This week Hillary Clinton was dumped on for being too feminine and then not feminine enough. This was when she got emotional and cried. In sympathy Hill’s Angels came out to support here. This was a reference to Anita Hill who had accused Judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. (She was black and so was he; both had different supporters with their own agendas. That’s for another time).
India Knight pointed out that “Hillary has had to put on male armour in order to get to where she wanted to be. The reason crying worked for her was like watching a man cry” especially as she is not a ‘crying woman’.
Andrew Sullivan reckons that we shouldn’t be surprised at Hillary playing the gender card and points out that so far Obama has not played the race card.
On Obama, Sarah Baxter refers to a book by Shelby Steele ‘A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win’. The book talks about Obama being a new kind of Black politician who is a ‘negotiator’ rather than the old style ‘challengers’ ie people such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
As a part of his article, Paul Harris talks about Obama’s ‘post-racial’ image and provides some profiles of the new kind of black politicians who have not, like Jackson and Sharpton, come out of the civil rights movement. He points out that the old style black politics is slowly disappearing with the emergence of the black middle class.
In another article Baxter points out the conflict between the black and the Hispanic community which may come into play in the elections. She also quotes someone as saying that the public may be more afraid to vote for a woman than a black person.
Two articles for me stand out from a diversity perspective. The first was written by Gary Younge, a black british journalist who has settled in the US. He is an authority on race issues for example. He points that Obama is more about symbolism and less about substance.
The second article which stands out for me is by Patricia Williams. Just as I was writing about this, I thought there was something familiar about her name. It’s because she had given 5 Reith lectures which were published in a booklet entitled ‘Seeing a colour blind future’. I quote from it: “The colour of one’s skin is a part of ourselves. It does not matter. It is precious, and yet it should not matter, it is important and yet it must not matter. It is simultaneously our greatest vanity and anxiety and I am of the opinion like Martin Luther king that none of this should matter”.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, she concludes her excellent article by saying that “I hope that the two of them (Obama and Clinton), in whatever order, will become running mates by November”. For me I think Clinton should become president with Obama as Vice president for one or even two terms and then he should win the next two terms.
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Submitted by karamat on Sun, 2008-01-13 23:04.