Hillary Clinton wants to sell you your woman card.
Well, "sell" might be a bit misleading; what she wants to do is capitalize on your outrage about Donald Trump's recent remarks by commodifying this fictitious currency to get your real dollars into her campaign war chest. So, yeah, she wants to sell you your woman card. I'm a professor: I digress.
When all of this card business started showing up on my Facebook feed, I wasn't paying a ton of attention. Harriet Tubman had just been announced as the next face of the $20 bill, Prince had just died, Beyonce had just finished shattering any more silly notions that somehow she had left behind her blackness—
(Like, really, did people believe that she wasn't actually and authentically black? Girl had to whip Hot Sauce out of her bag and start busting windows, call up Serena Williams and a host of other phenomenally and recognizably black women for y'all to see that she has always been black? I don't really understand people sometimes, I don't, and...sorry. I digress...)
—and, frankly, I'm so burned out on the circus of this current election cycle that I've put it all on pause.
(Bernie; I'm with you, brother, and if you can get your sometime-party to actually be progressive in this insane climate, your campaign will not have been in vain. You need to reign in your boyz, though; they are doing you no service.)
I knew Trump had said something stupid and vile and misogynistic and that feminism was clapping back, and I had a hazy uneasy queasy feeling about the whole thing. The uneasy queasy crystallized into something closer to rage when I saw Clinton offering us that bit of hot pink currency.
I asked Facebook "Why is it that women can latch onto this notion and make it a strength—and a fundraising opportunity, to boot—when the 'race card' on which it is based receives no such treatment?" Why, I wondered, was the "woman card" able to be seen for what it is—absurd on its face—and the "race card" still tossed out liberally anytime I saw news stories connecting events to racial disparity? Yes, Trump's "Trumpness" elevated the idea to the nation's consciousness in a way that the average Facebook comment will never be able to do, but the fact is that the meme itself—the notion of "the X card" as a means of discounting claims to harm related to aspects of identity—is a commonplace part of our daily lives, one more element to hurl against African Americans.
As a black woman, I felt a familiar conflict. Can I fully participate in a cultural moment that uplifts one element of my identity without reference to the others? My woman card does not look like a white woman's and no cisgendered woman's looks like the one of our transgendered sisters. If I make this statement aloud, will I be accused, explicitly or implicitly, of pulling out the race card? So while what follows may seem like so much whining, know, dear reader, that it's coming from a desire to reconcile my identity response to this moment in all of my intersectional glory.
This whole "card" business, handy metaphor though it may be, trivializes deep-rooted issues surrounding historical, systemic, and cultural inequalities. When people accuse you of playing a card, they accuse you of trafficking in your marginalized identity to profit off of some imagined guilt-stricken culture that wants to give your clearly inferior self a pacifier to make you feel better. Hillary Clinton knows this; by capitalizing on the outrage at Trump's statement, she turns the slur into a strength at just the moment when her campaign desperately needs a rallying point for potential supporters who she hasn't been able to securely lock: young women. The card is playfully, wholly feminine, bearing its bathroom symbol (see what she did there?) emblazoned on a banner of the strongest version of the color considered a marker of weakness, daring anyone to marginalize or belittle her (or your, as the donor/carrier) identity.
I've got to give her props: this was a pretty shrewd move, and it taps into Romney's 2012 "Binders Full of Women" misstep in a way that should serve her well moving forward.
Unfortunately, it also reminds me of how quickly she and her husband—
(who should be muzzled—and probably has been—because he is as out of control of his emotions on the trail as Hillary is said to be inauthentic in the expression of hers)
—will throw black people who dare question the impact of their combined political records under the bus.
Maybe I should be angry that black folks haven't found a way to capitalize on this pejorative metaphor, but I can't. How much humor must you be able to access to do so? What reserves of strength must one possess to make lemonade out of this particular lemon—the notion that the moment you claim that which inescapably marks you as "Other" is the moment that your whole self and experience will be waved away as insignificant? When Beyonce expands her still-growing feminist outlook into a womanist one—
(I'm gonna put on my professor specs and let you look that one up for yourselves. Knowledge is power.)
—pearls are clutched, hands are wrung and policemen threaten her with a withholding of their protection. In the face of the real violence that is exacted on black women, how can I pretend to have the cultural power and capital to turn a linguistic weapon into a joke?
Which is all to say: F*@k anyone who proudly bears the woman card and dares to fix their mouth to ever accuse anyone of playing the race card. F*@k anyone who carries that marker of supposed sisterhood and solidarity without making real efforts to understand and acknowledge that the notion of a "card" is casually used to silence the voices of the black community in this country.
And f*@k you, Hillary, for not coupling your campaign stunt with a recognition that this metaphor works differently for you than for me.
Yes, I'm probably going to vote for you anyway—I'm not a fatalist—but I'm not going to let this shit slip past me, either.