With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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I really disagree with this but I don't have a way of proving or disproving it. I hate the claim and I think a large part of the reason is how impossible it is to prove. Maybe polling could work? I can say confidently (as a person who has voted for two different black men and at least one female) it played no role in my decision.
There is no way of proving or disproving it, since the claim is based around the SocJus notion of "privilege," which is fundamentally unfalsifiable. The claim that America is simply not ready for a black woman president isn't some categorical one about how no black woman could possibly win in 2024 due to there being too many sexist racists who would just refuse to vote for her. It's that a politician who is identical to Harris in every way except for being a white male would have won more points due to having to face less implicit bias from the media and the electorate, which would have translated to more votes going to this fictional man than the real Harris, with the gap accounting for the real Harris's loss to Trump.
Obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
Likewise, your history of voting for black men and/or white women would mean nothing to someone making this kind of claim, because, again, the claim isn't that you're one of the many vile American racists who would categorically vote against any black or female person. It's that, if these politicians were white and/or male, then you would have required less from them in order to convince you to vote for them. The fact that you voted for them even though they're black and/or female just proves how good of politicians they actually were, to overcome the biases you must have had against them and convince you to vote for them over someone more white and/or male. And that's before getting into the whole stuff about intersectionality where black women face bigotry in ways that are beyond merely combining the bigotry faced by black people and by women.
Again, obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
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Clinton came pretty close to winning in 2016, and if things had shaken out in a different way (e.g. Obama decides he didn't want to run in 2008), she would almost certainly have become President.
Tons of countries have elected female heads of government and state. Of course, plenty of European and Anglo countries. But even outside of those, you have Rousseff, Gandhi, Aquino, Arroyo, Bhutto, Sukarnoputri, Sirleaf. Are all of their countries more gender progressive than the USA?
As far as the black aspect, if the US had a prominent black person who had run for office and won the Presidency, twice, that would be a piece of evidence that blackness doesn't preclude anything.
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