Category: Exclusive 
2009-02-20
The intrigue is that a very unusual personality has become the United States leader. But it could have been even more unusual. It could have been a she-leader. The outcome of the Presidential race depended on a complicated interaction of various social stereotypes that exist in American society and among them obviously came up gender and race ones.
“Has there ever been a girl?”
Though there had never been any real female presidential candidates American sociologists started studying Americans’ consideration on the issue as far back as the thirties of the last century. Even then almost one third of respondents were positive about the idea and just after the WWII their number doubled. But most sceptical were the political elite (quite understandable: no one is eager to share the power!). In 1959 in a then very popular magazine “This Week” there was a significant article by James Fairly, a Democrat veteran. It had a distinctive headline: “Why we will never have a female President”. Having started with praising women as of having better endurance and tolerance of pain than men, being as smart as men etc. he ended up with three most popular gender stereotypes. First, women are unable to get a proper background for such a complicated and serious position; secondly, they are too emotional and subjective in their decisions; and finally, a female superior would never be respected by her male inferiors. The article was immediately commented on by Morin Neuberger, a spouse of a senator and Farley’s Democrat party-mate. Her “letter of protest” is registered in the Congress archives. A good example of how public opinion fails to keep pace with changes in real life was Morin Neuberger’s election as a senator two years later. After another three years she was among first presidential candidates from the Democratic Party. When Farley was trying to “substantiate” inability of a woman to be the President, 60% of Americans didn’t agree with him. It’s noteworthy that men and elderly people showed more tolerance to the idea of a female President than women and young people. But since 1960-1970 it’s women and young people who have become most enthusiastic about having a women as the President. By the eighties of the last century 80% of Americans were positive about the idea, by the nineties their number increased up to 90%, and it keeps on growing, while the number of opponents is decreasing.
But if we take a closer look into the public consciousness we will see that there are some stable stereotypes that make women stand little chance of being elected for high-rank political positions.
That can explain a sudden drop (to 65%) of number of positive respondents after 9/11. It became clear that when the electorate is anxious about terrorism and war it prefers to have the President with stereotypically masculine characteristics (such as self-confidence, determination and aggressiveness). At the same time the electorate stops admiring features like sympathy, sensitivity, and ability to compromise, i.e. the characteristics that stereotypically belong to females. Interestingly enough, the more aggressive a person is the more he or she is inclined to having a male president. Thus the majority of those who support the war in Iraq prefer to have a male president, while the majority of those who are against it are a female president’s supporters.
The efficient American pop-culture has already seen to how a sooner or later would-be female President will be addressed: Madam President. That’s how they called Jenna Davis, an actress who was starring in a popular TV soap opera “Supreme Commander-in-Chief”, which brought her two top TV prizes – “Emmy” and “The Golden Globe”). A new version of Barbie, “Barbie-the-President”, is already available in three modifications: white blond, Latinos and Afro-American. And specifying a potentially winning style of a high-rank female one of the journalists has introduced a term “mammismo” as an antonym to the aggressive and masculine term “machismo”.
Racial stereotypes and “a wrong black”
Stereotypical image of Afro-Americans still existing in today’s USA represents them as uneducated people, prone to criminality and poor due to their lack of motivation if not laziness. The truth is that indeed the average welfare and educational level among black Americans is lower than the one among white ones (especially of those who come from Asia), and the blacks’ average criminality level is a bit higher. The paradox is that there are much more perpetrators among white Americans than among black ones, just because Americans with European background prevail in their number. Nevertheless members of a well-being “white” community would not be pleased to see a Black stranger in their neighborhood rather than avoid a white one.
On the other side a cliquish antagonism is not always manifested in a negative way. Usually it’s ambivalent and divides those who are generally disliked into “good” and “bad” ones. For example a desperate anti-Semite might have a close Jewish friend. In other words stereotypical images of “a bad Black” (“a bad Jewish”, “a bitch” etc.) come hand in hand with also stereotypical images of “a good Black” (“a good Jewish”, “a genuine woman” etc.). That’s why for many voters Barak Obama is a personification of “a good Black”.
Indeed he is highly educated (he graduated from the two best Universities of USA – Columbian and Harvard), has made a brilliant career - from a lawyer and a teacher to a Senator (the only Afro-American Senator of his time and one of the five ones in the history of the Senate). His speech is perfect and without any specific “Black” accent. Even his skin color is not so black. It should be mentioned that this is also important. Experiments with pictures of one and the same face showed that the darker the skin of “a Negroid pheno-type” the worse the image he has among people of different pheno-types.
