The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

The Pain Game

If the first half of last week was Gender Week in the mainstream media, and the past few days were the Days of Race. Today’s theme is fast shaping up to be Gender Vs. Race, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Having gone one round on Hillary’s soft side and the next on the racist attacks her surrogates have unloosed on Obama, now it’s apparently time to debate once again who has it worse.

Not only does this Olympics of Pain play to the worst stereotypes about what’s wrong with liberals; it also forces us into pointless linguistic bickering about which words are code words for other offensive words and why. Politics as freshman year English lit class, circa 1987. Now there’s a smart way to pick your candidates!

The irony is that in 10 days, we’ve collapsed from a semisubstantive debate on the candidates’ merits to an inchoate debate about identity politics; a debate full of the cheap stereotypes and deliberate misunderstandings you often see when minorities and women square off on a reality show. Unless we can figure out a way to put all this who-suffered-hardest stuff back in the box, this presidential campaign will make history not for race and gender barriers broken, but for the race and gender clichés we relied on to hold us back.