Maybe it's easier for a woman to acknowledge this because subliminal prejudice hurts women too. Studies have shown, for example, that people are more likely to find an article convincing if it is signed by "Bob Someone" instead of, say, "Barbara Someone." It's just the brain's little habit of parceling reality into tidy equations, such as female=probable fluffhead. The truth is that each of us carries around an image of competence in our mind, and its face is neither female nor black. Hence our readiness to believe, whenever we hear of a white male losing out to a minority or a woman, that the white guy was actually more qualified. In Jesse Helms' winning 1990 campaign commercial, a white man crumples up a rejection letter, while the voice-over reminds him that he was "the best-qualified." But was he? Is he always? And why don't we ever hear a white guy worry out loud that his colleagues suspect he got the job-as white men have for centuries-in part because he's male and white?
It's a measure of the ambient racism that we find it so hard to believe that affirmative action may actually be doing something right: ensuring that the best guy gets the job, regardless of that guy's race or sex. Eventually, when the occupational hierarchy is so thoroughly integrated that it no longer makes sense for our subconscious minds to invest the notion of competence with a particular skin color or type of genitalia, affirmative action can indeed be cast aside like training wheels.
Meanwhile, aggrieved white men can console themselves with the gains their wives have made. Numerically speaking, white women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, and because white women tend to marry white men, it follows that white men are, numerically speaking, among the top beneficiaries too. On this planet, Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan may not have been able to figure that out yet, but most white guys, I like to think, are plenty smart enough.
Poster Comment:
The white nationalist nightmare is that most white people are Diversity nuts.