The fact that he is a son of a white American mother and Kenyan father is also very important. It made him say: “In no other country of the world my life could have turned out the way it did”. If he had been born in a family whose slave ancestors had been brought to America by force he wouldn’t have said so without any irony or distress. Unlike other previous Afro-American Presidential candidates (Al Sharpon in 2004 and Jessie Jackson in 1980-th both were known as radical politicians and “leaders of Black America”) Barak Obama has successfully positioned himself as the President of all Americans, no matter Blacks or Whites. Besides, he is young, good-looking and sexy, which is also rather important (they say that it was John Kennedy’s attractive appearance and sex-appeal that played a great role in his election as the President).
Recent positive changes in the USA social climate are also favorable for Obama. We are talking about social security reforms which resulted in quantitative reduction of single welfare-provided Afro-American mothers and consequent quantitative reduction of white Americans who believe that too many Afro-Americans live on the State expense and worry that the Black President would “take money from Whites and give it to Blacks”. Criminality problem stereotypically associated with Afro-Americans has also become a less vital issue than it used to be. In other words lately race contradictions inside American society have decreased, but instead religious ones have intensified, which by the way is good for Obama and bad for Clinton. The thing is that a lot of conservative white Americans believe that “Black liberals” whose community life is traditionally concentrated around the Church are “not so very liberal” in comparison with white liberals who are stereotypically reputed to be “godless”.
Moreover, lots of Afro-Americans made their choice in favor of the white Clintons who have always been carefully cultivating that part of the electorate. Here it would be apt to recall an old joke of Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, who called Bill Clinton “the first Afro-American President”, because he was born in a South State, in a poor and incomplete workers family, he plays sax and likes junk-food.
As we can see it wouldn’t be right to think that all Afro-Americans would vote for the Afro-American President and all white Americans – for a female President. It should be noticed that 52% of Americans are women, which is 54% of all registered voters, and usually 55-56% of them actually go to a ballot-box. And both male and female Afro-Americans are also rather influential and usually solid voters. As regards a social stratum of “white males”, here much depends on where a resultant vector embracing various social stereotypes is directed.
What are stereotypes and why are they pernicious?
Social psychology describes a stereotype as a component of so called cliquish antagonism – a situation when representatives of a certain social stratum (e.g. white men) dislike representatives of another social stratum (e.g. women or the colored). Stereotypes reflect a cognitive component of cliquish antagonism. In other words they reflect typical idea of a person about typical features of a representative of another social stratum (e.g. “a typical woman” or “typical Jewish”). Their synonym is “prejudices”, i.e. something we believe in without having carefully thought it over basing on our own experience. Stereotypes are not easily overcome, because they are both steady and attractive by nature. They save our time and mental efforts, because as Pushkin rightly said “people are lazy and incurious”…
At the same time stereotypes are often rational to a certain extent, otherwise they wouldn’t have formed the way they did. But if we take a closer look we will see that that rationalism is false because it has resulted from certain social circumstances and people’s inherent distrustfulness and suspiciousness towards anything unusual and strange. The main problem about stereotypes is that they prevent us from treating other people in a right way, the way they deserve. Without even knowing a person who belongs to a stratum different from yours you already label him in a negative way and ignore his or her individual qualities. In other words, stereotypes make us subjective. Without any ground we like “our own people” and dislike strangers. Another bad side of stereotypes is that they make us underestimate individual differences within one group or stratum and overestimate differences among people belonging to different groups or strata.
But the most destructive effect of stereotypes is so called “realized prophecy”. Very few people can withstand it. Interestingly enough, though this phenomenon is rather common there is no generally accepted term for it. So let’s bring some rather typical examples. Ex.1. Since her young age a girl’s parent, teachers etc. have assured her that she would never be able to properly use any technical appliance. So when she eventually encounters a problem with using an appliance, she doesn’t even try to solve the problem by herself and learn how to use it because she “knows” that she is altogether unable to do that. So she asks a boy to help her out. Ex. 2. An elderly person “knows” that his memory “must” get poor with age. So when he first realizes that he has forgotten something (which is absolutely normal for people of any age) he says: “Oh, here we go! I have sclerosis”. He becomes absent-minded, because he gets depressed. In both examples the main destructive effect is caused by lack of self-confidence. People refuse to overcome their failures, because they are sure they are weak by nature.
Nobody could believe it, but it came true.
Ladies next?
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