I’m sharing this thought-provoking correspondence received today. Before answering the question of whether Obama deserves women’s votes, there are many considerations that come to mind.

Recollections:

The efforts of too many women of color in support of the election of Barack Obama were responded to by having our presence, Justice 4 All Includes Women of Color, removed from the Obama website just before his election. Despite a written commitment by Presidential Candidate Obama to issues of women of color, our group and other grassroots, working class women of color have had no access to President Obama during his presidency, while some of those who fought against him, including some who put out objectionable material, amazingly have garnered high level appointments and all kinds of inclusion. There is no evidence that the lack of substantive or meaningful attention to concerns of women of color by the majority of US political parties or political incumbents at all levels will be remedied.

Note: up until now, I have been advocating a write-in campaign for Barbara Lee for President and Dennis Kucinich for Vice President in the primaries with messages to the Democrats that the same write-ins will occur in November if the Presidents and all the Democrats don’t deliver on promises before the election if they want our votes.

The Email Received:

The news is buzzing with stories about the Democratic Party trying to woo women voters. Here is a fabulous message that addresses what Obama’s policies have actually done (or not done) for women. It’s from the Freedom Socialist 2012 Durham/López Presidential Campaign. Radical Women endorses this campaign, because we want more than hollow election-cycle promises. Read the alert below and you’ll see...

For those who don’t know these candidates, check out their biographies:

Stephen Durham for president, Biography

Christina López for vice president, Biography

Durham/López campaign statement:

Obama to women voters:

Ask not what the president can do for you, but what you can do for the president

The Obama presidential campaign has recently turned its full attention to women voters and the fact that they are none too happy with the administration’s waffling on reproductive rights and other issues. Hence the idea was hatched to do a one-million-woman mailing targeting three groups-mothers, young women and older women-backed up by phone banking and a web site.

The president is re-selling his privatized healthcare plan (which specifically excluded abortion) as a feminist coup in hopes he can lure women back into the fold, after they narrowly went for the Republicans in the 2010 midterm election. You can read the Durham/López statement on the president’s plan at www.VoteSocialism.com.

But what exactly has the president done for women and how much better is it than what the Republican patriarchs offer? If you are a working woman, you may remember that one of the first bills Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. The act gives victims of wage discrimination more time to file suits. That’s helpful-as long as you can afford an attorney, your house isn’t underwater, and you haven’t run out your unemployment. Reforms like this create the legal means to fight discrimination but not the basis to win. In fact, Obama has been a much better friend of the discriminators - the banks, Wall Street, industrialists and union-busters - than of women workers.

If you are lesbian, you know that the president still doesn’t support gay marriage, although after a long delay he endorsed repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. He also took two years to end “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” waiting until December 2010 to sign the bill. His military chiefs then dragged their feet on implementation, claiming they needed more time to figure out how the change would affect military operations.

If you are a young woman, you may be feeling vulnerable since the White House overruled the Food and Drug Administration proposal to make emergency contraception available without a prescription to under-age women.

If you are an undocumented immigrant, you are probably worried about being separated from your U.S.-born children because the president gave ICE $600 million to hire 1,500 more agents, among other things, and has deported more people than G.W. Bush. His administration has deported nearly half a million, many of them mothers, in the last year alone.

If you work for a well-heeled university, hospital or school operated by a religious institution, Obama signed a deal that exempts your employer from paying for insurance to cover your reproductive services. (Who is imposing whose beliefs here? Is the government “oppressing” wealthy, tax-exempt churches or are pastors and priests imposing their beliefs on women? We think the latter.)

If you are a unionist or a public worker, you probably noticed that Obama was completely invisible during the intense labor battles raging in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee-despite $200 million dollars poured into his 2008 presidential campaign by the AFL-CIO. (On March 12, the AFL-CIO announced it would endorse the president again.)

If you are female and you care about free speech and the First Amendment, Obama’s signing of H.R. 347, the misleadingly named Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, and the National Defense Authorization Act should be cause for deep concern. H.R. 347, also known as the “Trespass Act,” makes protest of any type a federal offense if it occurs in the presence of the Secret Service, with penalties of one to 10 years in federal prison. The National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president on December 31, 2011, authorizes indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and foreigners anywhere in the world, without charge or trial, by the U.S. military.

Finally, if you are an Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian, Caribbean or Latin American woman, Obama’s four-year reign has not brought you and your children peace or security. Rather it has meant more U.S. military bases, more killing, more sophisticated methods of extermination, more arming of your enemies, more fanning the flames of destruction.

President Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, has simply continued the policies of G.W. Bush in a less bellicose and more charming, but none-the-less imperialist, manner, by arming and embracing reactionary regimes that repress their own people.

It is an illusion to think that any man or woman in Obama’s position is going to rise above the desires of the capitalist class that rules this country. The president of the United States, regardless of color or gender, is the leader of the most privileged 1% on planet Earth. His or her job is to protect the interests of this class.

