I keep hearing statements of this kind – reminders that this is a “historic candidacy” and that Obama is a first, a representative not just of the state of Illinois but also of black people everywhere.

What smelled fishy to me was not Julio’s food but the smugness with which he delivered this pronouncement: What does a Colombian kid care what color the President of the United States is? Colombia did not have a civil rights movement, and, to my mind, has suffered for it. To Colombians, the idea that their powerful northern neighbor would be run by a descendant of slaves is a rude challenge to the existing power structure.

I think that many Americans view Obama’s candidacy in this light, too, much to his benefit. Yet, if we were to attempt to construct a Foucaultian reading of the situation, I believe that we’d find something else altogether. In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the repression of sexuality actually helped construct an idea of sex as a powerful entity. Thus, when people speak openly about sexuality, they feel that they are performing a powerfully transgressive act, but they are actually acting in accordance with the systems of power that encoded that transgression. Yeah, whatever, you’re saying, but how does this have to do with Barack?

Well, an application of this “Rules are Made to be Broken” hypothesis would lead us to the conclusion that the repression of black people in the United States has strengthened the idea of black people as a powerful entity- an entity so scary and so powerful that they needed to be repressed in order to prevent them from taking over the world.

By Foucault’s argument, Obama’s candidacy does not challenge but reinforces preexisting power structures: although we’ve been taught that an opposition exists between The (white) Man who oppresses and The (multiethnic) People who are oppressed, in reality, The Man and The People are interdependent.

While it is true that in some very real senses, having Obama as a president will offer new evidence of social mobility in the United States, and reinforce the promise of the American Dream, is it not also worrisome that the Obama campaign is right now something more of a cult of personality instead of being based on any kind of platform or issues? Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC was moving, yes, but she did not talk about issues.

In her column this week, Maureen Dowd wraps up with ” So that added to the weird mood at the convention, with some Democrats nitpicking Obama’s appearance, after Michelle’s knock-out speech and the fabulously cute girls. . . They wondered why he wasn’t wearing a tie, fearing he looked too young, and second-guessed Michelle’s green dress, wondering if it clashed with the blue stage, and fretted that there wasn’t a speaker Monday night attacking McCain and yelling about gas prices. “I’m telling you, man,” said one top Democrat, “it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality.” ”

Frankly, that’s what I’m fretting about, too – that Obama has gotten so caught up in his cult of celebrity that he’s forgetting he has got to apply for a position outside of that village-sized cult– a position with the American people. The Bush Administration has handled things egregiously; there’s no question that this election should go to the Democrats. Yet where is the strong anti-Bush rhetoric? Does Obama, Man of Change, already mean Obama, Man of Democratic Party Line?

Back in the day, in 1776, when our Founding Father and future second president John Quincy Adams was helping to draft the constitution, his wife, (Founding Mother?), Abigail Adams, asked him to “Remember the ladies” in that august document. He replied, in a letter, “Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”
The statement rings dangerously true today.  In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled the 1994 Violence Against Women Act “was unconstitutional because it exceeded congressional power under the Commerce Clause and under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,” according to wikipedia.

The Violence Against Women Act was enacted because Senator Joe Biden (who is not yet my favorite candidate in this race nor someone I know enough about, apparently) and others in congress had noticed “statistical evidence that states did not prosecute crimes against women as often as crimes against men.”

According to wikipedia, the Act “provided $1.6 billion to enhance investigation and prosecution of the violent crime perpetrated against women, increased pre-trial detention of the accused, provided for automatic and mandatory restitution of those convicted, and allowed civil redress in cases prosecutors chose to leave unprosecuted.

The National Organization for Women heralded the bill as “the greatest breakthrough in civil rights for women in nearly two decades.”

The Medill News Service of Northwestern University reports that “In late September 1994, a few weeks after her 18th birthday, Brzonkala met two Virginia Tech football players – Antonio Morrison and James Crawford – at a party. Thirty minutes after their introduction, the threesome went back to a dormitory room.

“Morrison propositioned sex to her, and twice Brzonkala told him, “No,” she said. Then, Brzonkala alleged, Morrison pushed her down by her shoulders onto a bed, disrobed her and restrained her with his hands and his knees. She said he then forced her to have sex with him.

“When Morrison had finished raping her, she claimed, the two football players switched places and Crawford then raped her in similar fashion.

“When he was finished, she said the players exchanged places again and Morrison raped her once more.

“Neither man used a condom, Brzonkala said, though she claimed Morrison threatened her by saying, “You better not have any [fucking] diseases.”

“Morrison then followed Brzonkala back to the door of her dormitory room, she said.

“Morrison acknowledged that a sexual act took place that night, but he said it was consensual. Crawford denied the charges.

“In the months following the alleged attack, Morrison announced publicly in the dormitory’s dining hall that he “liked to get girls drunk and [fuck] the [shit] out of them.”

“Meanwhile, Brzonkala stopped attending classes, became depressed and attempted suicide. But she kept quiet about the incident until April 1995, when she blurted the information during a phone conversation with her mother.

