain sought to win by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate really think about her choice. The stupid cabloid style blather about winning over Hillary Clinton’s supporters is only useful to show how useless those guys are. No one with a functioning brain would vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and then vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. People that clueless wouldn’t have supported Clinton in large enough numbers to begin with. The real reason he chose Palin was to call out the Republican far-right who showed signs of staying home on election day. Republicans can’t win an election without their support and they could be counted on to not want McCain to win this election. The only way he could get them to come out in large numbers next November is by selling them someone who they would want to see as president.

But to win them, McCain fundamentally betrayed the fabled “moderate” Republicans who are supposed to constitute his voter base. It’s a bait and switch gamble that only pays off for McCain’s moderate supporters if he serves out his term. In choosing Palin, McCain gives away the charade the “moderate” Republican politician really plays.

Stated or not, the extreme right, the real audience intended to be won over by the Palin choice, will be eagerly anticipating her becoming president at the earliest possible date. They will be looking for her to have influence even while McCain is in office. The cynicism of choosing someone at odds with his one-time positions on major issues for the purpose of getting in the Oval Office could be among the most irresponsible actions ever taken by the presidential candidate of a major party. It is similar to Nader’s final gift to the American People. You don’t have to wonder how sincerely McCain holds his legacy as a “maverick” because if he’s elected, those allegedly bold positions in opposition to his party will be about the mootest point imaginable.

The line that bringing up John McCain’s age is unfair, heard on even the most unlikely venue on TV last night, is dead wrong. It was always a legitimate point to bring up because John McCain is old, the oldest presidential candidate nominated by one of the two major parties. Being 72 simply by itself renders a man at greater risk of dying in the near future. That’s one of the less pleasant aspects of getting old. Not everyone makes it to 77, a significant percentage of the population don’t. Added to that is that he has had serious health problems, recurrent cancer. His age takes on added significance due to that, bringing it up is a perfectly legitimate issue. It is one of the facts that makes his tactic of using Palin to catch the far-right vote work.

McCain, himself added to the need to bring up his age when he chose a Vice Presidential candidate who is far different from himself on many important issues, or at least from the McCain who used to exist. A presidential term is a fixed four years. If McCain wasn’t able to finish out his term a new election can’t be called, his understudy will be president. McCain’s choice was to give a person from the quite far-right the greatest boost someone from that extreme has ever been given. There is every reason to expect that Sarah Palin could become the President of the United States at any point in the four years. Having a quite old man with far less than excellent health the only thing preventing that is a legitimate issue in the campaign this fall.

You can well imagine that if he is elected John McCain will immediately join the less rabidly right wing members of the Supreme Court on the list of those whose deaths are fervently prayed for by the far right. We know the list exists, they’ve openly talked about it on TV.

Moose Roots?

The title of a hagiographic piece on Sarah Palin in the Los Angeles Times refers to her moose roots. Imagine that. Your roots are in mooses (meese?) if you like to kill them with a gun that shoots bullets from a great distance. That's not exactly brave, mind you. I'd love to see an angry moose in an arena with an unarmed hunter, to even the odds. I also think that anyone killing moose should also eat the catch. Hunting for food is one thing, hunting for the pleasure of killing creatures is a completely different thing.

I share with Palin the moose roots, I guess, except for the killing bit. When I was a tiny goddess I used to watch the moose families on summer evenings, slowly making their way from one site in the forests to another site, the path requiring them to cross our vegetable garden. The size of the adults impressed me and the silly legs of the coltish calves made me laugh. I was always told to respect the moose and not to approach them. Not even to shoot them from a great distance.

One summer I was looking for wild blueberries in the woods and came upon a moose cemetery in a deep and shaded notch where the silence was dark and eerie. There they rested, gigantic moose skeletons, side by side, the most recent dead still with some brown skin on them. The antlers rose into the air like some prehistoric plants. I held my breath for quite a while, just as one would when coming across something holy or sacred. That's moose roots for you.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

This is my friend Greg Fight's cat, Peanut. Greg, a photographer, says: "He's a couch cat, stays indoors. He is very smart but naughty. He knows the rules but can't help but break them." He says the spots on Peanuts' nose started when he was a kitty.

Daddy in blackface (by Suzie)

          The son of Jewish immigrants, my father grew up poor in a multicultural, multiracial neighborhood where people joked about ethnicity and traded insults. He boxed at a black gym where some African Americans joked that he was darker than them. For a while, he commanded black troops in World War II. He ended up living in the South, and he supported civil rights.
          For the first part of his life, before Jews became white, he was neither white nor black, but fell elsewhere in our crazy taxonomy of race. When Alzheimer’s took away what little impulse control he had, he would blurt out to black people how much he liked black people while my sister and I cringed.
           A bass baritone, Daddy had performed in community theater, and loved Gilbert and Sullivan. He sang along with a CD of “The Mikado” as my sister drove him to a nursing home, never to see him again. We had taken care of him until his medical problems outstripped our abilities. He didn’t live much longer.
           Daddy had admired Paul Robeson, and he loved “Ol’ Man River.” Once, when he sang it in a talent show, he blackened his face and dressed like the dock worker in “Showboat.” To him, he was dressing in costume just as he might for another role. He thought the song was a testament to the perseverance of oppressed people. He thought singing in dialect made it more authentic.
            In a family album, Daddy proudly put a photo of himself singing at the talent show. In blackface.
           My sister and I finally convinced him that it didn’t matter what his intention was; what mattered was how people perceived his performance. We convinced him that he would offend and anger black people if he continued to sing the song in dialect or if he ever wore blackface again.
          I’ve left the photo in the album as a reminder of the complexity of the history of race. And I still know all the words to “Ol’ Man River.” 

