Of Demographic Strait Jackets, Prejudices, and Sloppy Thinking

Ann Althouse wonders how many Americans have cro-magnon sexist attitudes like those that Russian pol Vladimir Zhirinovsky expressed toward US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Zhirinovsky repudiated Rice, not on substance, but on the basis of her being "a single woman who has no children."

My feeling is that many Americans, men and women, in their sexist hearts, have the same feelings about Rice. But unlike Zhirinovsky, they thankfully don't have access to mass media.

But one must wonder what proportion of our feelings toward people in public life is substantive and how much of it is visceral or prejudiced?

How many qualified people are denied our votes or our support because we don't deem them attractive enough, or because they're female, or whatever?

And how often do we, like Zhirinovsky, pounce on irrelevant personal attributes in order to repudiate another person's point of view?

And how often, for that matter, do we jump on somebody's bandwagon just because we like the way the look or talk?

None of this is to said either in support of or opposition to Rice as Secretary of State or unlikely presidential candidate. My general impression of her, based first of all, on seeing her interviewed as a foreign policy thinker years before she came to work for George W. Bush, is that she's a bright person. But I do think that there's a lot of sloppy and prejudicial thinking behind our attitudes toward people in the public eye.

I suppose that if I did an honest self-appraisal, my finger might as likely point to myself as to others for thinking that's shallow, prejudiced, or illogical. I can unceremoniously stash people in my own categories of choice and am apt to keep them there until the Second Coming. I'm not proud of that. But it's the truth.

But people do break free of stereotypical thinking or their own visceral and demographic strait-jackets. My brother-in-law, a late-40-something, divorced father, who works in sales and does house restoration on the side, sports a "Condi for President" bumper sticker on his truck. His mother, my mother-in-law, in her late-70s, is horrified at the very sight of the sticker, not because she has something against women in high office, like many women her age that I know. It's just that she's an ardent LibDem. We have interesting conversations sometimes.