Leadership in the Time of Cholera
Leadership, the kind that comforts and guides, is in short order these days. Childishness and selfishness is no longer a disqualifying factor for any branch of government. In theory, we would turn to the Women Who Would Be President for clarity, guidance and leadership. But Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, women who fit this category, instead choose to oppress the constituencies with which they claim to be aligned, while invoking petty party politics.
Elizabeth Warren sua sponte released a DNA analysis, which claims she is more Native American than a Brit or a Mormon. Hillary Clinton claimed Monica Lewinsky was not sexually harassed and that her husband’s interaction with her did not constitute an abuse of power because she was an adult. In each of these moments, a real-time epic failure in leadership, the Women Who Would Be President mortgage their credibility and their key constituencies in the face of discomfort.
Elizabeth Warren’s approach, her casual exploitation of her racial status — now via the “authority” of a DNA screen — rubs me the wrong way. That’s a nice way of saying it is racist. Of course Warren benefited from claiming she was Native American throughout her career, probably in many ways that cannot be quantified. But her major sin is the continued cloaking of her Native claims in the trappings, language, and proof points or white privilege. Does she amplify Native issues involving citizenship, political authority, or the ongoing struggle for sovereignty and fair dealing? She self-identifies as “Okie” and western — pioneering, intrepid, adventurous — i.e., a child of settler colonialism. But what of the conflict between that framing and claiming Native status? What power one wields, hoarding both the mindset of the colonizer and the meager tools afforded the colonized.
The audacity — and the luxury — of seeing race as a utility tool or a stepping stone: mind-boggling, yet ubiquitous in white social discourse — and usage. Tick tock, Donald. Is racial identity a joke to her? Where is her sense of obligation and responsibility to those who came before? More importantly, is she using her claims of race to troll Trump — and in this game they are playing, is she the lesser racist? I’m not sure.
Of course she benefits. As importantly, Harvard and Penn Law Schools benefited from Warren’s self-identification as Native: she became a brick in the carefully calibrated insulation against the urgency of claims that the faculty lacked diversity. Natives-in-name-only allowed the Ivy League to pat itself on the back without creating meaningful diversity and without confronting the structural and individual barriers that keep academia white — and their interests and blind spots that maintain racial purity in elite spaces. Warren walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but her DNA says she’s Native American. Win-win.
Bastions of white supremacy, i.e., the media, will tell us Warren’s native ancestry was not the reason Harvard hired her — she didn’t get an unfair advantage, she was brilliant in her own right. Being seen as “basically white” is a mark of excellence. It only adds insult to injury that her own husband articulates this: “It takes the extraordinarily distinguished academic career that she built up over a lifetime and reduces it to a slur.” Are the individuals and institutions involved here so white that they can’t see the implication here? Those of us who hold out our racial identity as a site of pride get it.
This framing via white narrative, i.e., baselined in white supremacy and grounded in a white privilege, misses the real point. Studies show there is strength (and smarts) in diversity and that students of color do better when they have a professor of color. The question is not whether Elizabeth Warren deserved an appointment at Harvard Law School. The question is whether Native students, academics of color, and whatever constituency academia benefits, deserve better.
There is a cost in giving a seat at the table to someone motivated by individual gain and so untouched by racial injustice that she cannot offer a compelling framing of modern racism — even with respect to the putative race she would claim. Authentically and meaningfully addressing racial injustice, genocide, and settler colonialism will never start with appropriating and exploiting racial identity and minority status.
The same question applies to Hillary Clinton: Don’t women deserve better? If you are holding yourself out as a leader (check) and you are making use of mainstream media platforms (check), perhaps you also have the obligation to your core constituency. I don’t know why people can’t problematize the ubiquity of sexual abuse and harassment in America, but I know that I expect people like Clinton to keep articulating it on behalf of women. The outpouring of rage and tears of the last few weeks warrants reflection and consideration, not party politics as usual.