Racism, sexism and drag (by Suzie)

          You may have read about Charles Knipp, a white drag comedian who portrays a black woman. Critics have accused him of furthering stereotypes, and Jasmyne Cannick started a petition to ban blackface performances that mock African Americans.
          I don’t favor banning such performances; I don’t even know how that could be done under the First Amendment. But I fail to see how he's fighting racism or being subversive, as he claims. For more information, see what Sheelzebub posted.

         Those defending Knipp include RuPaul, Margaret Cho and Robert Simmons, who says:

The premise being tested is one that says a person
of a certain culture cannot make fun of another culture -- one can only
make fun of a culture if one happens to be OF that culture. That is:
Larry David can make fun of Jews because he IS a Jew, but if Dave
Chappelle makes fun of Jews, then he is ‘racist’. Or, if a hetero
makes fun of gays then he is a homophobe, but if Rosie O’Donnell does 
it, it is ok. Ditto for Margaret Cho re: Koreans, etc.

          I’m so tired of humor that reinforces stereotypes, no matter who's doing it. But more power to anyone who can use humor to subvert stereotypes. For example, Robert Downey Jr. portrays a black man in the new movie "Tropic Thunder." I haven't seen it, but it has gotten a different reception than Knipp because the movie is supposed to be mocking white actors who portray blacks. (Consider this post from Racialicious.)

           In addition to Knipp, Cannick has criticized black men who portray black women in offensive ways, such as Eddie Murphy in the movie “Norbit” and Martin Lawrence in “Big Momma’s House.” Another example is Gina McCauley's criticism of BET shows that demean women.

Moya Bailey, a graduate fellow in women's studies at Emory University, shares Cannick's concern about the extent to which much of the negative media about black women is produced by black artists and executives. 

         I would extend this criticism to all men who promote negative images of women. But let's return to the more specific topic of men dressing as women to get a laugh. Much as I loved “Monty Python,” for example, I was uncomfortable with men making fun of women, especially ones deemed uneducated, older and unattractive. Isn’t this similar to what Knipp is doing?

           Among progressives, it's unacceptable for a white to show up at a costume party in blackface. But think of all the costume parties in which a man, especially a big, hairy one, has clomped around in high heels, with bouffant hair and enormous breasts.
          This brings me back to drag shows. First, let me say that I understand that some people who grow up as men believe they are women and want to dress as women. I understand that some men choose to subvert gender roles by wearing clothing associated with women. I understand that some men get a sexual charge from wearing women’s clothing. But I want to address gay men who dress as women for the entertainment of others.

        Some argue that drag shows are a form of cultural expression for an oppressed group. But so was minstrelsy for a lot of Jewish men.

         Some argue that many drag queens celebrate women, not put them down. But some blackface performers admired aspects of African Americans. In a previous comment on “the American history of blackface minstrelsy,” Martha Bridegam said: “It's old news that racism coexists intimately with feelings of love and jealousy for the Other."
           Even when people have good intentions, their acts can reinforce stereotypes. In minstrelsy, whites took the stories, the voices, even the chances on stage, of black people. Men have done the same to women for centuries.
            Some people think drag subverts gender by bringing its performativity into the open. But parody works only if people get it. A straight man at a drag show does not necessarily think: “If that man can look and act like a woman, then that means my girlfriend and I are just performing gender.” Or: “It’s ridiculous that women have to wear makeup, heels and these ridiculous clothes to perform their gender.” More likely, he thinks the drag queen is not a real woman, but his girlfriend is, and there’s nothing wrong or funny when she dresses up. In other words, he sees only the drag queen as performing. 

           That's one reason why some people accuse a woman who they don't consider attractive or feminine enough to be in drag. For example, Camille Paglia called Hillary Clinton a drag queen. Ditto for Kathleen Harris.

           This reminds me of the New Yorker cover of the Obamas. It’s satire to people who understand that Barack and Michelle are not terrorists. For others, however, the image reinforces stereotypes.

          Esther Godfrey writes that drag and minstrelsy can both reinforce and subvert stereotypes. But she theorizes that people find minstrelsy more offensive because white men (and it’s almost always men) who put on blackface don’t want to be black. After their performance, they return to their former state of privilege. They see black men as oppressed, but they generally don’t put on blackface to fight that oppression. In contrast, she says, many gay men who perform drag long to be women, and some make the transition. They see women as holding power. When not performing, they don’t get to return to privilege. They face discrimination for being gay.
         But her reasoning focuses on the performers and their attitudes, not the effect of their performance on others. As Kelly Kleiman says:

In discussing drag, we talk about challenging the audience’s conception of gender, or recovering the male performer’s sense of the feminine. But what about those of us being impersonated?

          (Here's a more scholarly version of the same article.)