OK so I have to get something off my chest but before we begin let’s set some ground rules:
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This is not a third-party advocacy diary, even if I am a staunch Democrat who feels all parties should have equal ballot access. This site has rules about third-party advocacy. I’m certainly not going to dishonor them---nor would I vote third-party in the first place. For one thing, they’re never an option at the levels of government I find important (which is local) and I often wonder why that is.
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This is not a political-correctness diary and frankly, I find that people who go on about how un “PC” they are basically are bigoted in some way or another. Doesn’t matter if they ID as on the left or the right either.
Ok, that out of the way, now I can speak.
So I’ve been reading and reading. We’ve read a lot about Dr. Jill Stein’s positions on things, with debunkings and de-debunkings being hurled left and right. Quite a bit. She is getting a fairly intense public grilling that seems outsized given that the Greens have little or no presence anywhere at the local and state level in the US, let alone the Federal level.
It reminds me of the grilling Mrs. Clinton’s received for the last two-and-a-half decades, and the grilling women who are rising get in all fields, all sectors. Academia. Corporate life. Non-profits. Military. Government. Media. On the left. On the right. Grilling men do not get. It’s sexist.
I said so here on twitter. (Embeds aren’t working for some reason!)
Gary Johnson, for example, holds quite a few nutty positions—yet I’ve not seen in-depth thinkpieces on them at Slate, Salon, Vox, the Washington Post, and here at Daily Kos, and on and on and on. Why? Of course, I could always write them, and perhaps I will. But I was exasperated when I read yet another piece on Stein’s alleged anti-vax position in a diary here recently and commented as much. Johnson’s position on vaccines is just as dangerous. And Trump---well he actually believes vaccines cause autism when we know that they don’t---that too is dangerous.
When one is a member of a disadvantaged group, one is expected to be better than the rest—and this isn’t fair. It leads to all kinds of internalized self-prejudices that are tough to shake and rise above. For example, I used to carry far more books than I needed in my backpack as a kid so I wouldn’t be seen by white people as a “thug” and I’ve talked about my bougie “Talented Tenth” family in the past. We’re finally growing out of it—now that it’s pretty obvious it doesn’t matter. Cops will still shoot us (meanwhile they gave Dylan Roof a fucking burger), employers still won’t hire us even if we have “non-ethnic” names (which in my family, we don’t), taxis will still pass us by even if we’re well dressed, white women will still clutch their purses closer to them when we get on the elevator even though we’ve worked in the same office building for over a decade, we’ll get asked for ID at the Capitol even if we’re elected to office and we’ll still get reported by our neighbors on that Nextdoor site as suspicious even if we’ve lived in the neighborhood for years.
Look at what women do to avoid harassment—and it still doesn’t work. Or the things they’re told to avoid getting assaulted---they don’t work either. It bothers me that we haven’t heard a peep out of Ivanka in the latest Trump BS about sexual harassment—but in her book she wrote she dressed conservatively to avoid it. I wonder if it was successful (probably not.)
And then there’s the diaries critiquing hair, clothing, things you never see done for men. An assertive woman is called all sorts of names. An assertive man is praised. And on and on. It’s sexist.
A lot of our personal prejudices are subconscious—we don’t even consciously realize that we’re doing them. So, I’m not going to launch a crusade against those who feel the need to pile on to everything Dr. Stein says. But I am going to ask that before you fire up your outrage-o-matic to screed about her ideas about Wi-Fi, vaccination, and most other things, think about why you’re perhaps going to do it, and moderate accordingly.
Thank you for listening.