What Barack Obama means to America - PLEASE SEND TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

Inspiration for the young

Hope and concern

Elder in awe

Spike Lee on the Knicks, Barack Obama, and 'The Bradley Effect"

Issues, solutions trump race in U.S. election

by Lisa Van Dusen/10.26.08

On the evening of last Jan. 26 at the Columbia, S.C., Convention Center, something happened in the middle of Barack Obama's victory speech.

Obama had beaten Hillary Clinton 55%-27% in that day's primary, results that were seen at least in part as a referendum on the issue of race, especially among whites, a quarter of whom voted for Obama.

"We have the most votes the most delegates and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we've seen in a long, long time," Obama said.

From the bleachers behind him, a new chant erupted.

"Race doesn't matter! Race doesn't matter!"

It was an admonishment to the other side and a dare to the rest of the country.

In the past two weeks, the rest of the country seems to have responded. Obama is now at least ten points ahead in most polls. More crucially, especially for the question of whether America was ready for a black president, 48 percent now say they have confidence in Obama serving as commander in chief, statistically even with McCain's 50 percent, and seven out of 10 now say race won't be a factor in their vote.

Those numbers have shifted in the past six weeks, as Obama has passed every leadership test McCain has failed, from his choice of running mate to his handling of the economy to his daily campaign decisions (at a certain point, momentum becomes its own leadership indicator).

After months of uncertainty about whether there was a ceiling beyond which racial attitudes would limit his support, the issue has been clarified by both voters' economic concerns and Obama's obvious strengths.

Obama is now leading in states such as Indiana and Virginia that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson's landslide against Barry Goldwater in 1964, when the demographic divisions over his newly passed Civil Rights Act hadn't yet gelled and the nation was still mourning president Kennedy.

ACCOMPLISHMENT

No matter what happens in the next nine days, the success of their 50-state strategy is an accomplishment that not just Obama but his Chicago strategists won't have to tell their grandchildren about because they'll learn it in civics class.

What they may also learn is that, in this election, the path from voter intention to ballot to official result was especially daunting.

The 2000 Florida recounts exposed more about the sausage-making details of democracy than just chads and hanging chads, it revealed the extent to which voter suppression had become the new black art of political warfare and it's only grown more sophisticated since then.

Since Congress passed the misleadingly named Help America Vote Act in 2002, partisan election officials have purged, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, more than 2.7 million voters from the rolls. In 2004, more than 1.6 million votes were never counted.

Environmental lawyer and Democratic activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose birthright must give him an acute appreciation for the lengths to which people will go to subvert democracy, founded the website NoVoterLeftBehind.net partly to substantiate to the conventional wisdom that the law disproportionately impacts Democratic voters.

"HAVA has been used to erect a series of barriers," Kennedy told MSNBC last week, "that make it really an obstacle course, particularly for African Americans to vote, for Hispanics to vote, for young people and old people."

The new registration requirements, in the finest tradition of racially and politically skewed motor voter laws, use prohibitively stringent ID requirements, including driver's licence requirements and "perfect match" rules that require every fact on all your government IDs to match when you register to vote.

BRADLEY EFFECT

Most years, a huge gap between pre-vote polling, exit poll results and official tallies would raise questions. But because of the speculation about the Bradley effect, whereby the black mayor of Los Angeles lost his bid for the California governorship 26 years ago after polls showed him ahead, the outcome some people envision when they say "narrow victory scenario" holds more than a faint hope.

When voters have cited issues other than race in their intention not to vote for Obama and the ones who do see race as an issue haven't been shy about it, a real Bradley effect would require an awful lot of backpedalling by an awful lot of people.

And covering suppression by selling a decades-old fable that race does matter to voters who've already said it doesn't would make what happened in Florida eight years ago look like a day at the beach.

McCain Campaign: Calling out the worst in us, exploiting the worst of racism!

New York TImes Endorses Obama

Barack Obama for President
October 23, 2008

(Read the entire endorsement here)

Mr. Obama has withstood some of the toughest campaign attacks ever mounted against a candidate. He’s been called un-American and accused of hiding a secret Islamic faith. The Republicans have linked him to domestic terrorists and questioned his wife’s love of her country. Ms. Palin has also questioned millions of Americans’ patriotism, calling Republican-leaning states “pro-America.”

