My students (in my freshman composition and rhetoric class) turned in their analysis of Obama’s race speech today and, for a treat, instead of class we went to hear Donna Brazile speak. She was the keynote at today’s Pulpit Politics conference at Fordham (and her speech overlapped with my class meeting time). They didn’t know anything about her going in and they left excited and moved.
I learned a lot about her, but I did not learn whom she’ll support for the Democratic Nominee. She takes being an uncommitted superdelegate very seriously and manages to be very funny and charming about it without tipping her hand: I was listening intently and the hints went so fast in both directions that I really wouldn’t wager (though I hear a slight tilt to Hillary, perhaps).
Anyway, since we'll be watching her on t.v. tonight, I thought this diary might be an interesting distraction from the big story.
Brazile’s spoke out of her own personal experience, as a black girl from New Orleans (born in 1959, the 3rd of 9 children, her father was a janitor and her mother a domestic: she writes elsewhere that she was on the wrong side of three tracks—not just on the black side of town, but behind the double tracks that separated the middle class blacks from the poor). In the Q & A it came out that she entered politics at age nine, campaigning for a city council candidate who promised a playground to her neighborhood. She got the playground and, two years later, her first job, coaching girls softball. Without that anecdote, though, her speech was a really compelling and masterful story of how she felt indebted to the people of faith who welcomed her, acknowledged the irony of her often getting into a room as “a twofer,” a black woman, but was grateful to be in the room. All of this, she said, meant that she always wanted faith, work, and values to be linked.
Her most compelling story—especially at a Jesuit University, especially for me, seated amidst my freshmen—was how, as a girl she prepared for her first Communion in a segregated Catholic church, with a separate line for the little black kids. After she took Communion she announced her desire to become a priest, “and when I’m a priest, all the kids will be able to sit up front and the little girls will not have to wear veils.”
Her mother fell silent and called her dad into the room.
He told her that God loved her and always would but that the time wasn’t ripe for her to be a priest. But read the Bible, he said, God does not exclude women from the pulpit.
I was surprised and impressed by her strong feminism throughout. She called God “He” and “She.” She went off script to say that last week she cut her class at Georgetown short to go to CNN so that she could sit beside fellow-Catholic Bill Bennett and add her voice to the coverage of the Pope’s visit. She feels it a privilege and a responsibility to represent liberal feminists of faith wherever she can.
She quoted a lot of scripture—very, very fast, with great verve and humor, but definitely proving that she knows her Bible and depends on it and knows that it supports her positions.
She took questions, selected by a moderator, on notecards. After a brilliant and funny answer on the perils of negative campaigning (and how she knows Bill Clinton would like to take her aside and ask her to stop criticizing him and how he’s been a distraction), she answered my question:
I asked “What do you make of Hillary’s choice to downplay herself as a woman, let alone a feminist, in this campaign? A good or a necessary strategy?”
Brazile said that she thought that it was a necessary strategy for women, that women have to frame themselves in terms of their experience and their resumes, that she had seen lots and lots of empty blue suits in her time in Washington. She feels that it was necessary and right for her campaign to frame her as experienced in order for Hillary to get over the sex barrier but that in this political cycle it ended up making her look like an incumbent in an era of change.
She went on to say that running a campaign as if it’s your turn and not noticing the winds of change, and spending all your money to win on a set date with no strategy beyond February 5th were mistakes, not misogyny. Oh, there’s plenty of misogyny out there, but these were mistakes. Still, Hillary, like Obama, has had to navigate all these nuance, all these third rails. Then, she made a few more points: They should have pivoted her, after Iowa, as a woman; Elections are always about the future (true to her Clinton One roots); Pres. Clinton has been a distraction.
A few other things that came out in the Q & A:
- A funny riff on asking God not to ask her to love her enemies turned back to New Orleans and how she met with Bush and, as a consequence of that meeting, secured billions of dollars of aid for the city.
- The question about which is “worse” or “harder,” being black or being a woman clearly annoyed her (duh!) and she paused, then took the high road and noted that America has shown, in fundraising, registering, and voting that it is ready to elect a woman or an African-American and that she is prepared for the challenges that such an historic presidency will entail.
- In response to a question about right-to-life Democrats, she said that her grandmother, the daughter of a slave, had analogized the right to control your body to freedom: that her grandmother wanted Brazile and her sisters to have the rights to make choices about their bodies that their slave ancestors had not had.
- And a lovely image of her insisting on her place in the pew, hearkening back to that segregated church in Louisiana. These days, in D. C., she says, she loves going to church, especially when Scalia and Clarence Thomas are there. She thinks about herself as a girl, her desire to be a priest, to sit up front, and she walks to the front, to Scalia and Thomas and “I wiggle myself in” to the pew.
- Finally, probably most moving of all was her account of the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Defying her mother’s command to stay inside, Brazile took her mother’s black headscarf and put it on the front door, as a sign of mourning and a plea to the rioters not to come to their house. From that act of defiance, she said, she learned that when you’re called, you act.
My students were moved and so was I. I’ve been frustrated at her for not committing, but hearing her story made me respect her more. It also reminded me of why it once seemed hard to decided between Clinton and Obama: it’s weird how she still seems to be in that world where they’re both great and I’m out here, so disappointed and fatigued and angry at Clinton.