What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (3 page)

The second thing is, clearly the expense of running for office deters all kinds of newcomers and all kinds of people who have fewer institutional resources, and women continue to be poor in this country, on average and in general, more than men are. They have less access to capital, less access to the opportunities to raise the highest levels of capital, and so because it is almost unthinkably expensive to run . . . even our recent School Board race here in New Orleans was upward of like $250,000 [
laughs]
. I was just like, Who has that kind of money to run for office? Who has that kind of money to be on the school board? Add to that, then, what it takes to run for much higher levels of office. So part of it is that money tends to discourage newcomers and newcomers are, again, going to be more likely to be women.

Then, of course, we have all the institutional barriers that start from early school on. I am constantly telling the women in my classes that they should consider running for office, mostly because what we know is that when men are talented and when men are smart and when men show some leadership, it’s hard for them to even get to college without someone, at some point, asking them, “Hey, have you ever thought about running for office? Man, you would be a great president.” Even as little tiny boys, right? “Oh man, you’re good at this. I bet you’ll be president someday.” It turns out that we don’t have those same kinds of standard messages for girls. So if a woman is very talented and can remember people’s names and she shows a lot of interest in politics, we tend to say things like “Good job” or “Here’s an A on your paper,” but we don’t tend to say, “Hey, have you ever thought about running for office?” Some of it is just the very basics of being recruited. And then I think at least one of the things that Jennifer Lawless and some other folks have shown in their research is that women are perhaps more discouraged by the ugliness of running than are their male counterparts, that just because of how we tend to socialize women to have a very strong desire to please people, they are less comfortable with the level of ugliness that occurs in modern campaigning.

MS
: You wrote this really important book,
Sister Citizen
, and I’m hoping with my own book that it conveys two things: that it’s not just about women, it’s about having greater diversity in general, and also about the fact there are many ways to participate in our government, not just being president or an elected official, but also being an empowered citizen. How do you see what you wrote about in your book as connected to this conversation?

MHP
: Yes, I appreciate your saying that, because we’ve been talking about elected office, we’ve been talking about a woman president, which requires
running for office at various stages. That’s an important point: I can’t imagine what would happen for me to run for office, but I certainly see myself as engaged politically. And not just because of the show, but I write to my representative, my mother is one of those retired ladies who goes up to the State House and protests. So I always have and I hope always will be engaged in the political world. It’s something that I’ve tried to pass on to my own daughter, as part of what you need to know in the world—in addition to math and science and English—is to know how your government works, know who represents you, and put pressure on them toward the ends and goals that you see as important.

You know,
Sister Citizen
is meant to be more analytic than prescriptive. It’s not so much how to fix this, as it is to try to say: here is at least one story about how African American women end up constrained in the way that they engage the political world, and they’re constrained by all these very old, very deep stereotypes, and it can create actual emotional and psychological residue that makes it hard to do the work of politics. And yes, I certainly am talking about African American women, but although I would never compare myself to Toni Morrison, I do take from Toni Morrison the lesson that when we tell a specific story, it’s actually for the purpose of telling the universal. Right? We go narrow in order to illuminate something larger. So even though I’m talking about black women, it’s with the goal of saying that when we enter into the political world, all of us, we don’t just come in as our political selves, we bring our whole selves, all of our expectations about what a woman is supposed to be, what an African American is supposed to be, what an American is supposed to be—and those expectations that are racialized and gendered and classed can really impact the way that we engage politically.

MS
: Now that we have also elected Barack Obama twice—and certainly in this last election there was, it seemed, a move toward greater diversity—do
you feel hopeful? Do you see any new paradigms emerging? Are you optimistic?

MHP
: I am, but I’m always optimistic. I was optimistic halfway through the George W. Bush presidency [
laughs]
. I’m just not a person who believes that we are in the worst time, that this is the decline of the American project, or that there was some better, nostalgic time in the fifties. No! Maybe for white folks there was some time that was better, but for black girls, nope, never a better time than this. However bad this is, it’s always the very best time that there has ever been. And so I guess maybe it’s not that I think that progress is inevitable or that it’s easy or that we just kind of march forward without struggle, but I’m not nervous about the fact that it takes struggle to make progress. That does, in fact, seem right, and it seems like in many ways exactly what our founders expected. Democracy is supposed to be hard. Totalitarianism is easy; you don’t have to be part of it.

MS
: The media has such a big impact and that is a place where there has not been such great diversity either. There’s a report from the Women’s Media Center that actually said it is at crisis levels. One of the things that has made me optimistic is, for example, your having your own show, where you are basically getting to talk about all the things that you would want to talk about that aren’t really being represented in many other places. Are you aware of the milestone of your show? And also, how do you feel about the role of diversity in media in general, because that is where people’s political consciousness starts and their understanding of the issues and what needs to be done?