“”She just blurted it out,” Mary Ellen Brzonkala said. “She said, ‘I’m just calling to tell you that I was raped.’”

“With her parents’ encouragement, she then filed a complaint with Virginia Tech against Morrison and Crawford under the school’s sexual assault policy. She said she was told by the Women’s Center at Virginia Tech that she would not have to face her attackers.

“News of the complaint was met with hostility by Virginia Tech’s athletes, she said. Brzonkala said she overheard another male Virginia Tech athlete tell Crawford that he should have “killed the [bitch].”

“Virginia Tech conducted a hearing and found Morrison guilty of sexual assault. The school then held a second hearing and determined that he violated the school’s Abusive Conduct Policy and suspended him for two semesters. Brzonkala regarded the second hearing as “the necessary excuse (the university needed) to reverse the penalty” and restore Morrison to the team.

The following fall, Virginia Tech’s provost set aside that sanction in favor of “deferred suspension until [his] graduation from Virginia Tech,” and required that Morrison instead attend a one-hour educational session. Brzonkala found out about the reduced punishment from a story in the Washington Post. She left the university, testifying later before a Congress committee, “My personal safety wasn’t worth a nickel on that campus.”"

Wikipedia picks up from there: “College proceedings failed to punish Crawford, but initially punished Morrison with a suspension (punishment later struck down by the administration). A state grand jury did not find sufficient evidence, in its opinion, to charge either man with a crime.Brzonkala then filed suit under the Violence Against Women Act.

“The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia held that Congress lacked authority to enact 42 U.S.C. § 13981. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the decision 2-1. The Fourth Circuit reheard the case en banc and reversed the panel, upholding the district court.

“The Supreme Court affirmed in a 5-4 decision. Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, held that Congress lacked authority, under either the Commerce Clause or the Fourteenth Amendment, to enact the law.” 

As the National Organization for Women notes in their essay Women’s Less than Full Equality Under the U.S. Constitution, “The 14th Amendment, passed in 1868, guaranteed all “persons” the right to “equal protection under the law.” However, the second section of the amendment used the words “male citizens,” in describing who would be counted in determining how many representatives each state gets in Congress. This was the first time the Constitution said point blank that women were excluded. Similarly, the 15th Amendment in 1870 extended voting rights to all men — but not to any women.”

So in other words, Rehnquist could just have said  “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” Luckily, that’s not the entire story, although Christy, according to the Medill article,  left for George Macon University “changed into an embittered, isolated woman” — and who wouldn’t be if your country had just decided not to give a shit about your personal safety? 

I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing really constitutional for me about rape.  I mean, it sure gets in the way of my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Ironically, the Wikipedia article notes that “The United States v. Morrison decision was seen by the press as part of the Rehnquist Court’s series of federalism or states’ rights decisions, mainly because of the Court’s previous federalism or states’ rights holdings in Lopez, Boerne, and other decisions.”

But “Law Professor Peter Shane said that the attorneys general of 36 states had endorsed the VAWA, and Shane argued that the endorsement “exposes one of the more bizarre aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent activism on behalf of state sovereignty: From the states’ point of view, this campaign is often pointless and sometimes counterproductive.” According to Shane, the 36 attorneys general called the Violence Against Women Act “a particularly appropriate remedy for the harm caused by gender-motivated violence.” ”

So, luckily, I was not alone in this feeling.  It was Rehnquist and J.Q. Adams vs. me and Shane, and,  yes,  you guessed it, that hero of the  modern American woman,  George W.  Bush.

Right. Well anyway, he apparently signed The Violence Against Women Act back into law in 2006, with an additional clause: “The latest version for the first time also recognizes male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.”

This is the first thing that Dubya has done that I am proud of.  (Good boy, here’s a pretzel.) However, that doesn’t mean that things are better: the Violence Against Women Act is a sort of affirmative action for women, a stop gap measure that was put into place because even our dimmest government official knew that women were getting too many ends of the stick. As long as it’s okay for men to shout down dormitory hallways that they want to “get bitches drunk and fuck the shit out of them,” it’s going to continue to be hard to prosecute a rape case: rape is just so condoned in our culture that we have no concept of what the world would be like without it. In the US, 96% of rapists who stand trial walk free, according to the American Association of University Women. Considering the legal fees, not to mention personal humiliation and unwanted exposure that rape survivors undergo in bringing a rape case forward, it seems unlikely that 96% of them are doing it for the fun of it.

If this were another group of people – a religious or racial group, say – that was targeted in acts of physical violence and then blatantly discriminated against in the legal system, we might have some nasty names for it. But sexism slides under the radar quietly, and goes home to do the laundry and make dinner. Why is that? Because it’s cultural, and we are blind to it, because it is our norm. But we can change that, if we all work on promoting sexual agency and respect in ourselves, our partners and our friends. I know that this post has gotten long and didactic, but I care, and that’s why.