I'm trying to be optimistic about this and stick with my standard, "we are the future" line. Very difficult when you read things like this:
Later, when asked if she thinks this campaign has been racist, she says she does not. And she circles back to the sexism. "The manifestation of some of the sexism that has gone on in this campaign is somehow more respectable, or at least more accepted, and . . . there should be equal rejection of the sexism and the racism when it raises its ugly head," she said. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists."
This is the same woman who, only a week ago, equated "white" with "hard-working," whose surrogate claimed that Obama would not be in the race if he weren't black. When I read things like that, it brings forth some really dark thoughts about race in this country, and how black people should proceed. This is the case for Malcolm X and Jeremiah Wright, the case for a complete blindness to a nation of black men toiling in prisons, to black girls growing up fatherless. This is the case against Barack Obama--that his compassion for people who step on his wife and kids for power, is in fact a compromise of black people. I know that this a short-sighted way of seeing the world, that the great tragedy of African-American life is that the only way forward is jettisoning of our anger. But of course it can't truly jettisoned, it can only be hidden and in moments like this it returns.
Feminists have expended whole barrels of ink wondering why the fuck they have virtually no following among black women. But over the past week all I've heard is this stupid-ass attempt to raise the profile of privileged white women at the expense of black boys and girls who I see out on Lennox Avenue scrapping in the belly of the beast. Nothing is more irritating than watching people who think they know what beef is because they watched Roots, and took an Af-Am Studies class at Wellesley, tell me that it's now all good. Hillary, and people who support this sort of invective, are loathsome and disgusting. I don't care if they're racist--they clearly find racism useful. The only women who they care about, the only young girls who they truly are concerned about, are the ones from their side of the tracks.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
And to THAT you get my unmitigated "HOLLA!"
On the flip side of my comments about sexism, the thing that has made me progressively more and more nervous about this campaign is how it exposes what little understanding people have about "the black experience." And so when I hear people rake say, Jeremiah Wright over the coals, whether I think he's crazy or not, I'm dumbstruck because very little that he's said are things I haven't either thought or heard in the church and faith I was raised in (and left, coincidentally). And so then we're left with an electorate that only wants to hear what it wants to hear about race, which is that things were hard but if we stay the course things will get better. And I don't disagree with that idea in general, but when I see Obama, as the presidential candidate having to make sure that he doesn't come off too angry or radical because he's black and the combo of those two things automatically magnifies as negative in a lot of people's eyes. And while I admire that strength and self-awareness as a personal trait in my president, it bums me out as a black person because it only shows me that most of the people in the country don't even realize that having to do that is a huge part of this discussion we have about race that never gets talked about, that as you say, even the nice kind, sweet liberals who like black people don't want to see it raw and out there. I mean, maybe Maureen Dowd will allude to it in a column or two (in a condescending kind of course), but it's actually a huge deal. Ugh, I talk too much.
Posted by MikeJack | May 20, 2008 4:55 PM