How Unconscious Bias Elected Donald Trump

It’s 12:10 am. I’m home in bed, trying to unwind from a raucous evening of cards and family fun at my mom’s house, and I open the New York Times. Just some light reading before I drift off to sleep, I think. (I’m not sure why I believe this will help me drift off pleasantly to dreamland, but I can’t stop myself from tapping that black and white icon on my phone to see what the newest headline is).

“Behind the Scenes: How James Comey Shaped the Election”

Hmm, “shaped” is an interesting word choice.

Read.

Read..

Read…

…

It reads like a fable. Like a past tense fairytale story that happened long long ago, in a galaxy far far away. And yet, it’s not. It’s recent history. It seems unreal, yet this is what happened. The biggest, most overt display of unconscious bias in the history of the world. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Reading the article, I feel like I knew this article would be written the moment she lost. Because:

She.

Was.

Not.

Supposed.

To.

Lose.

The moment she lost, I knew something had happened. Well honestly, I knew something had happened the week before, when James B. Comey (let’s not forget to add the middle initial since that really makes him sound distinguished) announced there was something else. There was something else they just HAD to investigate and they just HAD to let Congress (and oh by the way the entire United States electorate) know about.

This woman, this righteous, strong-willed woman, well, there was just something we shouldn’t trust about her. Because, she made a mistake.

But it’s not just that she made a mistake. Heck. EVERYONE makes mistakes. Donald Trump made 59,000 mistakes on the campaign trail. But the difference with her mistake was that:

She’s a woman.

Yes, she’s a woman. And the unconscious bias there is that:

We can’t trust her.

Therefore, her mistake, MUST mean something. Her mistake MUST be an indicator that she’s hiding something. It couldn’t just be a pure and simple mistake. It couldn’t just be the fact that someone gave her bad advice a long time ago, or that people barely knew the difference between an email server and a VCR back then. It couldn’t be that. There had to be something truly malicious behind it.

It’s the oldest story in the book. Look at Disney. Fairytales are FULL of old women, disguising themselves to be something they’re not. Something kind and good and helpful, when really, they are just waiting to let their tentacles out, their tangled black hair fall down and their warts pop up. They are just waiting to hand you that ripe, red apple that will be your downfall.

And Jimmy Comey, boy did he fall for it.

He just KNEW there had to be more to this story. This couldn’t be just be a clerical error. A copy room gaffe. He just knew. And he wracked his conscious to figure out what to do. And he told himself that he had to “not care” about the election and carry on with procedure. Politics could not and should not be involved in the decision.

And it wasn’t.

But what was involved in the decision, was unconscious bias. Because in the meantime, at the very same time Clinton was being second-guessed and burned at the stake, another candidate, the only other candidate that mattered in the race, was getting away with murder. Ok, not murder exactly, but at least some light pussy grabbing and Russian fraternizing. Because at the same time, the FBI had started investigating the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia.

“But what did they have?” you might say. What evidence did they have that there was something going on with Russia?

Well, they had someone, early on, who they knew had been in contact with Russian diplomats. They had just as much of a smoking gun there as they had with Clinton, except, they said nothing. And they did nothing, because there is a different standard for when to prosecute a man versus a woman.

I realize that is a bold statement. But if you think back to my previous example of the witch archetype, there is no equivalent for men. None.

Men are heroes or men are villains. They can be both, but you always know which one they are. Sometimes they’re the underdogs, sometimes they’re the knight in shining armor. Sometimes they’re the villain with crooked teeth, a hook for a hand, or a scar across their eye. But it’s always clear which role they play. There has never been a villainous male character who disguised himself as a beautiful prince, but then turned out to be evil. At least not that I can think of, and I think I’ve seen every Disney movie ever made. That storyline is reserved for women. And that is why:

We. Cannot. Trust. Women.

It’s not that we don’t want to trust women. It’s that we aren’t sure we can. We just don’t know for sure. And especially, ESPECIALLY, if you’re a man, you have a strong unconscious bias to regard women as less trustworthy than men. Period.

If you don’t agree with me, think about it like this. There is a story that is told and retold to represent the symbolic birth of mankind. In that story, there’s a beautiful woman, who picks an apple because she is persuaded by a serpent to do so. She takes a bite of the apple and then persuades her male companion to do so as well. And boom. They are catapulted out of the Garden of Eden.

