The Tougher Road

On two occasions last week, separate friends of mine voiced the opinion that gender bias is worse in this country than racial bias. Neither of them said it was a large margin, but still. My reflexive opinion was that the opposite was true, and that it was, in fact, kind of a blowout. I thought to myself, if I were someone interested in being treated fairly -- and with respect -- would I want to wake up tomorrow a woman or an African-American man? To me, the choice was easy. Obviously, the issue came up because of the battle for the Democratic nomination. In this week's New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes about the end of Clinton's campaign, and he gets around to the subject of historical wrongs. I couldn't agree more with the first six words of the excerpt below (which is why I'm not even interested in a prolonged debate), but the rest of it is smart about these competing grievances:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Clinton was right to say that from now on it will be “unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States”—and that, in large measure, is her doing. But the Speaker of the House is a woman; and there are, at the moment, sixteen women in the Senate and eight in the nation’s governors’ offices, the pools from which Presidential candidates are usually drawn. There are two African-American governors, only one of whom was elected to that office. There is one African-American senator—and seven months from now that one may have a different job.