A Vote of Allegiance?

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In her book "Ain't I a Woman," black feminist bell hooks says there is a fragile bond between white and black women's rights advocates. And that bond has been broken again during this presidential campaign, some women say, as it was during the first women's rights movement in the late 1800s, during the second wave of women's rights in the 1960s and '70s, and then during the "mommy wars" that still rage today.

"There are a fair number of women of color who would consider themselves to be feminists who have no time and interest in struggling with white women anymore," Crooms says. "Some people come from the view that if there is truly a difference between what is offered as mainstream white feminism and black feminism, black feminists are trying to figure out how we as black people can move forward as a community. We are not interested in fanning the flames between black women and black men. . . . Racism and sexism impact people differently. . . . You have race injuries. You have sexism injuries. Pick between the two? No, it's not like that."

No one profits when oppressed people are split against each other, says Patricia J. Williams, author, columnist and professor of law at Columbia University. She argues there is often an ideological agenda involved when people claim that racism is no longer a major force in this country.

That is what Ferraro's recent comments seemed to imply, that race had become an advantage: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman. . . . he would not be in this position," Ferraro said.

Says Williams, who is black: "One ubiquitous subtext of the black-man-trumps-white-woman calculus is that it's easier to be a black man than it is to be a white woman or, even more reductively, that sexism is worse than racism. . . . That in turn fuels the not-so-coded diminishment asserting that Obama is getting 'preferential' treatment in the media; that he's simultaneously 'entitled' and 'elite' yet 'unqualified' and 'not ready.' A lot of this debate as it is currently framed is a product of a very segregated society."

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Robin Morgan, an author and founder of the Women's Media Center, recently wrote an essay titled "Goodbye to All That (#2)," a reprise of her 1970 denunciation of sexism. In her latest manifesto, published online last month, she argued that she would vote for Clinton because of the historical importance of overcoming sexism.

"I was celebrating the pivotal power at last focused on African American women deciding on which of two candidates to bestow their vote -- until a number of Hillary-supporting black feminists told me they're being called 'race traitors,' " she wrote. "So goodbye to conversations about this nation's deepest scar -- slavery --which fail to acknowledge that labor- and sexual-slavery exist today in the U.S. and elsewhere on this planet, and the majority of those enslaved are women."

Morgan, who is white, received a flood of reaction, from women who thanked her for expressing what they needed to hear, from younger women saying they were tired of older feminists shoving the movement down their throats, from a black man who said he would be overjoyed to see a black family in the White House.

"I certainly won't begrudge a woman's desire to want to see a woman in the White House and basing, at least in some measure, her choice on such a possible milestone of achievement," he wrote in an online response. "What I take absolute exception to in this article by Mrs. Morgan however is the need to run down Obama for sake of supporting Hillary."

Morgan says she was not trying to run Obama down but trying to make a point about lingering sexism. She says she "cut her political eyeteeth in the civil rights movement." She agrees that racism is a major wound in this country's history and still is today. The society's consciousness about racism is nowhere near where it should be, but it is higher than it is about sexism, she asserts.

"Sexism is not as high as yet," Morgan says. "It is still there. It is still pervasive. It is so pervasive, sometimes you can't see it standing out from the background.

"Anything that can be interpreted as racist in the campaign is leapt upon and should be," Morgan says. "Stuff that is blatantly sexist is not leapt upon. It's often ignored, trivialized and laughed away."

Only now has it been highlighted after "women said, 'Excuse me!' " Morgan says the attacks on Clinton have ranged from trivialization to outright venom. "The Hillary Clinton nutcracker doll being sold in airports. They would not dare do that with a Stepin Fetchit doll in the image of Senator Obama. And they shouldn't do that and there would be national outrage, and there should be national outrage."

Still, it is never a good idea to compare human suffering, Morgan says. "The only people in a position to say which bigotry they suffered worst from would be African American women. Some say they have suffered more from racism. And others, like Shirley Chisholm, said they have suffered more from sexism. That is not for me as a European American woman to say."

Mary Frances Berry remembers those heated discussions of the 1970s, when Chisholm became the first black woman to run for president.

"Shirley Chisholm and I had long conversations about whether sexism or racism is a bigger barrier," says Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "She said to me when she was running for president she found out how much sexism was a barrier. The reaction of men to the fact she was going to run for president almost floored her. Other black politicians couldn't understand why she thought she could run for president. That campaign didn't go anywhere."

But Berry says it's dangerous to raise questions pitting sexism against racism. "I think anytime people who have been in subordinated groups start debating about whose discrimination is the worst is a problem," she says. "What they should do is reconcile the differences. Everybody has had something happen in their history. That's why it's called subordination."