How the Sting of an Elizabeth Warren Defeat Felt Different for Young Women

By Kenya Evelyn, Guardian UK

22 March 20

Warren’s candidacy struck an all-too-familiar note for many as hopes faded for a highly qualified contender: ‘What more could she have done?’

fter boasting one of the most diverse fields of candidates in recent history, Democrats are left to choose between the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and the former vice-president Joe Biden – two white men in their late 70s.

For women, the blow has been particularly hard.

With the congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard leaving the race on Thursday, the final woman has exited from a contest that once included senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand, plus the health guru Marianne Williamson. Together the six women represented the left and center lanes of the party, spanned the nation from Hawaii to Massachusetts and hailed from the private sector as well as public life. They were young, old and in between.

For many Democratic women it was the failure of the Warren campaign that has hit especially hard.

“[Warren was] a woman seeking power and that made her a threat,” said TJ Holmes, a professor of environmental science in Tallahassee, Florida. “What more could she have done – served in the military just because?”

As a young black Democrat, Holmes wanted to exercise her power in voting for Warren in Florida’s Tuesday primary. Warren was Holmes’s top choice; she described the candidate as the more “pragmatic alternative for progressives”, unimpressed by a “lack of detailed plans” from democratic socialist Sanders.

November’s general election will still mark a historic first for Holmes. After moving to the US from her native Trinidad and Tobago more than a decade ago, she decided to become a US citizen. Her motivation, in part, was to cast her first vote for the nation’s first female president.

Instead, she said she was “heartbroken” to watch Democrats “lose their most qualified and viable candidate” in Warren.

“She had evidence of experience but people refused to acknowledge her credibility,” she said. “Sadly, but understandably, Americans are fearful. And when we vote in fear, we go with what’s familiar. So I’m not surprised.”

Many analysts note Warren’s plans addressed longstanding issues including inequality, millennial debt and the climate crisis. She earned a number of key endorsements, including from the New York Times. Biden has since announced he will adopt Warren’s bankruptcy reform plan to attract young, progressive voters.

Warren’s exit underscores, for many, how deep misogyny runs within American politics. Harris noted that this “election cycle in particular” presented very “legitimate questions about the challenges of women running for president”.

“The reality is that there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it very clear that women are exceptionally qualified and capable of being the commander-in-chief of the United States of America,” she told NBC News.

Still, voters rejected Warren as she failed to make headway in early primaries, experiencing a steady decline from early polls that couldn’t be revived by debate performances that included a takedown of the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

That rejection is a phenomenon many young women said they knew personally. Warren was an uncomfortable reminder of their own professional setbacks. In a column exploring her impact, the author Sarah Smarsh likened Warren’s loss to “every moment, since the dawn of woman, when a female aspired but to no avail”.

“She raised her hand but wasn’t called on. She applied but wasn’t hired. She created but wasn’t credited,” she wrote. “Imagine the sadness and frustration of every such instance as a spark.

“That is the measure of grief and fury I felt rise inside me as I watched Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic nomination wane.”

Warren, in addition to Harris, was often criticized as bitter or angry, particularly haunting Holmes as she recalled similar instances in her own life.

“Simply because I’m a black woman or an immigrant, I’m constantly working to prove I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You have to prove that you just belong in the room to get that credibility and may still be passed over as Warren was.”

But Warren did err, facing many setbacks as a consequence. She released a DNA test to prove her controversial Native American ancestry but later apologized, and she failed to attract black voters – the backbone of the Democratic party.

Many analysts note, however, that the gravity of those mistakes only adds to arguments of a sexist double standard. The author Hannah Drake pointed to male candidates like Pete Buttigieg, whose ambitious run for president as a town mayor, despite struggles with black voters, was praised – a feat she said would be nearly impossible for a female counterpart.

“None of them matched her in plans or knowledge of policy. Yet the votes showed not Warren, or any woman, could run on a mayor’s record and be as successful,” Drake said. “Make no mistake: the clear winner of the primary will be white male mediocrity.”

Although Warren supporters point to double standards as factors in her demise, studies have shown that women win political offices at rates equal to men. The US elected a historic number of women to Congress in 2018, thanks in part to a blue wave against Donald Trump.

But Drake contends that “those races are less of a litmus test on the country’s perception of what makes someone a leader”.

“When you’re judged under a lens that historically associates power with being white and male, it’s how you end up with a flawed president beating an exceptionally qualified woman, or a race with diverse candidates leaving us with problematic men like Trump, Sanders or Biden.”

Biden, now the likely Democratic nominee, has also faced less criticism throughout the campaign season despite a controversial history of civil rights votes, inappropriate contact with women, and more recent gaffes that have garnered questions of his mental fitness.

“He’s a familiar face who, especially against Trump, doesn’t have to be distracted with sexist comparisons of his demeanor, likability or electability,” Holmes said. “It’s a tough reality women are reminded of daily.”

As the nation grapples with a slumping economy from a growing national health crisis, Holmes predicts a “voter’s remorse” that will extend beyond Warren’s post-campaign interviews and cameos, similar to Hillary Clinton’s re-imaging through a Hulu documentary that examines her life and 2016 defeat.

“Maybe in the future when there’s more hope than fear, and more of us have gotten fed up with men like Trump,” Holmes said, “maybe then everybody will be excited for a woman while she’s still running and not after her Saturday Night Live appearance.”

In Africa, Social Distancing Is a Privilege Few Can Afford

By Karsten Noko, Al Jazeera

22 March 20

If you live in a township, make a living in the informal sector, or travel on a crowded bus, how do you self-quarantine?

he COVID-19 pandemic has already permeated all aspects of life.

