I wasn’t always like this. Growing up, I firmly believed in the equality of the races and the sexes, but now I’ve made a conscious decision to favor women and people of color in the voting booth.
Not blindly of course. I’m a very progressive Democrat, at least that’s what my voting history will tell you, having cast my first presidential ballot for George McGovern, and I’ve only gotten more and more inclined in that direction over the decades since. This is my thirteenth Presidential election, possibly my last for a variety of reasons, and I hope it’s cast for the first winning woman of color POTUS, not only because I think both groups have been ridiculously and harmfully underrepresented, but because I think both groups generally make better candidates.
Why better candidates? Because it’s harder to pin smears on them. A white man running on a Democratic ticket can expect to find his name tied to some sex scandal or some racial slander, and to have to spend considerable time and effort debunking the accusation whether it has a tiny bit of validity or not. Most men, in my experience, have some incident buried in their pasts that can be blown up into some sort of accusation—an angry ex-girlfriend, or a black or brown co-worker who didn’t get along with you—and there will always be some voters who attach more credibility to these things than the facts warrant. (And of course, sometimes these accusations are demonstrably true, which only makes denying them harder.) Not that women or people of color are immune to such smears—look at Kamala being accused of promiscuity and of discriminating against black men in her D.A. days. But I think white men simply have a harder time denying racist and sexist smears, mainly because they’ve stuck to so many white men over the years.
Naturally, I’m not going to be gamed into supporting a Mark Robinson or a Sarah Palin just because of their race or sex. MAGA’s latest trick is to put forth a regressive and offensive woman or person of color to protect themselves against being accused of racist and sexist policies, especially when that’s exactly what they (and their clueless, hapless, often brainless candidates) support. I’m going to be selective in choosing my P.O.C. and female candidates to support, but all else equal, I intend to support them vigorously.