A Vote of Allegiance?

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Never has a campaign given voters who were not white men such power to participate in the "politics of identity." Blogs have exploded with people of all identities explaining why they favor one Democratic candidate over the other. Black women have been particular targets, with bloggers attacking them for deciding that voting for a black candidate was more important than voting for a woman.

And some black women have asked how they split their identities. Are they black first or women first? To which group do they pledge allegiance? Does the term feminist apply only to white women? Can a woman be black and feminist at the same time, even if she hardly understood Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist classic, "The Feminine Mystique," which asked the bored housewife's question: "Is this all?"

Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of research at the National Council of Negro Women, says the answer lies in perspective. "That was Betty Friedan's truth. That was her experience of feeling bound by the limitations of being a housewife. That was not the typical truth for the black woman."

Jones-DeWeever says many black women worked outside the home out of necessity, a fact that seemed to be ignored by arguments made at the height of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

"You had a push by white women to get out in the workforce. That is fundamentally a different experience," Jones-DeWeever says. "Black women were always in the workforce. Even if part of that workforce was the work of raising white women's children. Our perspectives are different. There is the feeling that some second-wave feminists view life through a binary perspective; the male and female being the only line of division in their society."

The lines are more complex for women of color. "Personally, for me, I feel it cuts both ways," Jones-DeWeever continues. "In my experience, if I was to weigh the two, I would say race has had a greater impact on issues in my life. I am black. Both of my parents were educated in segregated schools in Virginia. . . . There was a lot of brouhaha about the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright's statements in the news. He was saying Hillary was never called the N-word. I was first called the N-word in fourth grade and the last time I was called the N-word was in graduate school."

Race cuts even deeper now. Jones-DeWeever is raising two sons, 4 and 11. Her personal choice for president is Obama. "I worry about them as young black men driving a car," she says. "What will happen when they get pulled over by the police? I am realistic about what I need to teach them about how to conduct themselves in that situation. Those are issues most white women and white mothers don't have to be concerned about, life and death issues that will impact their children."

Latifa Lyles, vice president of membership of NOW, says sexism is a huge problem in the country, a learned behavior that doesn't seem to provoke as much outrage. "I am an African American woman," Lyles says. "There is not a day when I don't think of both."

Overt racism is less prominent, she says. "In my experience, I am more likely to see some kind of sexist incident than a racist incident. Because of the prevalence, people become more desensitized to it. If someone says something more overtly racist, I would have a much stronger reaction to it because I'm not used to hearing overtly racist comments."

Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard's Law School, says white women and black women have had different relationships to power. White women, she says, have had a greater access to it.: "They were sleeping with power. Even though they were disadvantaged in terms of access to conventional opportunities to their mates, they were also in an intimate relationship with power."

Guinier, who is black, was once nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, but her name was withdrawn after controversy erupted over her writings on affirmative action. "For black women, power was not represented by their mate or by their father or by their uncle, which is not to say -- I am by no means excusing sexism within the black community or the fact there is violence against women," Guinier says. "It extends beyond any particular identity. I am trying to make this larger point that quote-unquote the man had a different footprint in the black community than in the white community."