Sarah Palin and the "Sambo" Remark
Saturday September 6, 2008
To hear the L.A. Progressive blog tell it:
"So Sambo beat the b--ch!" This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama's win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
The quote is attributed to Palin by "Lucille," an unidentified Alaska waitress. At first glance it sounds like an offensive, off-the-cuff remark--but there's a lot more to it than that. This year's election cycle was rife (at least among the punditry) with discussion of race versus gender. Who would be the first to break the white male monopoly on presidential nominations: A black man, or a white woman? We could have saved ourselves all this trouble if we'd just nominated Shirley Chisholm in '72, but never mind. The 2008 Democratic primary has been characterized as the oppression olympics, as a competition to see whether racism is worse than sexism, or vice versa. But there was another time in our nation's history when an even more fundamental question of race versus gender was being resolved: December 1865. The American Civil War had just ended eight months prior, and talk was afoot of giving black men the right to vote. White suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in a letter (emphasis mine):
The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were allowed to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see "Sambo" walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever again close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?
The term "Sambo" has fallen out of favor as a racial epithet in recent years, and so--considering the context of the current presidential election--the phrase "Sambo beat the b--ch" would almost have to be a subtle reference to Stanton's remark. Would a group of fortysomething Republican politicos from Alaska have gotten the reference? Probably not. But Sarah Palin might have; she self-describes as a feminist and belongs to Feminists for Life, a group that reveres the writings of 19th-century suffragists but has little use for later feminist material. But it would have been strange to use it in a conversation with ordinary Republican political operatives, because they wouldn't have understood what she was talking about. McCain had famously fielded a "How do we beat the b--ch?" question (regarding Hillary Clinton) from a supporter months earlier, at a time when Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee. When Obama defeated her, that rendered the supporter's crude question moot--so the statement would have doubled as a response to the McCain supporter and a wry reference to the history of the race vs. gender issue that dominated the news cycle during the Clinton-Obama primary. The phrase is too succinct, too complete, to have been the invention of a shrill blogger four months after the fact. I don't mean to sound like I admire the remark--it's offensive--but it encapsulates so many different controversies, so much history, that it's not something that an enemy of Palin would have created out of whole cloth as a smear because it's too complex. If you're going to have Palin say a racial epithet, it makes sense to just have her say something crude and simple without all the subtle references.So I don't really know. I can't see Palin saying it over lunch to a group of Republican colleagues, but I can't see it going unsaid either. Somebody must have said it. I don't pretend to know who, when, or where, but it comes with its own why.
You can't win our issues so, you choose to play the race card
pathetic
http://racerelations.about.com/b/2008/09/06/sarah-palin-and-the-sambo-remark.htm
