The Twisted Face of Prejudice

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

A dear friend recalls a revealing story an acquaintance witnessed some years ago on a Family Island. Upon hearing considerable commotion outside an older white Bahamian woman rushed to her window to see what all the fuss was about.

Confronted with two of the local boys fighting, she jeered: “Only black people carry on like that!

Fast forward years later to the parking lot of a movie theatre in Nassau where the police are breaking up a fight between two or more supposedly gay women. Many of the onlookers offer their own prejudiced verdict: “Well, you know, gay people like to fight. No one can fight like them sissies.”

Classical scapegoating.

One person authoritatively stated, with approving nods by others: “This homosexual stuff is from foreign.”
They were partially correct: Homosexuality did come from overseas -- when the first people arrived here centuries ago. Of course, if several Haitians were fighting in that same parking lot, you can guess what response would be offered.

Events usually pop up to expose the prejudice which breeds stereotyping and scapegoating. Much of the reaction to the pregnancy of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s daughter was comically hypocritical.

Various commentators insist that we should judge Bristol Palin’s pregnancy on an individual basis and as a private family matter. Yet other commentators have noted how the Palin tableau at the Republican Convention was spun into a Norman Rockwell moment.

Now, imagine if Senator Barack Obama and his wife had appeared at the Democratic Convention with five children, one of whom was unmarried, pregnant and accompanied by her black jock boyfriend.

Such an individual and private matter would have been exploded into yet another example of a liberal culture with irresponsible black people wreaking havoc on America. How could they parade such behaviour before the nation? Such a brazen display of immorality would obviously encourage more young girls to have babies. This may have even cost Mr. Obama the presidency.

The hypocrisy on this matter has already led some supposedly right-thinking people to spin: Since Mrs. Palin is running for vice president, the comparison with Mr. Obama’s family is off the mark. Is this really the best they can do?

Many of those who regularly and loudly denounce pre-marital sex and lambast the parents of pregnant teens, have spun their moral outrage into swooning praise for this “brave” young lady and her “courageous” family.
No mention of absent parents. No scolding regarding premarital sex. None of the finger-pointing language of mother and daughter having babies around the same time. You will recall that Governor Palin had a child just a few months ago.

The decision of the younger Palin to have the baby is applauded as a virtue. You don’t hear much talk about virtue when a young black American teen mother decides likewise. Teenage pregnancy is not simply a matter of black and white. It is considerably more complex and involves many factors.

Truth be told, we do not know the circumstances which led to Miss Palin’s pregnancy and we should not rush to judgement. She is a vulnerable teenager who made a mistake, not a poster-child for pro-life groups or Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, the US presidential election is also a pregnant topic at home.

With no sense of irony a local columnist recently lampooned a journalistic colleague for his “misogynous nature” and stereotypical views on Governor Palin, while falling into a similar trap by parroting the line about “the effete, elite, arugula-munching Barak Obama.”

Somehow eating your green vegetables makes you less than manly. Someone should have told Popeye. Moreover, macho Italian men in Italy, where arugula is a staple, had better quickly switch to pork rinds.
When many female leaders demonstrate resolve, many people label them with offensive terms. Thankfully, many others rightly see “true grit” and “gutsy” resolve. Curiously however, when a man shows resolve without chest thumping and testosterone overkill he is somehow labelled as effete.

The process for how stereotyping works was played out in another local column a few weeks ago. The process is quite simple: think in black and white and either-or categories and dismiss the nuances that are required for critical thinking.

So, after lauding Senator Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the columnist simplistically dismissed Barack Obama as an empty vessel. You expect this of partisans. But you expect more balanced commentators to have greater reach when crafting their conclusions.

Palin, Clinton and Obama are all people of merit who also have gaps in their resumes and policy prescriptions. The electoral process has exposed their weaknesses and tested their strengths. Yet even more curious was this columnist’s tenuous grasp of American and world politics and history:

“Electing a man of a different colour is just more of the same. Electing a president of a different gender is real change. Why? Because when it comes right down to it, if given a choice between a black man and a white woman, Americans would hands down elect the man, regardless of colour, because sexism is more insidious and pervasive than racism.”