The fall from paradise is the woman’s fault. Is it her stupidity? Maybe. Is it her naiveté? Maybe. Is it her bad luck that an evil serpent decided to sweet talk her first into eating an apple? Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. Because the moral of the story paints the woman to be the cause of the fall. And socially, societally, I don’t think we’ve ever truly recovered.

If James B. Comey worked at Facebook, he would’ve had to take a course in understanding unconscious bias. And I wonder if, after he had learned the meaning, he would’ve been at all concerned about whether he was exhibiting it. I doubt it. Because not only was there a thick layer of bias toward Clinton, (she looks like the popular front-runner, but what is she hiding…) there was also a thick layer of self-satisfying justification (if we DON’T share this information, people may think we were hiding it to try to help her so we just HAVE to share it. It’s for their own good, but really it’s for our own good too.)

The hardest thing about unconscious bias is that it’s impossible to prove. It’s unconscious, meaning the person responsible for it doesn’t really know if they’re doing it or not. And the people or person accusing them of it (most often women) are frequently treated to the same treatment of bias. That is why it’s so insidious. It’s impossible to point something out if the person doing the pointing is never fully given the benefit of the doubt.

I’m not going to lie. This election hurt. It was personal. I wanted Hillary Clinton to win so badly I could taste it. And I wasn’t even close to being one of her biggest fans.

And honestly, it wasn’t about her, it was about what she stood for. And we all knew that. And the way it went down, was a blow to women. It wasn’t just a blow actually. It was an atomic bomb in the face of women. You pit the most distasteful, disgusting, disrespectful man against the most intelligent, well-meaning, hard-working woman, and the man still wins. It literally felt that black and white. It felt like being spit on when Donald Trump won. I sobbed ugly tears when the final vote came in, not because I was scared for our country, not because I hated him so much, but because I was hurt. Hurt that a person that despicable, rude, cheating, conniving and false could win out over a woman who hadn’t ever been officially accused of anything, but who had been found guilty in the court of public opinion for nothing more than the insertion of doubt. It was a very harsh pill to swallow. Because it made me realize that that is how the world could see me too if I messed up. An innocent mistake could make me appear stupid, naive, or worse, incapable. Men, are allowed to make mistakes. They give each other permission to be idiots. They say things like, “Oh that’s just locker room talk,” or, “Is it really rape if she was wearing a short skirt? She was asking for it right?”. They let each other off the hook. All. The. Time. Sure, there are exceptions, but come on. If you really look at it, that’s just how it is. It’s called the Boys Club. And we women know we’re not in it.

But ok. Here we are. Life is life, and shit happens, and there’s no going back. My question is, what are we going to do now? No, not what are we going to do about our country politically. That battle is over. Drumpf is president and as much as I believe he absolutely should not be, that doesn’t matter. What matters now is that we actually try to address the horror show of unconscious bias. What matters is that we actually address the fact that it was unfair and biased of the FBI, and James Comey specifically, to decide to publicly discuss an ongoing investigation of one candidate but not the other. And what kills me now, is knowing that BOTH candidates were being investigated. AT THE SAME TIME! And yet, only one investigation did Comey decide he needed to discuss publicly. There was no hard evidence of wrong-doing on either side. Theoretically both investigations were open and ongoing, and one got fed to the media and the other did not. Well, at least not until well after the candidate whose mistakes and/or shady dealings were not discussed became president. And afterwards, who the fuck cares. I mean really, who cares! Is anyone going to talk about this? No. No one is going to care beyond this crazy, ranting, pantsuit-wearing womanchild lying in bed typing a manifesto at now 1:25am. This will be one little blip of a New York Times article. And it will go away tomorrow. Fading back into the night, forgotten along with last week’s Trump tweets and Kellyanne’s “alternative facts”. Ok, well maybe not like that one. I think we’ll be quoting “alternative facts” for a long time to come. But we definitely won’t be thinking about how the fate of our nation, and the world, got swayed by one man’s unconscious bias. Nor will be able to do anything about it.

But oh well. I guess Jimmy is just a man. Full of integrity but fallible and human to the core. We can forgive that. But not Hillary. Women should be dainty, golden-haired, smiling and subservient at all times, lest that glimmer in her eye and the way she holds her cigarette just so suggest that maybe, just possibly, she’s hiding something.