Tim Wise makes his first blunder in the very title of his article "Your Whiteness Is Showing: An Open Letter to Certain White Women Who are Threatening to Withhold Support from Barack Obama in November" -- which is this: he reveals, despite later claims to the contrary, that his real target isn't just white women who might stay at home or vote McCain on election day to send a message to the Democratic party.  Whatever he says later, he doesn't forgive those women who might vote gender by choosing Green party candidate Cynthia McKinney. 

That is, his problem is with all those unruly white women who might not suck it up, get in line, and vote for the candidate the DNC hand-picked, whether they vote for a woman instead or not.  We unruly women should be pretty used to this, of course; calls for Hillary to step down, be a good girl, and get on board with the real (male) candidate began in all media outlets from the second she became a serious contender, and scoldings toward the embarrassing harridans who insisted on making a big deal out of the misogynist treatment she received still haven't ended.

You see, if we don't vote for Obama, we are racist.  We are not nice girls.  We're bitches.  This is, of course, almost the worst thing you can say about a woman: accuse her of not being nice, in whatever circle she runs in, and in the terms important to that circle.  As a progressive white woman, the worst form of not-niceness that exists is probably racism, so it's not surprising that racism is the weapon being used to batter white women disenchanted with the Democratic party into electoral submission.

The women I know who have talked about withholding support from Obama -- they aren't racist.  They are, however, furious with not only the media, which Wise acknowledges is fair game, but with a party power structure and a party discourse that has arranged things such that the young male rising star will win out against the older equally-qualified (and perhaps more qualified) woman.  They are -- I am -- familiar with that particular song and dance.

"Your disappointment...is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you...is raw, pure, and justified," Tim Wise coos patronizingly at us, like a lullaby that's supposed to put us to sleep.  Is this something he learned in one of those "Women Are From Venus" relationship books?  Acknowledge her anger, and then you don't have to change your behavior?  She just wants to be emotionally validated?

The "sting," by the way, isn't "new."  I've been passed over for promotions and money in favor of less qualified, younger men with that shiny dazzle that older men with power so admire in young men, reminding them, as it does, of the shiny dazzle they hope they had themselves at that age.  When I went after promotions or money, I've been treated like a crazy bitch.  When I complained about the sexism in the way promotions or money were handed out, I've been treated like a crazy dangerous bitch.

That's what the women who are threatening to leave the Democratic party now are being treated like: crazy, dangerous bitches.  What do you do with a dangerous animal?  You scare it into submission, or else you have to put it down, I suppose.  So Tim Wise warns these white women: keep it up, and we'll call you racist.  Keep thinking you're important to the party -- a party that needs its soccer moms but rarely finds it important to pay any attention to women's issues -- and we'll say "your whiteness is showing."  Try to hurt the party and the party will hurt you.

Here's what's most interesting to me, though, about Tim Wise: he writes 1500 words in support of a party he says he "couldn't care less about," a party he "left...twenty years ago."  What's got him so invested in straightening out these out-of-control white chicks who may have just figured out that the only way the Democratic party is ever likely to pay any attention to them is if they let it see what's it like to try and win an election without them?  That is -- what's his great solidarity with Obama, whom he dreamily supposes will be a kind of Messiah of a "new day"?  Maybe his maleness is showing.