Parlor bigots

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press quotes Bob Sommerby:

Neither professor could imagine a world in which decent people, acting in good faith, made a judgment which differed from theirs.... they’re parlor bigots—people who assail the motives of anyone who disagrees with their views.

Down further in his post, Chet says:

What this means, unfortunately, is that the concept of fairness, and therefore the presumption of good faith disagreement, is in the United States a gendered and racialized concept. Women and non-white people just do not get the presumption of good faith applied to them when they seek or exert power. They are always thought to be cheating, and always thought to be illegitimate. This is especially true when someone is applying for the top job in the country: the more that is at stake, the harder it is to break the grip of entrenched cultural presumptions.

There's one other important point, though, which is that as far as the major media are concerned, the concepts of fairness and good faith are limited in another way: they are not only gendered and racialized concepts, but also partisan concepts. Anyone who has been paying attention to American presidential campaigns for the past two decades can't have failed to notice this: Democratic candidates are always attacked in the general election as phonies, liars, and cheats who act in bad faith, while Republicans are nearly always depicted as authentic, honest, regular guys who act in good faith (even their howling errors and distortions are often forgiven as good faith mistakes). No matter what the facts are, and no matter how many falsehoods have to be fabricated to make this narrative work, it's the one that gets told every time. Put these three things together, and you've got a shockingly narrow conclusion: the white male Republican is always portrayed, by definition, as the only good-faith candidate. Everyone else is portrayed as illegitimate.

It is true that we have been promising a place at the table and never getting around to finding a chair for anybody but the white Republicans males. But we have just been through the worst president and the worst administration in US history. This might be the thing that breaks all prejudices and throws down all hurdles and finally lets blacks and women, Democrats and liberals into the Oval Office.

And lets them finally be heard.