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The Democrats, Equality, And ?Difference?

Last Sunday the ?Week in Review? section of the New York Times ran a long article on the ?improbable collision course? between the civil rights movement and the women?s movement. It provided a useful overview of the close but also often strained relations between the two movements.

Although it noted that the victory of either Obama or Clinton ?will be a benchmark moment for the American promise of equality, and the Democrats will add to their partisan quiver a feel-great story that could buoy them in the fall,? it struck me as having a pervasive air of sadness that either a black or a woman was going to lose.

Someone will lose. Such is football, Yahtzee and elections. And either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton ? and the movements they represent ? will be consigned, for the time being, to a status of ?almost.?

The article is worth reading because of the history it provides, but one of the historians it quotes presents a typically tenditious interpretation of that history:

Yet the core challenge of both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton is the degree to which each can transcend the first-ness of their candidacies. ?The question is, How do you become a universal figure when you represent movements that have claimed the right of equality for you in your difference?? said Joan Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In fact, neither the civil rights movement nor at least half of the feminist movement ever ?claimed the right of equality? for their members based on their ?difference.? At one time many feminists did base their claim to equality on the ?difference? of women, but, as I have discussed on several occasions (here, here, here, and here), modern American feminism thoroughly rejected that view. Can you imagine Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem or Hillary Clinton saying that women, poor, frail little shrinking violets that they are, need special protective legislation to shield them from the harsh world that men must confront every day? (Actually, as I argued here and here, some modern feminists have resurrected the old cry for protective legislation, but they tend to get offended when this is pointed out.)

With regard to the civil rights movement, however, Prof. Scott is totally off base. From its beginnings in the 1830s through abolitionism, the long road to Brown v. Board of Education, and its success with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the civil rights movement always based its claim for racial equality on the fact that blacks are the same as everyone else, not on their supposed ?difference.? Indeed, the very recent mantra of ?difference? and its offspring, ?diversity,? is simply a modern artifact of the effort to come up with an argument for racial preference that will pass judicial muster, overlaid with a thin veneer of trendy multiculturalism.

I suspect Prof. Scott knows full well that it would be a tragedy to ground the right to equality in ?difference? between the races or sexes. After all, she herself has written that

[w]hen equality and difference are paired dichotomously, they structure an impossible choice. If one opts for equality, one is forced to accept the notion that difference is antithetical to it. If one opts for difference, one admits that equality is unattainable. [Joan Scott, GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY (Columbia, 1988), p. 172,
quoted here]

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 15, 2008 (boomark / email).