This media icon came into my life just after my parents' divorce in the early 70's. In the mornings I would go into my father's room, where he was sleeping on a bean bag, turn on the TV and watch Barbara Walters on the NBC Today Show. Something about her captivated me. Then one morning, she was gone. I remember the anxiety I felt as I went back every morning, and Walters was never there again. I scrolled through the TV channels looking for her, and she was no where to be found. I was baffled and bewildered. I must have been three or four years old.
While Freud and the psychoanalysts may have some field research to do on me, what's more interesting is how Walters got in front of the camera in the first place. In earlier interviews long ago, she noted the beginnings, but I notice in the last month as she has announced her impending retirement, leaving her TV show, and a building named in her honor at ABC-TV, she is silent about the history of how she came to be a respected TV journalist.
More than a generation ago, women in the news business was an oxymoron. Walters, like a lot of women of her generation, was kept behind the scenes in the research departments writing copy for the male reporters. In high schools and colleges, they had no chance of perfecting themselves as athletes.
Then class-action lawsuits, feminist activism, Title IX, and affirmative action programs changed all that and forced the athletic departments, news rooms, newspapers, and TV stations to bring [white] women into the forefront.
It was force. It was pressure. It was organized chutzpah. It was a form of class war. It was not some Darwinian evolution to naturally occurring higher state of being that enlightened men and patriarchy to eek out a sliver of its privilege to women anymore than our slave owners or factory owners were naturally enlightened to see the error of their ways: they did not, they will not, and they have not, to this hour.
There would be no Barbara Walters [or Diane Sawyer, Connie Chung, or the late Jessica Savitch] were it not for feminist activists being "pushy". Granted, these white feminists come with problems. As the major beneficiaries of 1970's affirmative action, they have not shown much solidarity with the Black or Brown recipients, brothers or sisters, who faired far worse under affirmative action programs.
This white feminism is a lot like that of the elites in the LGBT community of the last generation in that the demand to sit at the controls of white supremacist capitalism, be "married," or fight its imperialist wars is ultimately not a very radical demand. These victories cost the system nothing, just widen the cage of rats competing for the spoils. Liberation and revolution with real demands cost a lot but come with greater benefits, like ending patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
Still, even with that sordid history, those white feminists of the 60's and 70's offer a valuable lesson about activism and organizing worth repeating. The working class and poor have always been in the cross-hairs of the slave state, but we are losing precipitously more ground now.
If Walters wants a building named in her honor, it should be one that honors this militant history and its class warriors, not her. I'm sorry she is not repeating the real story now while she is being given so much attention but has allowed the Creation Myth to take over. The Creation Myth says that she worked hard and kept her head up, and this is all it takes to succeed in a white settler state, like the the United States of America.
This Creation Myth has no truth to it, and Walters knows this unless she's become senile and brittle-minded. Listening to her over the last few days, she seems perfectly lucid. And this risks leaving generations of men and women waiting for the sun to rise into the dark hearts of the empire and jubilee to come.
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