WASHINGTON – Think of it as a lesson learned the hard way.
While Joe Biden is taking a decision on his vice presidency, women’s groups are mobilizing to proactively combat the kind of “ism” that negatively affects women running for political office.
These groups take actions ranging from setting up news outlets informing that they ‘will have their backs’, to calling on rapid response teams with the task of tracking and calling out sexism and racism in real time. It is a coalition dedicated to rooting out a problem that has placed women in politics for a long time.
“We’ve all been to this movie before,” Tina Tchen, president and CEO of the law firm Times Up, told NBC News. Tchen says the conversations among women who were responsible with these groups were “built a few weeks”, bearing a desire to highlight the negative benefits before they begin. “We knew what was going to happen and then, look and see, it fell out for us.”
Several leaders involved in the attempt to refer to the current talks ran the Joe Listens Vice Presidential Choir to illustrate what they are trying to oppose, although they do not coordinate with the Biden campaign.
First Chamber Member Kamala Harris, D-Caliph., For example, was considered “too ambitious” by some anonymous Biden supporters. And one recent article compared the selection process to an episode of The Bachelor. These moments reinforce the need for education and to make people aware of sexism and racism – for a media that is still largely male-dominated and for voters.
Last week, senders from various women’s organizations – including Times Up, EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, Supermajority, NARAL and others – sent a letter to media outlets urging them to use this moment to create scholarships: “A female VP candidate , possibly a candidate for Black or Brown women, requires the same kind of internal consideration about systemic inequality as you underwent earlier this year “around the assassination of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed,” she wrote.
On MSNBC Sunday, former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett – one of the signatories to the letter – simply advised: ‘Deal with the substance. Do not talk about what she looks like. … Let’s stop describing ourselves with words you would not use to describe a man. ”
This does not mean that candidates should be immune to criticism.
‘We are not saying that every attack on a woman is sexist. We are not saying that any criticism of a woman is unfair, ”said Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at Emily’s List. ‘What we’re saying is that there are ways we women seem to look different, that they do not belong here, especially women of color, and that we want to call that out so that people are aware of it and they seek it and they accept it. it not as the facts. ”
The initial effort is usually one of awareness and a campaign carried out on social media platforms on cable television programs that play major roles in establishing the narratives of a presidential campaign.
Feminist group Ultraviolet published a style guide on how to “prevent unintentional sexist and racist bias or disinformation in interviews, writing about, or moderating content about women and people of color running for or holding political office” – from the photos which have been chosen to accompany articles to no code language without repeating it properly contextualized. Meanwhile, at Times Up, a newly announced team of five employees will keep a close eye on sexist and racist bias, with the goal of “shining a light on it before it takes hold.”
In addition, nearly 700 Black women have jointly signed an open letter explaining how some of those candidates for VP have been “not respected in the media in recent weeks.”
“While some of the compassionate attacks on Black women and our leadership qualities have been more suggestive than others,” the letter says, “make no mistake – we are qualified and ambitious without remorse.”
And while the effort comes amid a vice-presidential selection process, the groups have kept their eyes on the general election and President Donald Trump, who repeatedly spoke in sexist dogfights in 2016 about then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, calling her “the devil” when she said she lacks the “power and condition to be president.”
“If past prologue is,” said Alexis McGill Johnson of Planned Parenthood, “once the candidate is named, [we know] the types of attacks that will be unleashed. And so it happens. ”
