The Clinton-Obama campaign has been portrayed by many as a white v. black contest. Instead, we should recognize it as a contest between two prejudices. Which does the greater damage to the greater number in our society in this year 2008. In my opinion, it is no contest.
While I hate racial descrimination and recognize that it still holds back millions and has caused the degradation and deaths of many tens of thousands of our African-American brothers and sisters, the damage that still linger in our society as a result of hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crowism and racial prejudice in both the north and south, this hardly matchs the thousands of years of both institutional and individual sexism that rolls on in this country almost unnoticed and completely unrecognized by a majority of its male, and many of its female, populations, black and white, and brown, red and yellow.
Obviously as a young black man, Barack Obama had struggles that I, as a white male of a certain age, never experienced. And the young black people he worked with in the neighborhoods of Chicago had and have much greater struggles. But inspite of so many opinions to the contrary, this country has and is making significant progress in changing racist attitudes, though probably much more in smaller communities than in the major cities of our country.
In my hometown of Fayetteville, AR, this is evident to an extent that I believed would have taken many lifetimes to achieve. We now see hundreds of biracial couples and evidence of interracial interaction of all kinds in our community. It is still not a perfectly racially intergrated society, but we are making amazing progress, especially among the younger generation.
But misogyny lingers like a bloody red stain among large numbers of both male and female. It is as though most of us are red green colorblind and have no way of detecting this stain until it is called to our attention. As Amanda Fortini has written in the New York Magazine in an article called Hillary Clinton And The Fourth Wave, the Clinton campaign has brought a new recognition to exactly how far we have still to go in eradicating this unseen stain from our society.
Ms. Fortini writes, "bitch has replaced black" as a term of disgust even among journalists and much of what we used to call "polite society." And in the less polite among us, "cunt" has replaced "nigger" as an acceptable term of denigration.
For a short portion of Ms. Fortini's article read below. For the full article, go to the website
http://nymag.com/...
Not so long ago, it was possble for women, particularly young women, to share in the popular illusion that we were living in a postfeminist moment. There were encouraging statistics to point to: More women than men are enrolled at universities, where they typically earn higher grades; once they graduate, those who live in big cities might even receive higher salaries?at least in the early years of employment. The Speaker of the House is female, as are eight governors and 16 percent of Congress (never mind that this is 11 percent fewer than Afghanistan?s parliament). Many women believed we had access to the same opportunities and experiences as men?that was the goal of the feminist movement, wasn?t it??should we choose to take advantage of them (and, increasingly, we just might not). There was, of course, the occasional gender-based slight to contend with, a comment on physical appearance, the casual office badminton played with words like bitch and whore and slut, but to get worked up over these things seemed pointlessly symbolic, humorless, the purview of women?s-studies types. Then Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy, and the sexism in America, long lying dormant, like some feral, tranquilized animal, yawned and revealed itself.
Has Obama had to endure anything in this campaign even approaching what Hillary has endured - and continues to experience on a daily basis not only from boors like Rush Limbaugh and Roger Stone - from mainstream media types, male and female.Examples? Read these.
The egregious and by now familiar potshots are too numerous (and tiresome) to recount. A greatest-hits selection provides a measure of the misogyny: There's Republican axman Roger Stone's anti-Hillary 527 organization, Citizens United Not Timid, or CUNT. And the Facebook group Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich, which has 44,000-plus members. And the Hillary Nutcracker with its stainless-steel thighs. And Clinton?s Wikipedia page, which, according to The New Republic, is regularly vandalized with bathroom-stall slurs like whore, slut, and cuntbag. And the truly horrible YouTube video of a KFC bucket that reads HILLARY MEAL DEAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS, AND A BUNCH OF LEFT WINGS. And Rush Limbaugh worrying whether the country is ready to watch a woman age in the White House (as though nearly every male politician has not emerged portly, wearied, and a grandfatherly shade of gray). And those two boors who shouted, "Iron my shirts!" from the sidelines in New Hampshire. "Ah, the remnants of sexism," Clinton replied, "alive and well." With that, she blithely shrugged off the heckling.
And for examples of MSM boorish remarks, read on.
It was hardly a revelation to learn that sexism lived in the minds and hearts of right-wing crackpots and Internet nut-jobs, but it was something of a surprise to discover it flourished among members of the news media. The frat boys at MSNBC portrayed Clinton as a castrating scold, with Tucker Carlson commenting, "Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs," and Chris Matthews calling her male endorsers "castratos in the eunuch chorus." Matthews also dubbed Clinton "the grieving widow of absurdity," saying, of her presidential candidacy and senatorial seat, "She didn't win there on her merit. She won because everybody felt, "My God, this woman stood up under humiliation." While that may be partly true that Hillary's approval ratings soared in the wake of l'affaire Lewinsky Matthews's take reduced her universally recognized political successes to rewards for public sympathy, as though Clinton's intelligence and long record of public service count for nothing. Would a male candidate be viewed so reductively? Many have argued that the media don't like Clinton simply because they don't like Clinton, even her devotees will admit she arrives with a complete set of overstuffed baggage much in the same way they made up their mind about Al Gore back in 2000 and ganged up on him as a prissy, uptight know-it-all. But whatever is behind the vitriol, it has taken crudely sexist forms.
As a physician who has worked with women as colleagues and as patients; as a husband and father of two daughters and two grand daughters and a son and grandson who would never treat the female sex so crudely and disgustingly, I find all these sexist insults incredibly offensive.And as a man who has delivered several thousands of babies and viewed men and women in some of the most horrowing experiences in anyone's lives, I will take women. I have known very brave and sensitive men, and count many of them as friends. But when the chips are down, and you desperately need brave and focused associates, give me a woman every time.
I know we have two wonderful and intelligent candidates for the POTUS under our party's consideration. But folks, the chips are down. Our country desperately needs a president with the character of a Washington or Madison or Lincoln. I pick Hillary