When President Obama was elected last November I was literally moved to tears. Stirred by an emotional combination of relief and triumph, I felt a critical moment in history wash over me, invigorated by a sense of hope and possibility. For a time, I set aside my bitterness about the failure of the Hillary campaign to embrace change and celebrate progress in a country whose capacity for social and political revolution I had more or less given up on.
Throughout the 2008 primary season I was repeatedly disturbed by the gendered politics that were simultaneously blatant and invisible in the media, pop culture and social space. When Obama finally defeated Clinton, I was heartbroken- an opportunity for the lives of women everywhere to be changed permanently, had escaped us-chalk another one up for patriarchy.
Months later, I have more or less gotten on board the Obama bandwagon. He's an inspiring human, a remarkable orator and an ambitious politician. His life and leadership has changed our country for the better, already, and I can only imagine what his presidency will do to reshape the meaning of the African-American experience. I was reminded of just how powerful the popularity and prominence of President Obama is in shaping our collective consciousness when I came across this article in the New York Times today:
A major publication (arguably the nation's most successful and resilient newspaper in the current crisis of disappearing print media) critiquing the racial composition of mainstream television? That's not something you read everyday. And while I applaud the effort to deconstruct the narrow, biased imagery we've come to regard as normal in our culture, there is one, glaring problem: not a single word of it is about women. What about the disparities between the roles men and women both act out and represent on television? What about (almost) every network nightly newscast and every late night television show featuring a male host? Even the iconic Oprah Winfrey-a goddess of American television- occupies the late-afternoon advertising slot still dominated by tampons and facial creams. Sure, D.L. Hughley is losing his spot on CNN primetime, but could we even fathom a woman of color being offered a shot at one?
While I think it's important to assess the racial inequities of real life that are reflected in the imagery of our media, we can't discount the significance of how gender, class and sexuality intersect with race to produce our understanding of identity. The truth is, African-American males are overrepresented on television and in movies compared to their numbers in the population (while Asian and Latina women remain the least represented). And yes, there are problems of essentialism and internalized/institutional racism in almost all media characterizations of people on the margins (ethnic groups, alternative sexualities/genders, etc.). The point here is that I fear as the Obama presidency proceeds, we will hear more and more of the African-American male experience and less and less about the gender inequities that so fundamentally direct our everyday lives. As race (which it certainly needs to) comes more to the forefront of our cultural awareness, I fear that gender will slip to the background and we will continue to exist, dialogue, behave, as if men and women are the same: on television and elsewhere.
I'm still waiting for most of the population to admit to the deeply rooted, institutional sexism that helped President Obama win the democratic nomination in the first place; and I hope that as we examine racism as it still persists in this country, we won't ignore the fact that 44 President's later, we still can't elect a woman to office, put one on a late night talk show, or hear one moderate a political talk show (one her own) on CNN.
