My stomach was killing me yesterday after brunch. T. wanted to shop downtown while we were there, though, so instead of my usual habit of opining for her and shopping on my own, I found the most comfortable spot I could find and sat down in it. At Beggars and Choosers, this was a plush red chair, and since it was an antique store, there happened to be a stack of LIFE magazines from the early sixties to the present. In an hour and a half I got to take a stroll into the mainstream mass media’s past.
On the lighter side of things, in 1967, everything that could be marketed as having to do with the space program was, from toothbrushes to fake orange juice. The American Sugar Council was promoting the idea that daily sugar was needed nutrition, and that newfangled diet drinks could cause your immune system to buckle under the strain of your active lifestyle. Concert violinists and composers were celebrity endorsers for menswear, fine liquor, and golf clubs.
On the darker side, the issue I picked up came on the heels of the Detroit Race Riots. The previous LIFE had covered them in detail, and the letters to the editor were all over the place. One of the most telling letters I read was from a man in Wilmington, North Carolina who used a simple, perfect word, “fear.” Fear drove racism onwards. Fear of more race riots. Fear that giving a mammoth, angry underclass the ability to assert themselves as equals would lead quickly and decisively to that underclass abusing the white men who held the power up until then. Fear of not being believed when, “I wasn’t one of the bad guys,” is said by a white man. Fear that somehow society depended on the status quo, and that once bucked, the rest of the US’s cities would turn into Detroit, Buffalo, Tampa, Newark, or Washington DC (all cities that saw race riots in 1967).
That letter stood as the single strongest argument on that page for the status quo if only for its unmitigated honesty. All the straw men that had been built and pointed to as the reasons to hold back, to go slow, to moderate and manage the ascent of the black person into first class citizenhood could be reduced to the fears of one lonely, frightened white man in a city that remembered its sins (the massacre of 1898, for those who are unfamliar).
“I’m afraid,” was no reason to refrain from doing the right thing. There was no longer an excuse for stagnation. There had never been an excuse for silence.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fast forward to 1987 and Jesse Jackson’s nearly-successful bid for the Demoractic Nomination for President. LIFE magazine does an expose of Jackson, extolling him as the likely nominee after Gary Hart’s disgrace. If you just had the text of the article, you could nearly believe that Jackson would win the nomination, and that nearly no-one thought this was a bad thing. If you just had the text, but LIFE was known for its pictures.
I’m sure that at least for the photographers, the settings and mood are unintentional — products of unconscious bias. On the left hand page is a picture of Jesse Jackson and family surrounding a table for a Sunday family dinner. His mother is in a blue-floral muumuu. Their heads are all bowed, hands together, and the food on the table is unmistakably soul food. The intended message is clearly one of pride in history and roots, but the way it is photographed, and the placement of the photo opposite an advertisement for Colt 45 (on the other hand, the marketers and editors were clearly intentional in their bias) make it a farce. On another page, a photographer captured Jackson on his morning jog with his advisers. Once again, though, the shot fails in its attempt at seriousness and captures a distressed look on his and his advisers’ faces, and catches them from a low angle, making them look like they’re running flat out instead of exercising. Clearly these men are running from the law. Once again, this was opposite an ad for a product primarily marketed at black people.
Still, in the 20 years since the first magazine I’d picked up, enough had changed that people seriously considered the possibility that a black man could be President of the United States.
There were also ads for the Chevy Colt and Toyota Tercel that claimed 56 miles per gallon — I realize we were all supposed to drive 55 back then, but having just paid in excess of 50 dollars for gas for the car I inherited from my granddad, I wonder what happened to our nation valuing that kind of economy.
The last thing I want to touch on, though, is how little the fight for gender equality had progressed in that time, and with the appalling sound bytes I keep hearing spewed from the MSNBC wall monitor as I walk into work, how little that cause has progressed since then. I mentioned Gary Hart, but the back of the magazine article was an interview with his mistress, Donna Rice. To begin to tell you how bad it was, all I have to do is quote the last sentence of the lead in, “At least she tells us what a nice girl like her was doing to get into a situation like this,”
The worst words out of anyone’s mouth, though weren’t in the editors’ lead in. They were from Donna Rice herself, in the way she felt she had to explain herself, her actions, and how she was still a “good girl,” Also the simple statement, spoken offhand, without a hint of resentment, as if the division between the sexes was as ordained as the placement of the stars, “If I’d been a man, I’d have been a doctor. I graduated summa cum laude in Biology,” but as it was, she looked for jobs in modeling and acting, because those were the things she’d obviously been told she could do.
She and so many other college age girls still accepted naturally the idea that there was women’s work and men’s work. Yes, there were female doctors in the 80’s. Yes there was a woman on the Supreme Court. But look at us, the People. We see celebrity and public figures and people paraded about as symbols and they are that — not realistic or attainable. Other people. Extraordinary people. Role models to some, yes, but not something we ever expect to be able to attain when we’re teenagers or in college. The majority of female college graduates would think like Donna Rice and if they broke away from those roles, it would be through long years of self-rediscovery of things that shouldn’t have been drilled out in the first place.
These days, the media’s treatment of women looks more like the way Jackson was treated in 1987. Half-successful, bitter, and frankly pathetic mockery by the receding elite, pundits who overestimate their own and each other’s importance, and their unconscious and conscious supporters who can’t understand why ad hominem jokes based on Hillary Clinton’s anatomy fall flat on our ears.
I can only hope that the tiresome and loathsome analysis of congresswomen’s dress cuts and hairdos, and the presumptions of marital relations or lack thereof will be as appalling to people a generation from now as the props on Jesse Jackson’s dinner table were to me when I looked back on 1987.
