Wash Post: Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause

By Kevin Merida

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; Page A01

Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana’s primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.  MORE …

NYT: Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race

March 31, 2008

The New York Times

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.

“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.

“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. “I remember feeling like, Isn’t this what everybody expects me to think?”

Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own. MORE …

NYT - Mixed Messenger: Multiracial issues and Obama

March 23, 2008

The Way We Live Now

By
PEGGY ORENSTEIN

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.   MORE …

THE ROOT: Alice Walker “Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave”

TheRoot.com

Updated: 6:17 PM ET Mar 27, 2008

March 27, 2008

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old.  On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future.  It is a space with which I am familiar.

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative,  Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as “Miss” when they reached the age of twelve.)  She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it.  Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not.  No Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.  They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night.  She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn:  not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style. MORE ….

Obama Speech: ‘A More Perfect Union’

NYT - The Red Phone in Black and White

March 11, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

The Red Phone in Black and White

By
ORLANDO PATTERSON

Cambridge, Mass.

ON first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.

I am not referring to the fact that the ad is unoriginal; as several others have noted, it mimics a similar ad made for Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign for the Democratic nomination. What bothers me is the difference between this and the Mondale ad. The Mondale ad directly and unequivocally played on the issue of experience. The danger was that the red telephone might be answered by someone who was “unsure, unsteady, untested.” Why do I believe this? Because the phone and Mr. Mondale are the only images in the ad. Fair game in the normal politics of fear. More …

Crosscut - Knute Berger - The rock star of hope

What’s amazing about Barack Obama’s message is that he can make something so wholesome seem so sexy.

By Knute Berger

A testament to just how good Barack Obama is is how good he makes the other politicians on stage with him look. It’s like he casts a glow that turns a conventional political tableaux — some stuffy old pols in folding chairs — into a scene washed in the light of a Caravaggio.

I just got back from hearing Obama speak at Seattle’s KeyArena. He was joined on stage by three local politicians who are not exactly paragons of charisma: U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, and Gov. Chris Gregoire. Yet such was the atmosphere created by Obama’s fans, and such was Obama’s rhetoric, that he made all three seems like the best-lit back-up band a guy ever had. Obama, of course, was the real rock star.

Read On … 

NYT - Top black leader drops Clinton to back Obama

Last updated February 14, 2008 8:46 p.m. PT

Ex-first lady sharpens attack on rival

By JEFF ZELENY AND PATRICK HEALY
THE NEW YORK TIMES

MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Rep. John Lewis, an elder statesman from the civil rights era and one of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s prominent black supporters, said on Thursday night that he planned to cast his vote as a superdelegate for Sen. Barack Obama in hopes of preventing a fight at the Democratic convention.

“In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” said Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who endorsed Clinton last fall. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”

Read On … 

We bruise our daughters when we bash Hillary Clinton — Connie Schultz

We bruise our daughters when we bash Hillary Clinton — Connie Schultz

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Connie Schultz

Plain Dealer Columnist

When I was 11 years old, my girl friends and I used to talk long into the night about how one of us was bound to become president of the United States.

We had no reason to believe that, except that we were young girls watching and learning from the chaos swirling around us. It was 1968, and the change blowing across the country was kicking up quite a breeze in our own small Ohio town.

Read on … 

HuffPost - Clinton’s New Campaign Manager is Black (But Shhh! Don’t Tell Anyone)

by Keli Goff

Huffington Post

Talk about irony. As I was sitting in a studio with award-winning Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa preparing to appear on CNN for a discussion regarding black and Latino voters, it was announced on-air that Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, who had made history as the first Latina to helm a major presidential campaign, was stepping down. Taking her place would be Maggie Williams, Clinton’s former White House Chief of Staff. Maggie Williams happens to be black, only you may not know that because most major news outlets didn’t mention it.

Read On …