Forget gender and race, let us chill out!

Author: Rosa Maria Young

Yes, we should really chill out. That was not such bad advice from Bill Clinton. The opinions of the followers of both candidates to the Democrat nomination are so distant that it is beginning to look as if they were from two different parties. Today in the ‘Opinion’ part of the New York Times there were some readers’ comments to the editor. Here is an example: “The more Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stands up to the barrage of voices from both sides calling for her to drop out, the more she proves to me that she has the guts and stamina for the job of president. For this Democrat, it comes down to the choice between an amiable dreamer and a hard-headed realist, and that’s an easy call. Jacob E. Goodman”

Well those comments seem to me to be quite reasonable and made me think that there was still hope that we could find common ground without having to become rabid followers of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama because we were women or black. Because if we look at it in a calm moment, that is what the elections are turning out to be for the Democrats. I was then feeling a little more optimistic when I went on to read an article published Saturday March 29th by Derrick Z. Jackson, a Globe Columnist. I dare anyone to read it and tell me that race is not involved in it. Here is what he wrote about Hillary Clinton. “…there are also signs that she will continue to skate the thin ice of race politics and risk the Democratic Party falling through. Because of the racial blunders of her campaign, Clinton is for the rest of the way utterly dependent on middle-aged and older white working class and middle-class voters. Clinton’s campaign remains on course to betray the chances of the Democrats to regain the White House.”

Which were the racial blunders of Clinton’s campaign? Is this the case of accusing someone of something to cover one’s own actions?

And as if I needed more I went on to read an article in the British newspaper ‘The Guardian” written by Alice Walker, the American author and feminist who received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 for her novel “’The Color Purple’ (which later would become a movie in which Oprah Winfrey the famous supporter of Obama would have a role). In that article, Alice Walker writes of Obama “He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change it must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.”

I strongly disagree and would even say Barack Obama is not Martin Luther King and most certainly he is not Nelson Mandela!

And if that was not enough, Alice Walker goes on saying about Clinton (after berating her for not using her maiden name) “One would think she is just any woman, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in the US in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to try to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.”

Does that make all the whites in The United States guilty of a racial inheritance? I believe things are going too far and tempers have to cool.