2011.03.28 杰拉尔丁-费拉罗的白人民粹主义

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The White Populism of Geraldine Ferraro
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
MARCH 28, 2011
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Joan Walsh writes a good column on Geraldine Ferraro, but I don't understand the following section. Walsh begins by claiming Ferraro's comments on Obama were indefensible. Then inexplicably marshals a defense:


In her 2009 interview with Traister for "Big Girls Don't Cry," she softened -- a little. "I got tied in by the Obama campaign on being racist, which I probably will go to my grave with and will never get over," she said, with sad prescience. "And I wasn't, obviously. What I said was not racist. If Hillary had drawn black women the way she drew other women, she would have won. Black women had two choices, race or gender. They went with race. As a mother, if I were a black woman, would I rather have my kids see a black get elected president of the United States? I would, quite frankly. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that. So when this [reporter] said to me, 'What do you think is going on, I said, 'It's black voters.'" She went on: "So when I heard this stupid-assed comment by [David Axelrod] who knew me, because I had supported [African American state controller] Carl McCall when he ran for governor ... to call me a racist ... I was like a lunatic."

As I noted last year when I reviewed David Remnick's great Obama bio, "The Bridge," while Ferraro was pilloried for suggesting Obama's race was a political advantage, inside his campaign, some advisors believed the same thing. Mona Sutphen told Remnick many in the campaign also thought race was helping Obama more than it was hurting. "He is the embodiment of American diversity. In the end, that played really well for him," Sutphen explained.

Remnick observed that where before the election, campaign pollsters feared a "Bradley effect" -- when whites tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate, but don't -- but afterward they discussed a "Palmer effect" or a "Huxtable effect" - the possibility that popular black TV characters like "24's" David Palmer and the whole "Cosby Show" made Obama's race less a disadvantage than an asset for many voters. That's just a long-winded, ruminative set of ways to suggest something like what Ferraro claimed. But putting it in her white ethnic Queens vernacular - "He happens to be very lucky to be where he is" -- gave it the tone of white grievance that made it objectionable. She was right; she sounded "like a lunatic."

Let's begin by noting that every presidential candidate in recent memory has tried to deploy identity in some politically advantageous manner. It is certainly true that Barack Obama attempted to leverage his own identity as a biracial black man in much the same way. It's also true that through most of American history, whiteness was not simply the deployment of political advantage, it was the deployment of decisive political advantage. And yet while you could definitively say of that Roosevelt and Lincoln were "lucky" to be white, your statement would be myopic, and skip over many other attributes, the absence of which kept millions other white people out of the presidency.

One can't even award that level of "true" myopia to Geraldine Ferraro. As always, the original quote is instructive:

If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race.

Oh wait. That's Ferraro in 1988 describing a man fortunate enough to be born in grinding poverty to a 16-year old poor single mother and a deadbeat father. Jackson went on to become a presidential candidate, winning seven primaries, four caucuses and seven million votes, a historic feat made possible, not by skill, hard work or intelligence, but by all the advantages routinely and liberally afforded to black people raised in the Jim Crow South:

Twenty years later Ferraro had matured and endeavored to offer a more nuanced take:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.

This is not an indelicate rendering of some ruminative, long-winded truth. It does not simply assert, as Sutphen and Remnick did, that Obama's diverse background helped him. It asserts that his skin color imparted a singular, decisive advantage, without which, Obama could not cope with the likes of Hillary Clinton. The necessary implication is bizarre. It holds that the party of Jack Kennedy would never have as its front-runner a handsome, male, Ivy League educated, Illinois senator, who edited the Harvard Law Review, had a picturesque family, and was a rousing speaker, unless he had the obvious, and indisputable advantage of being black.

The implication is bizarre, but familiar. It is the alternative world of white populism, one that Ferraro, tragically, chose to inhabit. The hallmarks are all there. She repeatedly claimed that Axelrod and the Obama campaign had called her "a racist." The charge does not exist in known reality (I have yet to see such a claim attributed), so much as in that parallel universe where whites are always under attack. Ferraro, again:

Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white.

I'm put in the mind of the great Jane Austen, proving that Ferraro's white populism is the manifestation of something all-too human:

The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough: for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

Ferraro is a hero to a generation, and this is as it should be. Full stop.

I was eight when she was nominated for vice-president, and while I could not register the full import of the thing, I understood that the world had somehow opened up, and later, more specifically, that Ferraro, herself, through dint of her own hard work, had opened the world up.

From Ferraro, from someone who likely been told she was only in the 1984 race because she was a woman, many of us, indeed, expected better.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction.


杰拉尔丁-费拉罗的白人民粹主义
作者：Ta-Nehisi Coates
2011年3月28日

琼-沃尔什写了一篇关于杰拉尔丁-费拉罗的好专栏，但我不理解以下部分。沃尔什一开始就声称费拉罗对奥巴马的评论是不可辩解的。然后莫名其妙地进行了辩护。


在她2009年为 "大女孩不哭 "接受Traister采访时，她的态度有所缓和--有点。她说："我被奥巴马竞选团队捆绑在种族主义者的行列中，我可能会因此进入坟墓，永远无法释怀，"她悲哀地预感到。"而我显然不是。我说的不是种族主义者。如果希拉里像画其他妇女那样画黑人妇女，她就会赢。黑人妇女有两个选择，种族或性别。她们选择了种族。作为一个母亲，如果我是一个黑人妇女，我是否愿意让我的孩子看到一个黑人当选美国总统？坦率地说，我愿意。我不认为这有什么不妥。因此，当这位[记者]对我说，'你认为发生了什么事，我说，'是黑人选民'。" 她继续说。"因此，当我听到[大卫-阿克塞尔罗德]这个愚蠢的评论时，他认识我，因为我曾在[非裔州长]卡尔-麦考尔竞选州长时支持过他......说我是种族主义者。我就像一个疯子。"

