Are we ready?

NPR has been running a two part series, yesterday and today, on whether the American public is “ready” to elect (a) an African-American, or (b) a woman to be President. Yesterday’s segment was on black electability, today’s touches on women.

Part of what was interesting about it was the “man on the street” commentary and polls. In polling, a significant majority said they’d be willing to vote for a black man for president, but many expressed skepticism that the public as a whole would be willing to (that skepticism goes significantly up among blacks polled).

I’m optimistic/idealistic enough to think that an African-American man could, indeed, be elected. I don’t labor under any illusions that racial prejudice in this country is dead, but I think for many, it’s become at least moribund, especially in the context of all the issues that go into selecting a president. For most, whether, say, Barak Obama is black will be, if not irrelevant, far down the list of things that will decide their vote — unless he (or any other black candidate) makes it an issue.

And there’s the tricky part. A black man can’t run successfully as a candidate for the blacks. That would be alienating to every other group out there, and blacks don’t have a majority to work with. That’s been the problem with so many past possible contenders (Sharpton and Jackson, most notably). The trickiest question is how a black candidate plays in black communities if he doesn’t reach out to them directly as their candidate. It’s been dealt with in other political campaigns, but the more
national an audience, the bigger the issue.

The resolution of the conundrum above — that Americans think they’d individually be willing to vote for a black man, but aren’t sure that their fellow Americans could — is that it depends on the candidate, both in terms of what issues they’re running on (like any other candidate) and how they play the race card (if at all). In a simplistic but fundamental way, if being an African-American becomes no more of a distinguisher than being a Texan, then we’re probably in fine shape.

But if a black man can be fairly easily perceived as being little or no different from a white man of the same political philosophy, the same cannot be said for a woman candidate. That’s not to say at all that a woman cannot be a good candidate, or an excellent office-holder; there’s no question in my mind about both of those propositions. But while people are becoming increasingly used to women in the workplace, and in government office, it seems unlikely that, any time soon, people will relate to male and female
candidates the same way, or perceive them as the same thing, because of, frankly, genetic hardwiring.

Gender relationships are a foundation for our psyche, our socialization, our actions in a million things large and small. The baggage and association of those relationships — regardless of the gender we are or that we seek after — affects how we relate to others of different genders in an intrinsic fashion, how we perceive them, what assumptions we make about them. I’m not necessarily talking about harassment and harmful prejudice here, but just a profound, gut-level, “here’s how I relate to women, here’s how
I relate to men” thing that’s so inculcated in our thoughts and emotions and our glands that it’s foolish to think it can ever been eliminated (“Men and women are the same!”) but only dealt with positively (“Men and women can both accomplish great things, possibly in different ways, though there’s a lot of individual variation as well”).

Racial humor is dangerous in many corners of our society, unless it is self-deprecating (i.e., about one’s own ethnic/racial group). But “the battle of the sexes,” though different in a lot of ways (the vast majority of them good) than ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, is still a subject for humor and discussion — and that’s because while the opportunity for race-based conflict and competition and interaction is relatively limited, nearly all of us deal with gender relations in our personal lives (negatively
or positively or both), and will for the foreseeable future. I, myself, am always going to, at some level, look at women differently from men, because so many of my personal relationships — family and friends and romantic — are different with women than with men.

Put another way, Barak Obama can work the election so that race is a trivial issue, unnoticed by many, or of tertiary importance to most. There’s no way that Hillary Clinton’s gender, however, can be so masked or ignored, only acknowledged and worked through. That’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just a thing to be dealt with. But it makes, in a vacuum (e.g., without looking at any of the other political baggage or positioning either of them have) Clinton’s hypothetical quest for the White
House a bit more complicated than Obama’s.

And that said, I’d be a lot more likely to vote for either them than most of the potential GOP candidates I see coming down the pike.