While optimists hope it will force us to rethink inequality and global access to healthcare, the realists believe the net effect of the pandemic will be to further entrench the divides that already exist.

In Africa, the crisis has not yet reached epic proportions. But the cracks caused by existing inequalities are already showing.

In South Africa - which declared a national state of disaster because of the pandemic last week - the working classes are navigating how to avoid contamination on cramped public transport on their way to meagre-paying jobs that often only help them live hand-to-mouth, while the more affluent classes empty large chain stores to stockpile as much food and toilet paper as they can.

Imaginary borders

In South Africa, the government only declared a disaster after more than 60 cases appeared. But Rwanda and Kenya declared decisive measures - including travel restrictions and bans on public gatherings - just after the first positive case was reported.

The option of closing borders to deal with the crisis, which some countries have already adopted, is undoubtedly a vexed one. South Africa, for example, has said it will build a 40km (25 miles) fence along its border with Zimbabwe. Although closing borders contributes positively to the social distancing recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), the question is how practical such a measure will be for African countries.

National borders were arbitrarily drawn during the colonial era and, for many communities living along these boundaries, they exist only in theory. We see them on Google maps. But trade and family ties have been established since way before colonialism - and they endure. It may be possible to close an official border post, but so-called "irregular crossing points" - dotted across hundreds of kilometres and even over rivers and lakes - abound.

As we saw in the West Africa Ebola outbreak - where the first case was recorded in Guinea before spreading to Liberia and Sierra Leone - and the cholera outbreaks that began in Zimbabwe before spreading to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique, diseases can easily spread across these essentially imaginary lines that nation-states carve out.

COVID-19 is not novel in this sense.

The myth of self-isolation

Knowing the realities on the ground, it is curious that the WHO and ministries of health in different African countries are recommending that people self-quarantine if they could have been exposed to the coronavirus. In Rwanda, for example, a man travelling from the US has potentially infected his wife and brother, accounting for three of the seven cases. Which raises the question: how are people in shared accommodation expected to self isolate?

Slums and informal settlements are also part of the physical infrastructures of many African cities. All of them were overcrowded and lacked services even before the threat of a global health crisis emerged.

Think of Alexandra in Johannesburg, where over 700,000 people are estimated to live in less than 5 square kilometres (1.9 square miles), Mbare in Harare with some 800,000 people, Kibera in Nairobi with at least 250,000, and Makoko in Lagos with over 300,000 whose homes are built on stilts in a lagoon.

Our big cities also pose a conundrum to people who must commute to work. Anyone who has been stuck in a traffic jam in a "matatu" (bus) in Nairobi or in a taxi in Johannesburg - often filled with 12 to 14 people - knows too well that the idea of social distancing on your way to work is a myth.

Not only are these overcrowded, but the commute and queues to use them require significant amounts of time that could potentially expose more people to the coronavirus.

No choice to 'work from home'

It is more practical for people who work in offices to "work from home" but if your only means of livelihood is selling tomatoes or second-hand clothes at an informal market in a big city, how do you begin to do this "online"?

The choice before you is often to stay home and fail to provide the evening meal for your family, or to brave it out into the city and try and fend for your family. If I was that person selling at a market, I know what choice I would make. It is not social distancing.

For those concerned about the risk of exposure to the virus, the WHO recommends self-quarantining. This has so far included advice for people not to share bathrooms, living space and even bedrooms, if they can. But what if you live in a house where the bedroom doubles as a kitchen and living space - all shared with your (sometimes extended) family? Such recommendations are even more absurd if your source of water is a community tap or borehole, or if your toilet is one you share with a dozen other families. For many people forced to live on the margins of our societies, this is unfortunately a reality.

Even in the well-to-do parts of many African cities, getting access to water is a challenge. Harare's taps have been nearly dry for almost 10 years now - and yet we recommend that residents not only self-isolate but also regularly wash their hands.

With coronavirus on our doorsteps, suddenly the importance of access to water is staring all of us in the face. But the governments and the WHO giving advice know only too well the conditions and challenges these communities have always faced.

Struggling health systems

A lot has been said about the health systems of many African countries and how they would struggle to cope with a fast-spreading virus like the coronavirus. Indeed, after many years of conflict, in countries like South Sudan and Somalia, the health system has almost collapsed.

In some countries around the Sahel - Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali - people continue to be displaced by conflict and live in squalid conditions in displaced peoples' camps. Even in countries not in conflict, like Uganda and Zimbabwe, structural adjustment programmes proffered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have seen a continuous decrease in funding available for healthcare. The Abuja declaration of 2001, requiring each country to set aside at least 15 percent of its national budget for healthcare, is still gathering dust in health authorities' offices. None of the parties to the declaration has managed to achieve its goals.

It clearly does not require a pandemic to expose the gaps in the health system. If developed systems like in northern Italy can buckle under pressure from COVID-19, one can only imagine the impact this will have on front-line health staff who are without adequate training, protective equipment and even basic drugs.

No one knows how the pandemic will spread across Africa. But we know it is a matter of time. One can not help but wonder if it is not time for African governments, with support from the WHO, to develop recommendations that take all these environmental conditions into account.

Social distancing could probably work in China and in Europe - but in many African countries, it is a privilege only a minority can afford.

The WHO has done well since the onset of the outbreak to provide leadership and access to information about a virus that virtually nothing was known about just several weeks ago. But now, more must be done to reimagine our governance systems, especially because healthcare is intrinsically linked to everything else.

And in Africa - likely the next battlefield for the virus - tackling COVID-19 will need more imagination and alternative solutions from all of us.