While it's fair to question the honesty of any candidate running for president, the fact that Warren is being forced to defend herself over this particular moment in her career-and that the matter has sparked a national debate over how pregnant women were and are treated-points to a long history in America of a portion of the population refusing to acknowledge discrimination against women and people of color.
This dates back to before the Jim Crow era, when black Americans were segregated, systematically disenfranchised, deprived of their property, and literally murdered in public. The National Opinion Research Center polled Americans in 1944, 1946, and 1956 on whether "most [N]egroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly," and at least 60 percent of white respondents consistently answered fairly. Meanwhile, only 11 percent of black respondents agreed in the 1956 poll that they were being treated fairly.
Even Alabama's notorious segregationist governor in the 1960s, George Wallace, who literally stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in 1963 to prevent black students from entering it, denied that he was a racist. "It was not an antagonism towards black people, and that's what some people can't understand," Wallace told PBS in 1984. "White Southerners did not believe it was discrimination. They thought it was in the best interest of both the races."
When David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, nearly defeated an incumbent U.S. senator in Louisiana in 1990, the media scrambled to attribute the candidate's popularity to economic anxiety and anti-Washington rage-anything but the obvious. "The economic explanation carried the day," wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. "Duke was a freak creature of the bayou who had managed to tap into the frustrations of a struggling sector of the Louisiana electorate with an abnormally high tolerance for racist messaging."
A strikingly similar narrative has played out with Donald Trump. One part of the country demands the media directly call him a racist, while another is equally outraged at the audacity of using that term at all. In a 2017 Pew Research poll, 54 percent of white people said they get little to no advantage from their race, while 92 percent of black voters responded that white people have it easier in America.
There is a similar inclination, especially among men, to deny the existence of workplace discrimination against women. This is a more modern phenomenon than racism denial, considering that in 1977, less than a quarter of Americans responded in the General Social Survey that women and men should be treated equally.
Women shouldn't have to continually mine their pain in order to prove the existence of systemic sexism.
Those attitudes have significantly changed-by 2016, only 7 percent of the population said men and women should maintain traditional, unequal gender roles. But sexism in the workplace still very much exists. Pregnancy-discrimination cases have been increasing since the passage of the law in 1978. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that between 1997 and 2013, the annual number of pregnancy-discrimination charges filed with the EEOC and state and local agencies rose from 3,900 to 5,342. Trump stated frankly in a 2004 interview with NBC's Dateline that pregnancy is "a wonderful thing for the woman, it's a wonderful thing for the husband, it's certainly an inconvenience for a business. And whether people want to say that or not, the fact is, it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business."
Women still only earn 80 cents for every dollar men make, working the same number of hours. Black and Latina women earn even less. Women ask for raises as often as men do, but are 5 percent less likely to get them. They make up less than 7 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.
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