Kamala Harris was running a different race “The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination.” The words of author and activist Soraya Chemaly have never felt more apt. My latest column for The Media Leader UK lifts the lid on this bruising election cycle which has placed into sharp focus the myth of meritocracy for women in leadership. Instead, we see the sharp edges of impossible double standards and the sharp words of other women who continue to pay forward a toxic cycle of institutional racism and misogyny. We all have an individual responsibility to level this toxic playing field. The US election must be an inflection point for a media industry that has created a narrative of leadership in which women simply cannot win. As the brilliant Lianre Robinson incoming CEO at The Marketing Academy Foundation and campaigning committee chair at Wacl, said the election is a wake-up call. She explained: “We urgently need to acknowledge and change our perception of what leaders should look like and how we expect them to talk, and that’s something we can only do from the inside out, starting with the organisations we work with. As we’ve seen here, the failure to do so can put women’s health, independence and career progression at risk for years to come.” The inequity at the heart of the most polarising election cycle in living memory is a bitter pill to swallow. But to collectively put our heads in the sand is unforgivable. We will never do better if we fail to acknowledge that black women are held to impossible standards. Women are exhausted. Yet they never give up. Every day, they set a new standard, defying the weight of suffocating expectations to show us what leadership should look like. These women give us hope. As Harris said in her concession: “Now is not the time to throw up our hands. This is the time to roll up our sleeves.” We can’t simply keep telling women to run their own race if that race has no finish line. Link to full column in comments.
I once tried to make it as an online poker player and got pretty good, but not good enough to make enough money to quit my job. The reason? The RAKE. The rake is the money that a casino takes every time you win a hand. The rake in online poker is generally so high that you have to not just be 'good' to make a decent profit, you have to be EXCEPTIONAL. With the exception of not talking nearly enough about climate change, as an armchair viewer it seemed like Harris ran a good campaign. But your piece rightly points out that she couldn't beat the rake. She had to be EXCEPTIONAL. There is no rake for people like Trump. The casino (whether it's the Supreme Court who says he can commit crimes as president), the print and broadcast media (who either sanewash or distort reality to hide his clear mental illness), and the billionaire class (who in the US are allowed to unaccountably throw money at political candidates). And then there's the Electoral College, which denied Americans the chance to have its first woman president in 2016 — a relic of America's slave-owning political class that gives outsized voting power to Republican states. Thanks for writing this for us Nicola Kemp.
I think indeed I know that there will be many women who'll think most of what you have written here is a load of steaming tripe. But your heart is in the right place I suppose.
Bravo as ever Nicky. It's the internalised sexism / misogyny that makes me weep. And knowing that we ALL have it, maybe be to different degrees yes, but we all remain shaped by the experience of growing up in a society that is still undeniably and fundamentally patriarchal. We all need to be more Iceland (country, not supermarket, obvs 😁)
En-pointe as ever. Just the summary we needed.
Mary Ann Sieghart fyi - hope you're keeping well. Warmly E
Editorial Director at Creativebrief
3dLink to the full column: https://uk.themedialeader.com/kamala-harris-was-running-a-different-race/