As a black woman, I couldn’t be more aware of the racial and sexual issues in contest between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The pitting of women against blacks — with black women being pulled both ways — is nothing new. In fact, black men and white women had to compete against each other for the right to vote.

Before and during the Civil War, a coalition fighting for abolition was formed among whites, including many women’s rights leaders, and blacks.

After the war, the Republicans decided that only one group— either white women or black men (but under neither option black women) — would get the right to vote. This split the abolitionist coalition into acrimonious pieces.

Some white women suffragists used racist rhetoric to argue that black men should never be allowed to vote. Black men, who were overwhelmingly loyal to the party of Lincoln, won the right to vote when the 15th Amendment passed in 1870. Black women did not get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment gave it to female citizens in 1920.

Many of the white women who have been elected to high offices as governors, senators and members of Congress have gotten their posts as surrogates for their husbands. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was elected the first female governor of Texas in 1924, was one of them. This avenue has so far only been open to white women because white men hold onto their political power.

So now it is the utmost cruel joke that Hillary Clinton wants us to see her campaign as a step forward for all women when she has used her husband’s presidency as a launching pad. Talk about being in the elite.

The Clintons, who have always promised us two-for-one, have a pattern of abandoning black allies and avoiding racial issues when it is politically expedient.

Remember when Bill Clinton as president disbanded the Racial Affairs Commission after touting it as fostering a racial dialogue that was sorely needed in this nation? Remember the black women who were allowed to be savaged after Bill Clinton nominated or appointed them to high office, and they became controversial? Does former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders ring a bell? Or Lani Guinier, whom Clinton nominated to be assistant attorney general for civil rights but then refused to defend?

Hillary Clinton’s latest incendiary remarks equating “hardworking Americans” with “white Americans” serve only to underline that the Clintons are untrustworthy, fair-weather friends of black Americans.

Black women’s interests lie more with Obama than Clinton. He would have a harder time rejecting us than the Clintons.

Starita Smith is a doctoral student and instructor in sociology at the University of North Texas in Denton. She is also an award-winning journalist formerly with the Austin American-Statesman and The Dispatch in Columbus, Ohio. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.