Shifting Baselines

No one wants to talk about it, but apparently some people might not vote for Obama because he is black (a phenomenon I could indeed feel when I recently visited my home state Ohio). At this point, addressing the topic of race is sort of like having to argue against the Earth being 10,000 years old: it's stupid and boring. But, if you can still stomach trying to understand U.S. dunderheads, this column in the Philadelphia Inquirer analyzes the role Obama's father's darker skin could play in November.

The sad reality in the U.S. is that many citizens (and, in particular, union members) are still not capable of looking past appearances. And so we could miss out on the opportunity to employ on our behalf one of the century's most promising leaders. But, in America, there is always more sad reality where that came from...

Let's take that turkey Sarah Palin. If we stress the limits of our imaginations and pretend for a moment that she did have enough experience to be in the Whitehouse, we would nonetheless have to acknowledge that that she is a woman. And being a woman in American politics is still deemed less favorable than being a man (another stupid and boring topic, but also perhaps a secret weapon to the Obama campaign) .

Being that this is ScienceBlogs, I would like to remind readers of the study published in January this year in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that showed that, following the introduction of double-blind peer review (where reviewers do not receive the names of manuscript's authors and thus can not discern their gender) at the journal Behavioral Ecology, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers, a pattern not observed in a very similar journal that provides reviewers with author information. And this study deals with scientists for goodness sake. Let's talk about the American public.

If we could instate a double-blind ballot ticket, the McCain/Palin ticket might be rejected based on content alone. But given the candidates names are disclosed, U.S. voters will have to look at a ticket with the names of candidates and decide whether to elect someone whose father did not recently descend from European ancestry (like many U.S. citizens) or whether to vote for a woman (also like many [ok, half of] U.S. citizens).

And at that moment the U.S. voter will be faced with one of the most important questions of this decade: Oh Lord, against whom shall I discriminate?

Against whom will you discriminate this fall?