Instead, Hillary Clinton delegitimized decades of law, policy, and activist by claiming that her husband had neither abused his authority nor sexually harassed Monica Lewinsky. Notwithstanding that sexual activity in the Oval, given the distance in positional power between a sitting U.S. President and a White House intern, presents a dramatic and nearly per se case of sexual harassment and abuse of authority. Despite this textbook case, Clinton could have stayed quiet. No one expects her to love Monica Lewinsky and she has surely earned the right to be petty as hell. Instead, she drew a line between consent and harassment that requires women to wear chastity belts and keep their hands clean, no matter the circumstances.
The central failing of liberal feminism is its narrow view of women and femininity, in addition to centering mainstream white voices. Of course, as Clinton says, Lewinsky was an adult at the time. As are most women who are sexually assaulted or harassed in the workplace.
And of course Bill Clinton abused his authority. In the peculiar fungibility of White House interns, hired and fired for any reason at all, a glance or word of approval from the President is high honor. Despite his attraction, that decisions relating to his interest in her would bear on her work or her reputation in the future is sexual harassment. He didn’t even need to touch her to be harassing her. If people think she’s his side piece, and he openly goes along with that, that’s sexual harassment. If she gets pushed to a remote basement after their affair concludes, that’s harassment. If she gets preferential treatment, the other women in the office may have a claim.
All of this is abuse of authority, that necessarily clouds the issues of consent as Lewinsky herself acknowledges. Sex in the workplace is a tangled web. In the blush of attraction we convince ourselves it doesn’t matter, but no one wants to see their ex — or the person they are just tired of — at the office every day. But the minute that becomes a concrete policy decision, that’s sexual harassment too.
Clinton knows this. She came of age as these doctrines were developed and lived first-hand the development and evolution of harassment law. But she also knows that power pervades these interactions, on both sides. Sometimes, women sleep with their bosses — or with powerful men or with older men — to build power. To opt into the protection of patriarchy. To take shelter in the traditional power dynamics between men and women. To create an umbrella of otherwise inaccessible privilege they couldn’t access otherwise. It turns Hillary Clinton’s stomach to admit that, even if Lewinsky was seeking power, Bill still sexually harassed and abused his authority. She remembers who he is — just a few weeks ago, we all watched him come undone over Ariana Grande at Aretha’s funeral.
Still, Hillary Clinton cannot maintain such an uncompromising stance without selling out all women. I suspect she was as emotionally wrecked as anyone after being the #WhyIDidntReport stories of abuse and harassment from women everywhere in the Kavanaugh hearings. Certainly, she understands that the complicated scenarios involved in many, many women’s stories of sexual assault and harassment do not justify abuse. Don’t we expect her to be as relativistic toward the widespread sexual abuse and harassment of women as she was toward her husband’s infidelity? As women, will we admit that her indictment of Lewinsky was the very brand of victim-blaming and slut-shaming that keeps us from coming forward and perpetuates toxic patriarchy?
I get it. For both Clinton and Warren, the rancor surrounding these issues has cut deep and felt personal. The personal is political — but neither of these media-savvy Women Who Would Be President pivots to the political. Instead, they pivot to the petty — at our expense. In the race-shifting of Warren and the exclusionary feminism of Clinton, we see the willingness to oppress and abandon. Despite being self-described leftists, they denigrate key constituencies to nourish personal and individual goals. Supporting women and racial justice easily falls within the brand they claim to be selling us. And yet, it is not natural on either of their tongues. Instinctively, they pivot away from the good of the many to adhere to (what they perceive as) the good of the one.
Perhaps this is an oppression inherent in liberalism itself, as our definitions of liberty, individualism, and success track market principles of self-interest and exploitation of opportunity. We are in a particular moment when good leadership is hard to find. Fear-mongering, pettiness, selfishness are in abundance already. We have a president who is leading via self-interest and personal profit. Perhaps the Women Who Would Be President could model another leadership style altogether. Perhaps. We are waiting.