At the same time, Obama is continually the target of vile attack by racists. These character assassinations are abominable, and socialists condemn them. At the same time, these assaults serve to mask the fact that Obama does not actually represent the interests of the oppressed group to which he belongs. Neither would another establishment president who happened to be female, or Black, or another person of color. Racism and sexism are key to keeping the working class divided and profits up, and are routinely practiced by all the factions within the ruling class depending on their usefulness at a particular time.

So what has President Obama - spokesperson for and defender of Wall Street - done for women? Not enough to warrant an endorsement from women voters. For that matter, neither does any of the Republican candidates who range somewhere between “Father Knows Best” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” on women’s issues.

Better to hang onto a sense of self-respect and register a protest at the polls by voting socialist feminist. Write in Stephen Durham for president and Christina López for vice president. You’ll be casting your ballot for the greater good, rather than the lesser evil. The question is not what Obama or Romney (or dare we contemplate Santorum?) has done for women, but what women can do for themselves by standing together across lines of nationality, immigration status, color, gender and disability to fight for freedom and peace in our troubled world.

Reflection:

These recommendations - the candidates and the platform - especially for the primaries, are food for thought. However, though the writings are clearly intended to be as inclusive as possible, disappointingly, with one exception in the section on Women’s Liberation, the words “women of color” are absent. This is not unusual. It stems from the frequent lack of understanding that the experience of racism plus sexism, only experienced by women of color, is unique and not experienced by any other groups and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of women of color on the socio-economic bottom of society, marginalized to invisibility. When women of color raise this issue, it is resisted by too many white women and men of color, probably because it requires admissions of white female racism and men of color sexism. This is not to declare all white women and all men of color to be racists or sexists, anymore that every white man is asserted to be racist and sexist. However, as long as women of color cannot even be mentioned, let alone having our issues and concerns receive positive action, there can be no real or lasting social solutions.

Detailed information about women of color is needed so that the facts of women of color getting 48% of the housing foreclosures, dying at the highest rates from every curable disease and the staggering statistics about the rates of women over 65 who cannot meet basic life expenses (51% of European American women, 61% of Asian American women, 74% of African American Women and 75% of Latina American Women) are understood as more than numerical data. Without specific women of color issues identified and included, overwhelmingly, women of color will not respond positively to the question of whether women should vote for Obama, because just as “people of color issues” don’t include us equitably, neither do “women’s issues.” The issue most often presented by women of European American heritage is reproductive rights. The issue of most importance to women of color and our unique experience of racism plus sexism is minimized.

The nation is at a crossroads. If the responses and suggestions of women of color are not understood and fully and immediately embraced, there is no way that most women of color will see socialist, progressive, Democrat or Republican efforts as meaningful for us. When mention of women of color is rejected, it means that women of color are not intended beneficiaries of the efforts underway and that no matter the outcomes for others, we will remain on the bottom of society. This was not understood in the last presidential election by the many white women who especially insulted grassroots and working class women of color when we did not accept Hillary Clinton as a candidate, notwithstanding her alliances with some women of color allies that she had but who do not represent the majority of us, regardless of their previous civil rights work or other credentials perceived by those who are not women of color. This circumstance was repeated, over and over again, before the 2008 election and since Obama’s election. Even the effort to have Obama establish a President’s Council on Women and Girls refused to include the racism + sexism issue or to use the words, “women of color” with any issues specifically associated with us.

What is at stake is the US empire as we have experienced it in varying ways and whether, as the empire sits on the edge of the world undergoing fundamental changes, the nation will come free of denial and seek a place in concert with more of the world’s people or will persist in its old ways and be left out or behind. In the midst of these precarious circumstances, white women and men of color need to make their own critical decisions on a grand scale - whether to pursue emulation of the while male-dominated system via token representatives, or whether more than a small fraction of progressive white women and men of color can be persuaded to collaborate with the masses of women of color who now and in the future will outnumber them. Sort of reminds of a biblical prediction that “the last shall be first, and the first last” at some time of reckoning. The time for ending the minimalization of women of color is now. To achieve this, the Jim Crow domination strategies used against most of us by a power elite, for their benefit, resulting in fighting among those who should be allies, must be ended. There can be no hesitation in reaching out to each other for mutual benefit. Justice delayed is justice denied. With each denial, the possibilities of unity and trust are diminished. It will not forever be possible to reverse the damage.

Women of color cannot wait any longer for full equity and justice. We cannot envision ourselves as among the “women” being discussed or “people of color” being discussed without specific mention of the words “women of color” and without specifically addressing the issues that we identify as having the greatest importance to us all.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Suzanne Brooks is the founder and CEO of International Association for Women of Color Day and CEO of Justice 4 All Includes Women of Color. Click here to contact Ms. Brooks.