Modern, systemic, "scientific" racism was invented about 400-600 years ago, woven upside down and in reverse to retroactively fit a society, tautologically, that birthed the need for it. And it proved so successful it was almost simultaneously exported to South Africa, to Australia, to western Africa, Indonesia, India... all the places on which the sun never set. It's pernicious and satanic, marked in its adherents by a panic, a perpetual crouch of defense, a lionization of dominance and an indifference to (and, as needed, delight in) spilled blood. To say it's enmeshed deeply into the American corpus is an act of thunderous understatement. It's one of the two helices that make up our national DNA.* It's not a feature of us, it is us. The racism is the whole point; it's the anima.
The thing about terror, however, is how present it is. The weight of it blots out, bends, obscures. It demands a reckoning, right here, right this very moment, as all effective means of social control do. It shoves out all room for reason or reasoning. It baits and looms, either provoking or simply conjuring the conditions it needs to extract the blood-price it needs to feed itself.
It crowds out everything else, an easy reality that a lot of people are saying some political figures of a certain stripe will sometimes pivot toward in order to bend a news cycle to their will, at the expense of literally anything else, even if that "anything else" can sometimes be inclusive of threats to literal global survival.
All of this is a way to lead up to saying: I'm not here to compare racism vs. misogyny, the thing I wanted to talk about today. When I say "modern racism is 400 years old," I don't want there to be any attempt at qualitative comparison when I say misogyny is less of a specifically American/colonial idea and more of a baked-in global human thing. There are degrees, certainly, and the odd, exotic exceptions exist almost specifically for us to gawp and wonder at, when a gawp and a wonder is all you can manage at a thing so antithetical to the fundamentals of basic human cultural thought. It is deeper than racism. If racism is our DNA, misogyny is water, the thing we crawled out of in the first place. It is both invisible and everywhere at once. We draw it in with every breath. Racism by its nature demands the more immediate response if only because the bodies assaulted are being assaulted in our streets, in front of cameras; it is an active hunt of human tracking human. Meanwhile, misogyny keeps doing its work, at the endemic, flatline, perpetually unchanging level, using its wider, less theatrical, white-noise way of achieving the exact same results of harm and control.
But there's no need for the two evils to compete! Sometimes you can get both! The devaluing of women of color of course is not a new phenomenon. The results of it are visible daily, whether you're a black woman at home minding your own business or a long-established professional musician whose name a bunch of white people trying to be performatively less openly racist covet (for branding purposes).
All you really have to do is look at the media coverage of the process of selecting a running mate for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. From the moment he announced he'd be choosing a woman of color as his running mate, the normal carousel of bandying names and trading in Vegas-style betting odds has churned and rotated, as it does every four years, but ah, the conclusion this time? None of these chicks are really that good, everybody.
I could break down the criticism of Kamala Harris and Val Demings and Susan Rice and Stacey Abrams and Karen Bass or Keisha Lance Bottoms, but look, the current actual vice president of the United States is openly racist and absolutely famously an unreconstructed misogynist of the first order. I recognize of course that he only seems to be a normally functioning human standing next to the pornographic flipbook cartoon of a president he toadies for, but objectively speaking, I don't think I can think of a better illustration of the gap of perceived cultural worth when a rigid, simpering, reactionary, sycophantic coward like Mike Pence gets to have a job that an empathetic, charismatic, intellectually curious, genuine public servant with a demonstrable record of actually having done something good for her fellow human beings like Stacey Abrams (to choose just one example) only gets the "privilege" of being considered for by the self-appointed gatekeepers of the American political press. The condescension is intolerable, but it's also a shudderingly accurate reflection of who we are, always-always-always for the worse.
Read this how you want, but: Mike Pence looks the part. That's it. We'll simply have to continue to struggle as long as that is true.
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*The other is obviously Amazon.com
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