One is being treated as an individual; the other, as a symbol of ‘white male privilege.’
One is being treated as an individual; the other, as a symbol of ‘white male privilege.’
T he operative question for many in the press as they assess Tara Reade’s assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not matter — for purposes of establishing Joe Biden’s culpability — whether the Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned. What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Biden’s candidacy, is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in 1993.
But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation — and that’s Dr. Ford, to you — but also the behavior of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault, parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the “world of privilege” that Kavanaugh allegedly inhabited.
Joe Biden is being treated as an individual — a man being accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh was treated as a totem — an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of History’s various Straight White Men who “got away with it,” who were cushioned from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable “privilege,” lashing out against the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boys’ Club.
Hence why Kavanaugh was accused of exhibiting “white male rage” as, before a national audience, he angrily disputed allegations of gang rape and sexual assault. It was a specifically white rage, we were told — Brett Kavanaugh was offered as a totem, as Richard Mosse wrote at The New Yorker, for all “white men” who “fear losing their privilege in a changing society.” Paul Krugman of the New York Times informed us that it was not merely Brett Kavanaugh who was angered at these charges but all white men with “privilege,” angered by an “increasingly diverse society” and “the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.” (The Nobel laureate, apparently, numbered himself among “the rest of us.”)
Likewise, believing Christine Blasey Ford’s account of events — one that her best friend and all of the eyewitnesses of the alleged assault refused to corroborate — was treated as a moral imperative, not merely for Ford’s sake but for the sake of all women everywhere. CNN blasted out video of a protester heckling Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator after he indicated that he would vote yes for Kavanaugh — “That’s what you’re telling all women in America, that they don’t matter,” she yelped. “They should just keep it to themselves, because if they have told the truth, you’re just going to help that man to power anyway.” Time’s Haley Sweetland Edwards echoed the protester:
The hopes and fears of women and men who have lived with the trauma of sexual violence were riding on the credibility of Ford’s testimony. Her treatment in the halls of power, and her reception by an expectant public, would send a signal to countless survivors wrestling with whether they should speak up.
Here, Ford was every abuse victim, and Kavanaugh every abuser, two almost literary figures playing out a story bigger than themselves in the Senate Judiciary Committee. By refusing to affirm the facts of Ford’s story, Flake was effectively denying the truth of the broader story, the Larger Truth, the Narrative truer in toto than the truth or falsehood of any particular allegation. He refused to crush the egg that would complete a long-overdue omelet that would at last sate a hunger wrought by centuries of unrectified gender inequity.
Then there is Joe Biden.
Biden is fortunate, by comparison — he is fortunate that the New York Times sat on Tara Reade’s sexual-assault accusation for weeks, even as the slow-motion news cycle wrought by the coronavirus provided the paper with a starved and captive audience. He is fortunate that his presumptive general-election opponent has faced both more-numerous and potentially more-serious allegations of sexual misconduct than he does. Biden is most fortunate, however, that members of the mainstream press are vetting the allegation against him on its merits, rather than condemning him as an avatar of that most loathsome of creatures: The Straight White Male.
If only Brett Kavanaugh had been so lucky.