In America today, is it more acceptable to be unabashedly racist or sexist? I'm voting for "sexist," based on the evidence of a recent NPR report. NPR sent some reporters to West Virginia in advance of the Democratic primary there, to ask citizens who would be getting their vote. Now, I'm from Kentucky, so I'm not going to start in on the jokes about dumb southerners and hillbillies.
I was ready to give the folks being interviewed a chance to prove they were more sophisticated than the media gives them credit for being, and was especially hopeful they could sound smart during the morning news about to be heard by people in their cars across the country. But boy was I disappointed.
It started with a woman who said she loved Bill Clinton, but could not vote for Hillary because she was female. Then a gentleman in Floyd's Barber Shop (I am not making this up) said he liked everything he heard about Hillary, but could not (again, these people said they could not, instead of would not, indicating they felt a higher power was setting these rules) vote for her, because if she were president she would be "usurping the power of man over woman." I've lived in the Bible Belt long enough to know this is a basic belief of many fundamentalist denominations, so I can't say I was totally shocked by it. (Please note, I grew up attending church myself and we didn't truck with this kind of nonsense, so it's not every single Christian or Southern person who feels this way.)
There were also some folks with negative things to say about Obama. Namely, that he had a crazy preacher, that he was a Muslim (which conflicts with the crazy preacher point, but whatever) and that his middle name was Hussein. Only one person was willing to go on record as stating that his problem with Obama was that he is African American. Many others implied it, according to the reporter, but were unwilling to utter explicity racist remarks into the microphone.
The statements about both Hillary and Obama (from Democrats no less) were enough to make me roll my eyes high enough to dangerously lose sight of the road. But what really caught my attention was how frank most people were about their sexist beliefs, while they at least tried to be less explicit about their racism. If they were willing to go on record as blatantly sexist, they must have felt that was a viewpoint likely to receive support in their community. They must have felt that sexism is right, whereas their reluctance to appear racist indicates some condemnation of racism in their community. This primary has turned into the Oppression Olympics, with African Americans and women pitted against each other by pundits, so it's not the right time to argue about who suffers more egregiously from discrimination. But this makes me sad, as a woman and a human being.
Allison Elliott knows that somebody is praying for her misguided feminist soul right this moment, and says thank you.
