As we're floating names for 2020, I'm hearing huge swaths (of generally white guys) really getting excited about Beto and Biden. Never mind how Beto is an Israeli war crime apologist and can't quite get behind universal healthcare and Biden is so bland and centrist, zero progress would be made – forget reversing the damage of our Nectarine Nightmare wreaked. We have both the inexperienced superstar and the old establishment default choices represented. This is diversity for white people I guess. We can do better. The people elected new representatives this time around that aimed to make Congress look more like the people. For instance, Rashida Tlaib plans to organize a delegation to Palestine, which would serve to make the discourse a bit more equal than the default genocide-as-Israeli-self-defense position.
Women are half of the population and SHOULD be half of Congress a the very least. Yet it's harder for women to run for office because of sexism and misogyny - and you can add exponential challenges for minority and queer women. Some think men are the default human and that they are naturally smarter and possess more leadership qualities and this is how they explain the lack of women in top jobs. Those of us who have lived as a woman on Earth, have read a freaking book -- or have looked inward know that there is quite a different explanation for that.
Old prejudices die hard. I remember my own mother saying she was more comfortable with men doctors because she assumed they were more qualified. I never asked her – WHY?
Two articles and two podcast episodes follow to illustrate:
1.
“History suggests that the biggest obstacle to a woman aspiring to the highest office anywhere is simply that she is not a man. In every era, in every culture, as French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, a man is the norm, and women are defined in terms of their difference from that norm. This is particularly true when it comes to our visual images and expectations for the head of state.”
2.
Well, this is disappointing:
“Asked if they'd see a woman president in their lifetime, 20 percent of respondents said they "definitely will,"...”
Both encouraging and discouraging are these results:
“A comfortable majority of Republicans—59 percent—responded no, they don't hope to see a woman president in their lifetime, according to YouGov. In comparison, 89 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents responded that yes, they hoped to see a woman president before they died.”
First podcast:
Around the 44 minute mark
THIS, RIGHT HERE, FOLKS:
“Men are 60% more likely to say that they are very qualified to run for office, while women are more than twice as likely to say that they are not at all qualified. Men, who are probably less qualified than you, are just jumping in.”
This is my problem and why I believe we need to seek out these women. Follow Barbara Lee and Stacey Abrams. Kamala Harris is being floated despite some misgivings of the prosecutor kind by progressives. Read books by black women. Follow black Twitter. If the default is white male, and it is, you have to do the homework and legwork to avoid being sexist and accepting the same old white guys whose perspective isn't going to be as relevant or accurate due to their lack of experience in certain ways. We need to stop accepting white men as the default in place of women with the same or greater qualifications.
Gillibrand has also been mentioned, but again, as with many white folks, the Israeli war crime issue is a red flag on their inability to take a stand for human rights here and abroad.
Warren seems great, too, sort of. Trump already has her number though with the Pocahantas slur. She does great tax, healthcare and wealth inequality explainers, but her handling of the ancestry issue wasn't handled well enough not to haunt her and cause resentment among Native Americans.
So, basically, there are some strong black women, problematic white women and the same old white guys.
Second podcast:
This is such a great point that I appreciated in Obama, but I didn't have a name for it: standpoint theory.
Around the 38:30 mark:
Biewen: "The big takeaway was something called standpoint theory, coined by the philosopher Sandra Harding. The theory basically says that people on the receiving end of oppressive systems, people at the bottom of social hierarchies, will see things more accurately than the people at the top, the ones benefitting from the system. Black women, for example, will share a general body of knowledge about how society is, about how it works, because of their common experiences. And, according to Sandra Harding, that shared understanding won’t just be distinctive, it’ll actually be better knowledge, more true, than the collective picture of the world that privileged people like me will soak up from our
surroundings. "
**(Also covered are problems with white feminism and how white supremacy sits on a foundation of patriarchy.)
**NC book alert: Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