MHP
: Yeah, I mean, I can’t believe I have a TV show [
laughs]
. I am sure at some point that someone is going to come and take it away, because we do crazy things every week. I constantly am thinking to myself,
We
just put that on television!
I was saying I wouldn’t want to run for office; I also really would not want to have a prime-time show, for example, because part of the freedom that I have in my show is because we air in the middle of the day on the weekends, so we are not in a time when it is absolutely necessary to sell the most expensive commercials to the most important sponsors or whatever. For me, that’s the freedom of being able to create the content that we want, even if it may have a smaller initial audience. But it can have a very engaged, small audience that is getting something useful from us. That’s an easy trade-off for me. I definitely prefer the autonomy and the engagement over just the scope. I mean, I assume that, for example, Soledad O’Brien anchoring [
Starting Point]
at CNN just had broader scope than I ever have. And so even though Soledad is not really as ideological as I am, she’s not pushing her own viewpoint as much—although I think she’s really an incredibly good journalist because what she does seem really attached to is the truth, and trying to muckrake and all of that, but I saw that as critically important intervention in that kind of diversity question. Her being there in that space, where there are a lot of eyes. But when you have a lot of eyes, she can’t necessarily do all the fun things and quirky things and transgressive things that we’re able to do. I can have a uterus on set, or have a whole panel of transgender people, or have a spoken word artist at the end of my show, because I’m not on CNN at eight o’clock in the morning. And that just gives us more freedom.

But yeah, there is no doubt that there are moments on Sunday morning while I’m sitting on my set and I can look up and the whole newsroom has all of the different channels and everything that’s on, and almost all of the other shows,
Face the Nation, Meet the Press
, all of them—we’re the only set that doesn’t have three or four white guys of advanced age all sitting around talking about politics. I think that matters. Again, no matter what the ideological perspective or the partisan viewpoint, it matters
demographically. You have to have the descriptive representation of bodies in order to show that everybody is a citizen, that everybody gets a say in this process.

MS
: I have two daughters, and I see that young girls are up against so many disempowering messages these days. What words of wisdom or what message would you most want to instill in girls and young women today?

MHP
: I don’t know; my kid is pretty funny. We actually just did an interview together for the July
Essence Magazine
, which is their body issue, and I did an interview with Parker about being an adolescent and going through puberty. I was expecting all of these horrible things and that she would say all this bad stuff about her body, but she was like, “I am great! I am beautiful! I am so sexy!” I was like, wow, this is fascinating. So I guess . . . I don’t know; I hate advice. You know what, even though I hate advice, here’s the one thing that I worry about: I worry that girls in particular, but just in general, that we’re not willing to make mistakes. That we’re very nervous about making a wrong move and we worry that if we make the wrong move, then the consequences will mean that you kind of never recover from them. And I guess what I try to instill in Parker, more than any other thing, is how okay it is—in fact, it’s better than okay—to make mistakes, really big mistakes sometimes. One of our responsibilities as adults in a society is to make the world safe for young people to make mistakes, because that’s how they learn. So I would want to say to young women, “Hey, run for office, even if you think you’re going to lose. Take a hard class, even if you’re going to get a C in it. Go ahead and follow love, even if it doesn’t work out.” Just a little bit of courage to make mistakes . . . because that strikes me as where all the good stuff happens.

ARCHITECTS OF CHANGE

One of the things that I encourage for anybody who is interested in their own charity or philanthropy is to start from where you are and what has mattered to you
.

        
—O
PRAH
W
INFREY

The goal of The Women’s Conference, under my direction, has really been to empower women to be architects of change in their own lives, in their own communities, their state, their nation
—
wherever they see that they want to make a difference. If you want to be an architect of change by raising great kids, God bless. If you want to do it by raising money for your kid’s school, great. If you want to build a garden, whatever it is
. . . . I
bring women, and men, to the conference to talk about where they are impacting the world, where they are living their lives, and how they’ve lived it. So the goal of that is really to say, “Look at all these people out there: they weren’t famous, they weren’t born with a lot of money, and look what they’re doing with their lives. You can do it, too.”

        
—M
ARIA
S
HRIVER, FORMER
F
IRST
L
ADY OF
C
ALIFORNIA, DIRECTOR OF
T
HE
W
OMEN’S
C
ONFERENCES FROM 2003 TO 2010

Everybody has the power to make changes . . . and every change makes a difference
.