How Perceptions of Race and Sex Impact the 2016 Presidential Election | William Jelani Cobb

One of the things that tends to characterize the way Americans think about progress is that we think of it as a kind of straight line, you know. We have like the X-axis and the Y-axis and the kind of line going diagonally upward, and that is American progress. As time goes here we get better. And that’s actually a false narrative. That’s not an accurate way of looking at the way the country has progressed.

In this country, progress has more often looked like kind of like an EKG, where we have these moments, and then we have these valleys, and then we have these moments. And that may slope upward over time, but it certainly has the kind of peak and valley effect to it. And with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, we’ve actually seen almost kind of overlapping things where we’re seeing peaks and valleys simultaneously.

So it represents a form of progress that an American woman could be nominated for the presidency of a major political party, and it is not coincidental that that nomination coincides with the most egregiously breathtakingly vulgar expressions of sexism and misogyny that we’ve seen in American politics. We quite simply don’t have a frame of reference for this, but both of those things happen at the same time.

Now, because I’m an optimist, I tend to believe that the graph that measures kind of upward trajectory will supersede the one that – the peaks will eventually outweigh the valleys. But I don’t think that we should ever be nonchalant or kind of look at history as a series of inevitable victories for the righteous, certainly not American history. When we look at any of these movements that have better life in this country, they have the potential to fail at any moment.

And the ones that succeeded, that we think of as succeeding, did so precisely because of ones that preceded it that actually did not achieve those objectives. And so if we’re talking about civil rights in the 1960s, well we’d have to say that the kind of first thrust of that was in the nineteenth century after the end of slavery and the kind of dawning of segregation and those sorts of practices. So it’s possible for movements that are morally right to actually not achieve their goals.

And in that regard, Hillary Clinton’s nomination represents a particular kind of progress around gender and sex and inclusion in this country. And it also highlights the intransigent and entrenched means by which people want to retain the status quo. It’s embarrassing to see that men are still more likely to vote for the Republican nominee, whose name I think has been said enough. I try not to say it.

But I think we’re talking about a kind of entrenched reflex about patriarchy, a very masculinist idea that people have been waiting, I think feeling like they had to suppress, and now they get to express it. I was talking to a cab driver a couple of weeks ago who was an immigrant, and he said that he just doesn’t understand how the country could think that a woman is up to the task of being the president despite the fact that there are these dozens of countries that you can point to where women have had presidencies and the countries still exist. They didn’t kind of collapse and go out of existence.

And so these dynamics I think are very real and in a way that we had not anticipated, in a way that I don’t think we even thought was possible. The current presidential cycle has brought those to the surface. And I don’t think that it’s also – I don’t think this ends. Should Hillary Clinton be elected, these dynamics will be present and they may be more vitriolic, and they may feel more entitled and more victimized.

And I think that has something to do with the way in which we’ve taught men to understand themselves in this society. And I also think in some ways, if you can kind of take the silver lining approach to this, in some ways it’s better that you have this wound being lanced right now so all of it has come up. The disbelief around issues of sexual assault has now become part of the presidential election. It’s not simply a questi...