正如我去年回顾大卫-雷姆尼克的伟大的奥巴马传记《桥》时指出的那样，虽然费拉罗因暗示奥巴马的种族是一种政治优势而受到抨击，但在他的竞选团队中，一些顾问也认为是这样。莫娜-萨特芬告诉雷姆尼克，竞选团队中的许多人也认为种族对奥巴马的帮助大于伤害。"他是美国多样性的化身。最后，这一点对他非常有利，"苏特芬解释说。

雷姆尼克指出，在选举前，竞选民意调查人员担心出现 "布拉德利效应"--当白人告诉民意调查人员他们会投票给黑人候选人，但却没有这样做--但在选举后，他们讨论了 "帕尔默效应 "或 "哈克斯塔布效应"--受欢迎的黑人电视角色如《24》的大卫-帕尔默和整个《科斯比秀》使奥巴马的种族对许多选民来说不是一种不利因素，而是一种资产。这只是一套啰嗦的、反刍的方法，暗示类似费拉罗声称的东西。但是，用她的白人皇后区的白话来说--"他碰巧很幸运能在这里"--给它带来了白人的怨气，使它令人反感。她是对的；她听起来 "像个疯子"。

让我们首先注意到，在最近的记忆中，每一位总统候选人都试图以某种政治上有利的方式部署身份。当然，巴拉克-奥巴马也试图以同样的方式利用他自己作为双亲黑人的身份。同样正确的是，在美国历史上的大部分时间里，白人不只是政治优势的部署，它是决定性的政治优势的部署。然而，虽然你可以明确地说，罗斯福和林肯是 "幸运 "的白人，但你的陈述将是近视的，并跳过了许多其他属性，这些属性的缺乏使其他数百万白人无法成为总统。

人们甚至不能把这种程度的 "真正 "近视授予杰拉尔丁-费拉罗。一如既往，原话是有启发性的。

如果杰西-杰克逊不是黑人，他就不会参加竞选。

哦，等等。那是费拉罗在1988年描述一个幸运的人，他出生在极度贫困的环境中，有一个16岁的贫穷单亲母亲和一个不孝的父亲。杰克逊后来成为总统候选人，赢得了七次初选、四次党团会议和七百万张选票，这一历史性的壮举不是靠技能、努力工作或智慧，而是靠在吉姆-克罗南方长大的黑人经常和自由获得的所有优势。

20年后，费拉罗已经成熟，并努力提供一个更细致的观点。

如果奥巴马是一个白人，他就不会处于这种地位。如果他是一个有色人种的女性，他也不会处在这个位置上。他碰巧非常幸运，因为他是谁。

这并不是对一些反刍的、冗长的真理的不客气的渲染。它并不像Sutphen和Remnick那样简单地断言，奥巴马的多元化背景对他有帮助。它断言，他的肤色给他带来了一种独特的、决定性的优势，没有这种优势，奥巴马就无法应付希拉里-克林顿这样的人。这种必要的暗示是很奇怪的。它认为，杰克-肯尼迪的政党永远不会有一个英俊的、男性的、受过常春藤联盟教育的、伊利诺伊州的参议员作为其领跑者，他编辑过《哈佛法律评论》，有一个风景如画的家庭，并且是一个令人振奋的演讲者，除非他有黑人这个明显的、无可争议的优势。

这种暗示很怪异，但很熟悉。这是一个白人民粹主义的另类世界，费拉罗不幸地选择了这个世界。这些标志都在那里。她一再声称，阿克塞尔罗德和奥巴马竞选团队称她为 "种族主义者"。这一指控并不存在于已知的现实中（我还没有看到这样的说法），而是存在于白人总是受到攻击的那个平行宇宙中。费拉罗，再次。

自3月以来，当我因发表关于黑人对奥巴马历史性竞选的影响的声明而被指控为种族主义者时，人们一直在阻止我，以表达一种共同的情绪。如果你是白人，你就不能在不被指控为种族主义者的情况下开口。他们认为奥巴马在整个竞选过程中打种族牌，而没有人骂他是可怕的。他们对奥巴马不满不是因为他是黑人，而是因为他们不希望因为自己是白人而被公平对待。

我被置于伟大的简-奥斯汀的脑海中，证明费拉罗的白人民粹主义是人类所有东西的表现。

让他们失望的力量，这是真的，必须永远是她的。但这还不够：因为当人们决定采用一种他们知道是错误的行为模式时，他们会因为对他们有更好的期待而感到受伤。

费拉罗是一代人的英雄，这是他应该做的。句号。

当她被提名为副总统时，我才八岁，虽然我不能完全理解这件事的含义，但我明白世界已经以某种方式开放了，后来，更具体地说，费拉罗本人，通过她自己的努力工作，已经打开了这个世界。

从费拉罗那里，从一个很可能被告知她只是因为是女性才参加1984年竞选的人那里，我们中的许多人确实期待更好的结果。
塔-内西-科茨（Ta-Nehisi Coates）是《大西洋》杂志的前国家记者。他是《美丽的斗争》、《我们掌权八年》、《水舞者》和《世界与我之间》的作者，该书获得了国家图书奖的非虚构作品奖。