There’s a short video I keep watching of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen waiting in a ceremonial receiving line with European Council President Charles Michel and Emmanuel Macron to have photographs taken with dignitaries at the EU-Africa summit. The Ugandan foreign minister, General Jeje Odongo, enters, walks straight past her with a microscopic nod and greets Michel and Macron with vigorous handshakes. Macron gestures to Odongo, indicating Von der Leyen. Odongo does nothing; Macron insists, at which Odongo turns towards her with a small, stiff bow – still no handshake.
Another slight against Von der Leyen went viral last year. In “Sofagate”, President Erdogan and Charles Michel (yes, again) take the two chairs ceremonially arranged for discussion and photo ops at a summit in Ankara; left seatless, Von der Leyen coughs and gestures in impotent, angry incredulity, before awkwardly perching on a nearby sofa.
Von der Leyen is a steely Euro-overachiever: a doctor, mother of seven, trilingual; she was the first female German defence minister before taking on her current role. That’s not to say she hasn’t been heavily criticised (her management of vaccine procurement in particular was widely condemned). But she is a proper politician, not three crackpot opinions in a TM Lewin shirt like most of our government. Yet for the second (televised) time in her career it looks as if she was snubbed in an excruciating slow-motion choreography of misogyny.
They are little things: etiquette breaches, missteps, even miscommunications. Von der Leyen “chose to prioritise substance over protocol or form, that is certainly what EU citizens would expect of her”, a bored-looking male spokesperson said of Sofagate, dismissively, bringing my blood to the lethal rolling boil of hot marmalade. You could see worse any day: violent, terrible acts of racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.
So why do I keep watching? The first reason is the obvious one: these men seem not to feel the need to hide their contempt for one of Europe’s most senior political figures, in the most public environments. How do they treat less powerful women, in private?
It’s also because it’s interesting when prejudice touches people for whom it rarely comes. I see Von der Leyen’s incredulity and I recognise it: the expression of someone whose life experiences did not lead them to expect this treatment. I have felt it, too; made that face of confusion that someone might disregard my opinion, pay me less, intimidate or overrule me. White, straight, relatively well-off, I grew up in a progressive bubble: my stepfather was our primary carer and my mother the “breadwinner”; my partner once ironed my dress just to make a cousin’s macho boyfriend uncomfortable. I was luckier even than Von der Leyen: according to her biographer, her own father said she didn’t need a good degree because she would get married.
Not expecting, or needing to anticipate, prejudice is privilege. How restful life normally is for those of us who have that, how frictionless! Being insulated from the permanent, exhausting onslaught of micro- and macroaggressions others face means we have energy to spare. The question, then, is how we use that extra energy.
I’m asking myself, really. Von der Leyen addressed the issue explicitly after Sofagate: “I am the president of an institution which is highly respected all around the world and, even more important, as a leader, I can speak up and make myself heard,” she said. “But what about the millions of women who cannot?” She has also explicitly protested Poland’s horrific anti-LGBTQ+ stance.
Experiencing prejudice when you aren’t used to it can be galvanising, an electric shock of radicalising realisation. But really, none of us should need personal experience to act. That’s the other reason I’m compelled to watch: because that video is a sort of primer on allyship. Watching Charles Michel, my blood goes past marmalade, until it’s the consistency of the blackcurrant jam I forgot on the stove all afternoon last summer – a black, sticky stain clogging my arteries with fury. Michel was maddeningly passive the first time, a feeble shrug in human form. He “decided not to react further so as not to create a political incident”, he explained, blandly reaffirming his “total full and absolute commitment to support women and gender equality”. But then it happened again, and again, oblivious (according to his spokesman, he simply didn’t see Odongo’s slight), he did nothing. In contrast, we have Macron, steely but cordial, using all that spare energy he has from being a powerful white man to object.
We know that to do nothing is to be complicit. But do we (I) act on that, on the bus, in the street, when a colleague or cousin says something that leaves an acrid burnt jam taste? So I keep watching, to remind myself that even if you’re the president of the European Commission, prejudice happens. That unless those of us who feel insulated from it act, it goes unchallenged and gains strength. That it’s possible – essential, actually – to be a Macron, not a Michel.
Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling
