Would you like fries with your politics?
1 comment March 7th, 2008
A recent column in the New York Times has dredged up some painful memories for me.
Those memories come from the four years I spent working in the most stereotypical teenage job — working at McDonald’s.
Yes, I flipped burgers and asked, “Would you like fries with that?”
I admit this because one of my grease-soaked experiences there helped me understand why identity politics, which has consumed much of this year’s Democratic presidential race, seems to undermine the hard-won battles of women and blacks.
Maureen Dowd’s column brought up a good point about the duel of historical guilt that America, particularly Democrats, is wrestling with in this year.
With (Barack) Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary (Clinton) saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.
People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?
As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?
But see, guilt shouldn’t be the problem, because the way I see it, both of those groups — women and blacks — fought for choice.
Meaning that I, as a woman, could choose what I wanted to think or what I wanted to do, rather than have it decided for me.
At McDonald’s, the food truck would pull into the parking lot twice a week, and all of the men working that shift would lumber out to unload the fatty burgers and fries.
I never helped unload the truck, and not because I didn’t want to spend an hour hurting my back and sweating profusely. I simply wasn’t allowed to do so.
On one of my first days, the managers explained that only men unloaded the truck. Somehow ability didn’t matter; apparently my gender disqualified me from adequately doing the job.
Even at 16, I knew that the renegade women of the ’70s who are foolishly ridiculed for burning their bras had already fought this fight for me. They fought to give me the opportunity to say, “No thank you, I don’t want to unload the truck,” rather than being excluded based on my gender.
This is the problem with identity politics. Dowd described some overzealous female Clinton supporters:
[…] many shoulder-pad feminists are growing more fierce in charging that women who let Obama leapfrog over Hillary are traitors.
These same women that Dowd describes, and the blacks who do the same, are asserting that women who don’t vote for Clinton are somehow betraying the sisterhood.
But I think they are becoming no better than the McDonald’s managers who wouldn’t let me unload the truck.
If a woman wants to vote for Obama, or a Republican for that matter, then so be it. If blacks want to vote for Clinton, that should be okay, too.
People should not be expected to vote for a candidate because they share certain characteristics, and this election has exposed how far we still have to go before such a choice is acceptable for women and blacks to make.
