Talking Tough Love

In his speech [2] to the NAACP last week, President Obama sharply exhorted black parents and leaders to push their children toward excellence. After all, that’s what the president’s mother did. Obama acknowledged that an African-American is more likely to be unemployed, imprisoned, or infected with HIV/AIDS than, say, attend an inaugural ball. Still, he said, “We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands—you cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses.”

Unjust as it is, solving the social consequences of past oppression does require heavy lifting by those who happened to have inherited the bad deal, in addition to collective and government effort. And if it’s OK to tell the unambiguously victimized heirs of 400 years of documented racial oppression and discrimination to do what they can to help themselves, it should also be OK to ask the same thing of women, shouldn’t it? For example, prepare to support yourself through your own paid work. Or even more basic: Leave a man who’s beating you up. My interest in giving this latter piece of advice is particularly keen this week, since the singer Chris Brown just apologized [2] for beating up his then-girlfriend, Rihanna. I hope she doesn’t go back; I want to advise women to leave abusers, apologetic and all. But the response to talking tough love to women is different than for other disadvantaged groups.

When the mainstream media predictably ate up [3] Obama’s tough love to black parents, I sat back and waited for the storm to erupt on the lefty blogosphere at least. Bill Cosby certainly caught hell from African-American academics and commentators when he proposed the same solution five years ago in his famous “Pound Cake” speech [4]. African-American commentators might have reminded the black people Obama was lecturing that his mama is hardly an example of a black parent raising her kids by her bootstraps, since she was, er, white, as was her family, who raised him in Hawaii. I expected the president to set off a bloggy eruption of don’t blame the victim. But, with few exceptions, the usual suspects were silent. Or approving [5].

Sadly, no one has ever suggested electing me president of the United States. And I recognize that Obama gets a pass from critics that wasn’t extended to Bill Cosby. And yet, an argument should ultimately stand or fall on its own merits. Are women different from African-Americans when it comes to writing their own destiny, as the president powerfully expressed it? Apparently. When I published my book, Get to Work, [6] outlining the reasons why women need to prepare for and stay in a life of gainful employment, one blogger responded [7] with the headline “Everybody Hates Linda.” My friend and fellow writer Leslie Bennetts, whose similar exhortation [8] to women is titled The Feminine Mistake, got much the same response [9]. Even the traditional print media coverage [10] of my book largely took the line that no one can tell a woman what choice to make about anything. It is difficult to imagine the same writers suggesting that President Obama is interfering with the freedom of choice of black parents when he tells them to prepare their children to be scientists rather than rappers.

If anything, the argument for leaving an abuser should be an easier one to make, no? But a few months ago, after reviewing [11] Leslie Morgan Steiner’s memoir of her four years as a victim of domestic abuse, I took a pounding [12] for asking: Why didn’t she leave? Amply warned, educated, wealthy, childless, and almost never without the keys to the family car, Steiner seemed to me to be the perfect test case for opening a new discussion of female agency, unsullied by considerations like hostage children. Yet in her column the next week [13], Katha Pollitt said that the question “Why do women stay?” rankles feminists because “it sounds exasperated and accusatory.”

Maybe not accusatory, but yes, the question is and was intended to be judgmental. If Steiner was, as she described herself, an anorectic, recovering alcoholic with a weakness for blond men, at some level her story is just a memoir and not a political lesson. At the same time, when most of the discussion of abuse in the feminist community is one long hallelujah chorus of don’t expect any woman to be responsible for her destiny, it’s a problem for the whole culture. I wasn’t going to revisit the issue—once more through the P.C. wringer and I’m going to start sounding like Camille Paglia. But the silence that greeted Obama’s speech makes for a striking comparison.

Some of my critics explained themselves. In an autobiographical revelation, [14] the blogger Hilzoy argued [15] that abuse itself makes a woman doubt her judgment, the very faculty she needs the most to escape. Pollitt invoked “learned helplessness, low self-esteem, despair. Batterers are good at isolating their partners from friends, family and other sources of support and help, and at making them feel worthless, ugly and stupid. When we express bewilderment that a woman could stay with a man who hit her, we forget that physical abuse isn't like being punched by a mugger; it takes place in a context of ongoing emotional abuse and manipulation.”

True, some of the oppression of women is imposed in private, emotional relationships, as opposed to on a bridge in Selma, Ala. or at a lousy crumbling inner-city school. But such manipulative emotional relationships do involve political oppression, just like the political oppression that produces those awful schools and the lack of job prospects upon graduation. That’s what the old feminist insight “the personal is the political” was intended to illuminate. And, on the other side, public forms of oppression take a private emotional toll: Can anyone imagine that some African-Americans don’t suffer feelings of worthlessness and the like after centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and defamation? Still, the president asked them to overcome. Do feminists really want to take the position that women can’t do the same?

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