Joe Biden’s Choice for Vice President Will Face Baseless Smears
After weeks of uninformed and sometimes malicious media speculation, the saga of “Who’s Running With Joe?” will be resolved this week.
Frankly, I don’t care if he picks a grilled cheese sandwich as a running mate. I’d be happier if he picked a woman of color, and thrilled if Sen Warren was named, but being named for number two on the ticket isn’t going to change my need to succeed in ridding our nation of the Orange Cancer in the White House.
One thing we know for sure is that Biden’s choice will unleash a wave of misogyny and (likely racism) coming from people who in normal times would be dubbed too stupid to get airtime.
Luray, Virginia’s soon-to-be-retired Mayor Barry Presgraves has gotten out in front of this hate front with a (now deleted) Facebook post saying Joe Biden “just announced Aunt Jemima” as his running mate in his bid for the White House.
From the New York Post:
“I had no idea people would react the way they did,” he said. “If I had a chance to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it. You can apologize all you want, but no one will believe it.”
Presgraves said he took down the post within 30 minutes and insisted he had no negative “intent behind it.”
“I don’t even depict that as racist,” he continued. “I ate Aunt Jemima all my life.”
Fox News’ Sean Hannity won’t make a similar declaration, he’ll just say that “some people are saying” it.
In an open letter published Wednesday, more than 100 Black women leaders and activists decried comments made of Black women being considered to be Joe Biden's running mate as racist and sexist.
From USA Today:
"Regardless of your political affiliation, whether it's the media, members of the vice-presidential vetting committee, a former Governor, a top political donor, or a small town mayor: We are not your Aunt Jemimas," the letter said. "The use of the racist myth of a happy, Black servant portrayed as a happy domestic worker loyal to her White employer is not lost on us.
"While some of the relentless attacks on Black women and our leadership abilities have been more suggestive than others, make no mistake--we are qualified and ambitious without remorse," the letter continued…
..."We are servant leaders -- motivated by a desire to uplift and advance our communities and nation," the letter said. "And we will not tolerate racist or sexist tropes consistently utilized in an effort to undermine our power.
"No matter who you are supporting for Vice President, you should be equally outraged by the blatant disrespect of Black women."
How do we know this ugliness is coming? Because we’ve already seen a preview, embedded in social coverage of women running in the presidential primary.
From the Washington Post:
Lucina Di Meco, who studies gender and leadership issues at the Wilson Center, employed data analytics from the nonpartisan firm Marvelous AI to track how the half-dozen Democratic contenders at the front of the presidential pack were treated on Twitter at the outset of their campaigns.
She found that the three leading women — Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) — faced more attacks than their male competitors from right-wing and fake-news sites between December 2018 and April 2019.
“In addition, the social media narratives about female candidates are more negative and mostly concerned their character, as opposed to their policies,” Di Meco noted. Her report, “#ShePersisted: Women, Politics and Power in the New Media World,” was released in November.
Twitter chatter about Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., focused on their electability; meanwhile, Harris was portrayed as inauthentic, Warren was accused of lying about her ethnic heritage, and online conversation about Klobuchar kept coming back to reports that she had been mean to staffers.
We also know the sexist/racist tropes are coming because that’s what Dear Leader believes in. Now we just have to not let them be amplified.
According to the Washington Post, the Biden campaign, bolstered by some of the country’s leading women’s groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, Emily’s List, She the People and UltraViolet are prepared to mount an all-hands-on-deck push back against the expected onslaught.
But Trump and his followers have been fierce in their past attacks against women, particularly women of color.
He derided his former senior White House aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, who had been his highest-ranking Black staffer, as “that dog.” He told a group of four minority congresswomen that they should “go back” to the countries they came from, even though only one of the four is foreign born. He has insulted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) as “low-IQ.” And he jabbed at the mother in a Gold Star family, suggesting that Ghazala Khan wasn’t allowed to speak at the 2016 Democratic Convention.
The various potential running mates have also had their own experiences with Trump. He has long derided Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas,” a slur that refers to her claims that she had Native American ancestors. Trump went after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who also is among those Biden is considering, referring to her as “the woman in Michigan” before mocking her intelligence — a red flag to women’s groups — and tweeting her name as “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer.”
A letter, signed by NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue, EMILY’s List’s Stephanie Shriock, Time’s Up’s Tina Tchen, Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson, former Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and many others, is urging major media leaders to treat the Biden campaign’s vice-presidential choice with the “same” care that was shown during the recent Black Lives Matter protests.
“A woman VP candidate, and possibly a Black or Brown woman candidate, requires the same kind of internal consideration about systemic inequality as you undertook earlier this year,” they stated, addressing high-ranking personnel at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, and other outlets. “Anything less than full engagement in this thoughtful oversight would be a huge step backwards for the progress you have pledged to make to expand diversity of thought and opportunity in your newsrooms and in your coverage,” continued the letter. “Women have been subject to stereotypes and tropes about qualifications, leadership, looks, relationships, and experience. Those stereotypes are often amplified and weaponized for Black and Brown women. Attempts at legitimate investigations of a candidate have repeatedly turned into misguided stories that perpetuate impressions of women as inadequate leaders, and Black and Brown women as worse.”
The group listed examples of past coverage failures of women in politics, including reporting on their personal and professional relationships with a different tone than when covering male politicians, framing a woman’s election chances by questioning her “likeability,” and covering a woman’s “looks, weight, tone of voice, attractiveness, and hair.” The letter concluded by insisting that avoiding such sexist or unfair coverage will be an imperative part of the media’s “job to, not just pay attention to these stereotypes, but to actively work to be anti-racist and anti-sexist in your coverage (i.e.: equal) as this political season progresses and this Presidential ticket is introduced.”
https://twitter.com/mayaharris_/status/1291893117550026754?s=20
Speaking of evil spin doctors, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who loathed Hillary Clinton so much in 2016 that she completely erased the election from her memory, published a column (since corrected) saying it has been 36 years since a man and woman had been on the Democratic ticket together.
Here’s Clinton’s response:
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1292110214028767233?s=20
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