If Barack Obama becomes President that would leave the US Senate with no blacks and 16 white women. If my math is correct and Sarah Palin becomes vice president the US would have eight female governors and one black governor.

Around the world women have usually attained their country’s higher political offices quicker than ethnic minorities. The U.S. is also typical of this pattern. Sexism may have played a role in Hillary Clinton’s coming in second in the Democrats’ nominating process.

But racism also threatened to relegate Mr. Obama to second place. Mr. Obama simply ran a better campaign and defeated the powerful Clinton machine. The so-called effete Mr. Obama fairly beat the gutsy and true grit Mrs. Clinton. Imagine if he were to defeat a navy fighter pilot and become America’s Top Gun.

Moreover, the ability of a woman to overcome a male candidate was suggested by a columnist who noted that Mrs. Palin has “with a few well placed barbs, managed to deflate the hot air balloon…of Barak Obama.” and that Mrs. Palin’s “rising star” has sent the Obama-Biden campaign into “a state of unadulterated panic.”

While I don’t agree with some of these characterizations of the campaign, it is obvious that Mrs. Palin has helped to improve Mr. McCain’s presidential prospects and lessened Mr. Obama’s. But according to prior logic this shouldn’t be the case in a country “that would hands down elect the man” over the woman.

Still, the commentator who believes that sexism is more insidious than racism has a point, because the word insidious is defined as using subtle, stealthy and often seemingly harmless means towards a dangerous end.
The racism which gave birth to black slavery was not insidious; it was blatant and diabolical. White women, indeed all women, have endured a legacy of misogyny, sexism and discrimination.

But white women were never transported en masse in the hulls of death vessels, auctioned in slave markets, lynched in public rituals, purposely infected in Tuskegee-like experiments, used as target practice, systematically torn from their families, subjected to Jim Crow, and thought to be less than human.

Early in American history black people were defined as half persons: it took two black people to make one white man -- or woman. With this history, the contention that sexism is “more pervasive than racism” is not a serious argument.

Indeed white (not black) women were often insidiously romanticized as the essence of purity and virtue, even while being subject to white male domination. But blacks were condemned in the most vicious and demeaning language.

Ask a black person labouring on a slave plantation in the 1800s whether they would have preferred that status or the status of the white daughter of the plantation owner or of any other white woman. And would any American white woman today, two centuries later, really prefer the status of a black man?

Fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till who was brutally killed for the way he reportedly spoke to a young white woman came to understand the viciousness of racism. Sexism in America was never as vicious and murderous.
No white girl would ever have had -- as in the Till case -- her eye gouged out, got shot in the head and thrown into the river with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around her neck with barbed wire for the way she talked to a young black man.

If it did happen, her murderers would not have been acquitted by a jury, even though her killers may have publicly bragged about their crime. What is insidious are the pervasive mindsets that lead to scapegoating those different from ourselves and any reading of history that too easily minimizes the vicious legacy of racism.

Comments

[Janet Holt-Johnstone]

1. Several hundred white women were transported in slave ships from Ireland by Oliver Cromwell to serve as "wives" for black slaves already working in the Parish of Portland, Jamaica.
2. White women in the thousands were burned or hanged (lynched)as witches in Europe in the middle ages, and in Salem, Mass., during that memorable period.
3. More than half of the 6,000,000 killed in the Nazi prison camps were white women and girls.
4. White women as well as black continue to be abused by spouses/partners today, and are the subject of rape in many third world and other societies.

[Bob Knaus]

Simon... I need to run outside and count the stars on the US flag. Are there 51 already? Has the Bahamas lived up to my prediction that they are more ready to join the Union than Puerto Rico?

If so... welcome! It's true you'll have to give up your UN seat, but think... your 2 US senators and a congressman will have far more clout on the world stage than your entire cabinet does now.

(If you, or anyone else, fails to see the humor in my modest proposal, by all means e-mail me at bobknaus@pellucid.org and I'll spell it out in plain English.)