A Vote of Allegiance?

"I'm not going to stand against him simply because there is a woman on the other side. It means so much more for me if Barack wins than if Hillary wins. I don't pick Hillary because she is a woman and I am a woman. I don't pick Barack because he is black and I am black. I pick Barack because he is a man of substance."

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Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

-- Gloria Steinem

Steinem's recent op-ed piece in the New York Times infuriated many black people. She argued that black men were given the right to vote before women, but failed to mention the lynchings that made it potentially fatal to take up that right.

"The thing that ends up being curious to me is what people like Gloria Steinem advocate," says Lisa Crooms, a black woman who is director of the Constitutional Law Center at Howard University School of Law.

"They should know better," she says of the white feminists. "That is the most disheartening thing for me: 'We white women do this and you black women don't get it.' I thought folks had learned those lessons in intro to women's studies courses. . . . I thought it was something white women got, but clearly they didn't. Something didn't translate."

Black women say the pangs they feel in this debate of the competing isms have been sharpened as the campaign rhetoric has intensified.

"White feminists reduce everything to their cultural experience," says Arica Coleman, 46, a professor of black American studies at the University of Delaware. "We had a different battle. We are fighting a war on two fronts, being both female and being black. I know when I walk into any office or anywhere, people see my skin color first and automatically make assumptions."

"I wish people would stick to the issues, and the ultra-feminists would stop crying wolf because their girl is not winning," Coleman says. "Obama is not crying racism."

NOW President Kim Gandy says the lines drawn between sexism and racism and white women and black women are not that clear. "I think people are still thinking about racism and sexism because they still exist," she says. "I wouldn't call it a dichotomy. The camps are quite diverse. There are African American women who support Hillary Clinton and white women who support Barack Obama. The campaigns crossed those racial and gender lines."

To the question of which ism has the greater burden to overcome, Gandy says, "I say that is unknowable. Having never experienced racism, I couldn't express an opinion about that." She says the greater burden depends on experience and perspective. "To suggest there is a competition between racism and sexism is delightful to people who would see us divided from each other," she says. "Until we as a country recognize the intersection of those isms and the terrible damage they do, we will not be as great as we could be as a nation."