Author: Elayne Riggs

As much as I’d like to use this column’s title to segue into a discussion about Beijing and Tibet and Stephen Spielberg and so forth, that’s not my chosen subject matter this time. Although I reserve the right to swipe my own header again once the XXIX Olympiad gets going. No, the title refers to the phenomenon of all kinds of different people believing, and loudly proclaiming, that systemic discrimination against the particular group with which they identify (and sometimes, if they’re "concern trolls," against a group of which they’re not a member but with which they’ve chosen to sympathize to the point of condescension) is "the last acceptable prejudice."

A few weeks ago, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote and presented his now-famous speech about dealing with questions of race as though citizens were, you know, adults. As hoped for, it started a lot of interesting discussions, as adults who’d been speaking about race and gender and privilege all along were once more thrust into the consciousness of others who hadn’t. One of the more interesting comments I read came from a Native American rights activist who was disappointed that the speech seemed to define the issue of race as, once again, mostly a black and white divide. While I believe Obama did include Asians and Latinos in his speech, I’m pretty sure Native Americans received no mention. However, I’m not prepared to ascribe this omission to deliberate exclusionism; any orator knows there’s a point where your rhetorical cadence gets bogged down by too many "and"s.

And yet, that commenter had a point. When we’re talking about rights and justice for everyone in this country, it’s not a good idea to leave out an entire series of cultures that flourished on this continent before Europeans came along, many of which have managed against all genocidal odds to continue to exist. Nor is it a good idea to belittle those same cultures in bad analogies. Even speeches about racial divides can’t "win" sometimes. It’s a tricky tightrope we all walk, ever since the days when "politically correct" was defined as "well-meaning (usually white) liberals who bend over backwards so much to include everyone that they wind up saying nothing at all." There were jokes about breaking down identity politics into such absurd subcategories one wound up worrying about catering to one-eyed left-handed lesbian Inuit vegans. At some point, most of these subcategories must be assumed to exist for purposes of receiving social justice, without needing to be the recipient of shout-outs at every single turn.

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Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, the first IWD where women in the United States were facing the very strong possibility that an Estrogen-American would become their next President — and the equally strong reality that lots of people (mostly men, but a surprising number of women as well) are committed to seeing that she never breaks that ultimate glass ceiling. Not because they (like me) don’t necessarily consider her the best person for the job; it’s not like the Presidency has been a meritocracy for a long time. But because many harbor a deep and irrational resentment of the very idea of a woman in power, particularly wielding the type of nigh-imperial power that the current administration and its cronies in the other two branches of government have ceded to the executive branch.

This resentment, nay, this seething hatred, has manifested itself in some scary ways that us second-wave feminists could have sworn went out with disco. One prominent pundit speculated that Senator Clinton was "pimping out" her daughter for working on her campaign, like pretty much every adult child of a candidate from Mary Cheney to the Romney boys has done. That same daughter was once the butt of a particularly nasty joke from the current Republican Presidential candidate, who made the sexist jape a two-fer by including a reference to the "manliness" of Janet Reno. These days it’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who receives remarks about how cadaverish she appears (funny, she looked fine to me when I saw her on The Daily Show last month).

Of course, the progressives who once espoused Stokeley Carmichael’s adage that "the only position for women in [the movement] is prone" aren’t immune from sexist remarks either. Folks who should know better choose to attack right-wing lunatics like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin not on their lunacy but on their looks. Even for some on "our side," biology would appear to be destiny.

And while a part of me seethes at all this with the same rage I felt in high school and college every time I heard "women can’t" do one thing or the other, with no further explanation needed but that we were women — I also confess that a part of me just doesn’t care any more. After fifty years of this stuff, I’m more than suffering from outrage burnout.

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