U.S. women are losing the battle against sexism

Politico.com this week ran a story with an intriguing headline: In politics, does race trump gender?

The story continued as follows: "How come Roland Burris has had such an easy time getting to the U.S. Senate while Caroline Kennedy has had such a hard time? Could it be that the race card trumps the gender card in U.S. politics? ... Once supporters of Roland Burris made his appointment to the Senate all about race, the deal was done, though it took a few days for Senate leaders to wake up to the fact. At a news conference in Chicago, Rep. Bobby Rush, who represents a district on the South Side of Chicago, said that the mere criticizing of Burris was akin to lynching."

One could go on forever parsing out differences, and they are many, between Burris and Kennedy. First and foremost, she had the class not to play the gender card and Burris lacked the class to stay away from playing the race card. Second, Burris is replacing Barack Obama, the only African-American in the U.S. Senate. There are 17 female members of that exclusive club.

But in answer to the original question: whether being a member of a minority race is a bigger boost in politics than being female, the answer is an undeniable yes. Are Americans more racist or sexist when it comes to politics? If nothing else, the November election showed us with laserlike precision that sexism is still alive and well in politics, in business and in society at large while racism is, we all hope, breathing its last.

Hillary Clinton ran a flawed campaign and launched her campaign as a flawed candidate (with very high negative ratings from voters). That said, however, the sexist derisions and insults hurled at her during her run (being called a she-goat, her laugh being called a cackle, etc.) if translated into racial slurs and used instead against Barack Obama would never have been tolerated. Yet, to this day, no one has been forced to apologize to Clinton for all the gender-based abuse she had to endure.

Right wing radio mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh made derogatory comments about Clinton, posing the question whether the nation wanted to watch her age in the White House (as if he could walk down a runway in Milan). I wrote last year that the debate on whether American society is more racist than sexist began more than a century ago, when freed slave, abolitionist, editor, orator and women's suffragist Frederick Douglass and women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to oratorical blows over it. Although both freedom fighters worked to advance the rights of women and freed slaves, Stanton was outraged that black men were able to vote after the Civil War (even though, for most blacks, the right was fleeting) and women were not.