Prologue (April 25, 2016): I just finished watching the HBO docudrama "Confirmation," that sheds light on one of 1990's political flashpoints--law professor Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment against her former boss Clarence Thomas, the then-Supreme Court nominee. After watching the feature, I felt like re-posting (with some edits) the reflection that I wrote for my 'Gender and Law' class in Spring 2015 at the Santa Clara University regarding male privilege in the media.
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Colleen McCullough was a beloved and wildly successful Australian novelist, who passed away on January 29, 2015. Her obituary in the prominent newspaper “The Australian” started like this: “Colleen McCullough, Australia’s bestselling author, was a charmer.” So far so good. However, the next sentence in the obituary was: “Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.”
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Colleen McCullough was a beloved and wildly successful Australian novelist, who passed away on January 29, 2015. Her obituary in the prominent newspaper “The Australian” started like this: “Colleen McCullough, Australia’s bestselling author, was a charmer.” So far so good. However, the next sentence in the obituary was: “Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.”
This sentence is wrong on so many levels, that I cannot even conceive where to begin. All I can say is that I found myself imagining with horror a future obituary of Stephen Hawking (sorry Dr. Hawking---I wish you a long life!) that may read like this: “Hawking was no Tom Cruise, and his looks certainly deteriorated over the years by the debilitating disease of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). He was, nevertheless, a man of intellect.”
I realize the fruitlessness of such a retaliatory gut reaction, and I would be remiss not to mention the huge public outcry against the Australian newspaper for publishing that churlish obituary of McCullough. But this incidence certainly made me think about how the media treats men and women differently. It is unlikely that Stephen Hawking would have a future obituary that will go into his looks. It may be more flattering or less flattering depending on who is writing, but the discussion would likely focus on his talent. Male privilege is a real thing in the media.
Professor Stephanie Wildman’s book "Privilege Revealed" has a chapter called “Privilege and the Media” that focuses on the media’s role in propagating gender stereotyping. The chapter uses the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas saga as a vehicle for discussion. I was in India in 1991, when Anita Hill became notorious for accusing then-Supreme-Court-nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment--a very powerful term for which we are grateful to celebrated feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon. Because of the American media’s one-sided depiction of the Hill-Thomas judicial hearing episode, back then I had no inkling that Hill was an accomplished legal scholar. I am not denying that her professional stature was somewhat justifiably overshadowed by the larger-than-life stature of Clarence Thomas. But the media could have done a much better job in establishing Hill’s credibility as the accuser and the testifying witness by focusing on her accomplished career.
We talk a lot on intersectionality of gender and race in the context of feminism. I feel like somewhere along the way the Hill-Thomas saga lost its rich intersectionality aspect. Initially the media decided to focus only on gender--as both the accused and the accuser were Black (hence no racial difference). But, eventually the initial focus on gender got distorted to such an extent that sexual harassment became a secondary issue, and media became obsessed only on racial issues, as Judge Thomas used his formidable oratory skills to describe his tribulations at the senate hearing as "high-tech lynching of uppity Blacks". A powerful male voice got the media's ultimate attention no matter what the real issue was.
May be one of the reasons the media oversimplifies the stories based on either gender or racial stereotyping, but not both, is because intersectionality is just too complex to communicate to the masses. Still, media cannot shy away from the inherent power that it holds to act as an agent of change. In the shooting death of an unarmed Black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson by a White policeman, both the killer policeman and the unarmed victim were male, but belonged to two different races. So the media's focus immediately, and may be justifiably in this case, became race. If the Ferguson incident was altered hypothetically into a situation where a female White policeperson fatally shot an unarmed Black man, then the issues of gender and race would have been intertwined, but I wonder if media would have picked up the gender aspect as much as the race aspect. In my view, if the angle of violence is relevant in the discussion of police shooting, then one cannot avoid addressing both gender and race. Is a female policeperson with a gun more likely to shoot an innocent Black man, because in the heat of the moment, her perception may have been muddled by thinking that the man may become violent towards her because of her gender? Catherine MacKinnon would probably agree that (according to her Dominance theory) the policewoman would have felt threatened when confronted by a man in an adversarial situation. I find myself feeling quite disturbed by the thought that the perception of threat, rather than real threat, may lead to unwarranted violence. And that perception of threat is rooted in both gender and racial identity.
May be one of the reasons the media oversimplifies the stories based on either gender or racial stereotyping, but not both, is because intersectionality is just too complex to communicate to the masses. Still, media cannot shy away from the inherent power that it holds to act as an agent of change. In the shooting death of an unarmed Black youth Michael Brown in Ferguson by a White policeman, both the killer policeman and the unarmed victim were male, but belonged to two different races. So the media's focus immediately, and may be justifiably in this case, became race. If the Ferguson incident was altered hypothetically into a situation where a female White policeperson fatally shot an unarmed Black man, then the issues of gender and race would have been intertwined, but I wonder if media would have picked up the gender aspect as much as the race aspect. In my view, if the angle of violence is relevant in the discussion of police shooting, then one cannot avoid addressing both gender and race. Is a female policeperson with a gun more likely to shoot an innocent Black man, because in the heat of the moment, her perception may have been muddled by thinking that the man may become violent towards her because of her gender? Catherine MacKinnon would probably agree that (according to her Dominance theory) the policewoman would have felt threatened when confronted by a man in an adversarial situation. I find myself feeling quite disturbed by the thought that the perception of threat, rather than real threat, may lead to unwarranted violence. And that perception of threat is rooted in both gender and racial identity.
Instead of propagating stereotypes--as the Colleen McCullough obituary did, media should do a better job at covering all aspects of a complex issue, especially when the public is receptive in the wake of a high-profile incident, be it a police shooting incident or a sexual harassment accusation.
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