At a dinner party NewMexiKen attended Saturday evening there was a conversation about whether sexism or racism was the greatest obstacle to success. The women argued that women have faced more discrimination than minorities — and they gave some convincing personal examples. The men were, I think, less certain, but mainly argued that race was the greater hurdle.
I didn’t think to mention it at the dinner, but the first black woman in Congress, Shirley Chisholm, once said, “Of my two ‘handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”
Yet, writing for The New Yorker this week, Hendrik Hertzberg makes the opposite case:
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.
Hertzberg adds that there are 16 women senators and eight female governors, but only two black governors and one senator.
NewMexiKen fears that even today, racism and sexism are more closeted than gone. The veneer of open-mindedness, even of political correctness, is paper thin.
In such a world, who has the steepest climb?
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