With the 2012 presidential election just around the corner, signifying the 57th quadrennial election – with incumbent President Barack Obama bidding for his second and final term, Cindy Hooper’s new publication, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics couldn’t come at a better time.
Divided into 12 well organized chapters, Conflict explores the emerging voting bloc of African-American women relative to the national political landscape, negotiating dual identities of race and gender and the glaring under-representation of African-American women in elective office proportionally. In addition to the difficult task of analyzing this voting bloc’s prioritization of race over gender or vice a versa in selecting representatives (as in the 2008 Democratic primary, which historically pitted a white female candidate, Hilary Clinton, and a black male candidate, Barack Obama against one another for the democratic nomination) Conflict also offers a clear and succinct refresher course on the electoral process, an assessment of the history of the civil rights movement and the struggle for the black vote, placing Hooper’s subject into an important historical context, and provides a thorough examination of the issues impacting and informing the votes of black women and the impediments to black women in seeking elective office.
While Conflict isn’t your colorful beach-read variety piece of writing (really how dynamic – however important – can anyone make paragraphs fat with statistical data?), Hooper’s accompanying analysis is engaging, accessible, and deeply significant. Her prose is injected with an underlying current of energy and optimism that makes this an important and empowering read. It should also be said that while some of the numbers do wash over you, others stand out with striking effect. For instance, did you know that even though this country elected its first black president in 2008, we have yet to elect an African-American woman as governor to any of the 50 states? How about the fact that to date we have only known six black senators to occupy seats in the Senate, and only one has been an African-American woman (!)?
Perhaps the most engaging chapter in Conflict is chapter 13 in which Hooper digs deeper into recent efforts and experiences of black women who do hold elective office, and the obstacles they face within that sphere (and that any black woman would face in seeking elective office), and from their perspectives, how race and gender influence American politics. In that chapter, Hooper introduces names like Cynthia McKinney (the Green Party candidate in the 2008 Presidential election and the first black woman to represent the state of Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives), Julia Williams (candidate for the Register of Wills in the September 2012 election in Prince Georges County Maryland), and Patricia Washington (2012 candidate for the California General Assembly and current commissioner with the City of San Diego Human Relations Commission).
Their spot-on interviews and first hand analyses of the roadblocks facing women of color in the pursuit of elective office give Hooper’s own observations startling life, ranging from the exorbitant amount of money required to run for office to the double edged sword any minority status can have – both as a “handicap” and a “selling point” — for those candidates, and most compellingly how those “identity benefits” as Patricia Williams puts it, only “accrue to those with the most direct access to wealth, power, and individuals who are determined to decide who can access it.” Begging the question: even though we have a black president, who, in fact, is still holding the keys to power? Aside from the razor-sharp commentary, Hooper’s effort to honor current African-American women serving in elective office and the history she outlines, paying homage to trailblazers who came before (think Shirley Chisholm), is at once deeply inspiring and educational – information that deserves wider circulation within our communities and beyond.
The overarching question posed in Conflict is whether African-American women as the Democratic Party’s most faithful voting bloc (97 percent of black woman voted for the democratic candidate in the 2008 election. Touting the highest turn out among any demographic in the United States) would ultimately, given the chance, vote for race over gender or gender over race. Despite the fact that the majority of black female voters voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries over Hilary Clinton, Hooper maintains, based more on qualitative data, that it is in fact the issues, not identity, that drive the black female vote. To that end, she argues that it is the candidate – black, white, male, or female – who addresses issues specific to the experience of the black woman, ranging from household income (for this largely single family household demographic), to healthcare (with a specific focus on the HIV/AIDS agenda, the black female population currently one of the most rapidly impacted groups) that informs the electoral choices of this powerful voting bloc.
Hooper’s Conflict is a timely, inspirational, and well plodded call to action to all voters to take greater advantage of our civic system, to pursue elective office despite the obstacles, to vote, and to think critically about the intersections of race, gender, and class in American politics. Hooper also contemplates the road ahead, and the importance of acknowledging that after the 2008 election, yes, a little black boy can, with certainty, aspire to be president, but that “the question remains, can a young black girl, or any girl for that matter, say the same?”
As we move toward the 2012 presidential election Hooper reminds us the importance of being informed, strategic, organized, and that, indeed, “there is power in numbers.” This is one to be taken seriously and passed along to friends and family, young and old. The book will be available on July 31st from Praeger publishing.