In recent months, I’ve watched two excellent TV shows dealing with both race and misogyny. The first was on FX: “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” – and honestly, I hadn’t planned to watch it, since I knew the story and the outcome so well. But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive and after watching the first episode I was hooked.
Then, after watching the whole show, I was shocked.
It was shocking to see how the “racism” accusation caused everyone great discomfort while the blatant anti-women sentiment that flowed through the story and was expressed by both men and women of all races, was casually yet enthusiastically encouraged but almost never acknowledged.
The lawyer Johnny Cochrane famously made the case about race but after the seeing the dramatization of O.J. and Nicole and watching the abuse that prosecutor Marcia Clark suffers through, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that race had trumped misogyny.
Then HBO ran its show “Confirmation” about Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court vetting – in which a woman accuses Thomas of harassment while the future Supreme Court Justice defends himself by accusing the Senators of racism. I found it difficult to accept that after all the inappropriate behavior Anita Hill had apparently had to put up with, she now had to suffer through it again in public. Abusing women, it implied, might not be such a terrible offense after all.
I thought I already “knew” these stories. But after watching both dramas, I realized that I really hadn’t been paying enough attention.
Well I am now - especially as the presidential campaign narrows down.
Donald Trump has already started playing the “Woman Card” against Hillary Clinton.
“If Hillary Clinton were a man,” he’s said, “I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.” The he accused her of “shouting.”
And I’m afraid this sexism is just the beginning.
There are some who believe it would be a more significant achievement for a woman to win the presidency than it was for Barack Obama to become the first African-American president.
But there are others who are still not ready to see the status quo disrupted by having a woman run the country.
Having an African American family in the White House created what some people call the “Obama Derangement Syndrome.” With a woman candidate I shudder to think what we’ll be seeing and hearing more of in the months ahead from a gender bias perspective. I wish we were better than this.