This politics of fear, division and character assassination helped Mr. Bush drive Mr. McCain from the 2000 Republican primaries and defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004. It has been the dominant theme of his failed presidency.

The nation’s problems are simply too grave to be reduced to slashing “robo-calls” and negative ads. This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all of those qualities.

Patriotic American Grandmother Sues McCain and Palin for 'Hate Speech'

Congressman John Lewis speaks the truth to John McCain, Sarah Palin, the Republican Party, and the citizens of the United States

John Lewis, Rep. (D-Ga.)

As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

McCain's attacks fuel dangerous hatred

By Frank Schaeffer | October 10, 2008

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain. You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

John McCain, you're walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out "Terrorist" or "Kill him," history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

Change the atmosphere of your campaign. Talk about the issues at hand. Make your case. But stop stirring up the lunatic fringe of haters, or risk suffering the judgment of history and the loathing of the American people - forever.

We will hold you responsible.

Frank Schaeffer is the author of "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.

After stoking the flames of hate, McCain pulls back and proclaims Obama to be a 'decent' man - you don't have to be scared (of him as) President."

The Spirit of Lincoln

Racism could decide U.S. vote

By LISA VAN DUSEN | September 24, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Lincoln Memorial is pretty sparse on this gorgeous early Sunday morning in September, with just the security guards and a handful of German and Spanish tourists capturing the steps in family gaggles, photo by photo.

There are no school groups and, this being America, the locals are at church, so you can BlackBerry most of a column from the top step without being in anyone's way.

When my daughter was little and we lived in Washington, we'd come here on Martin Luther King Day and talk about how these steps were built to honour one man who died for his dream of America and later were made famous by another one.

I hadn't planned on the ritual being that morbid, but that first day I was caught short by the reality that every five-year-old line of questioning led to the same ending.

Abraham Lincoln was called up by history to fight the Civil War to end slavery . . . then what happened?

King fought for civil rights and he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on a day just like this from that spot right there and there were so many people you couldn't see a blade of grass between here and the Washington Monument . . . then what happened?

So, the focus got tilted toward the bravery angle.

Behind me, on either side of the exhausted man in the big chair, are engraved two of his speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural address.

It's impossible to read them today, to think of Lincoln reminding a nation that it was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," without thinking of this election.

There's an AP poll that says in an election as close as this one, racist attitudes among Independents and white voters in his own party could cost Barack Obama the presidency; that if he were white, he'd be running six points higher in the polls instead of in a dead heat with John McCain.

This issue was always going to matter, it was just a question of how far Obama would be able to navigate the gradations of comfort to discomfort once you factored out Republicans and people who disagree with him on particular issues before he hit a wall.

Now there's a number attached to that mystery margin of white Independents and Democrats who would have voted for him on the issues, but won't because of his skin colour. It's 2.5 per cent, which is larger than the margin that decided the 2004 election.

It's easy to figure history judged Lincoln to be right as you're sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead of the Jefferson Davis Memorial, but what goes into smaller, personal definitions of right and wrong doesn't necessarily get less complicated over time.

It's hard not to wonder what Lincoln would make of this moment and what history will make of this presidential election, less than three lifetimes after he won a war and lost his life over something human progress would no longer abide, regardless.

And it's impossible to look out over the reflecting pool and the empty grass to the Washington monument and not wonder what King would think, less than one lifetime after he stood on that landing, of the confounding persistence of wrong ideas in the only country that could have produced such men.

Surely...we can be better than this!

Poll: Lingering racism may hurt Obama

updated 11:04 a.m. ET, Sat., Sept. 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

'Less likely to vote for Obama'
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views.

Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.

"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

Issue among Democrats
The findings suggest that Obama's problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.

The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election.

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn't be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites' views.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don't trust Obama's change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.

Still, the effects of whites' racial views are apparent in the polling.

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

But in an election without precedent, it's hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.

The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.

Other techniques used in the poll included recording people's responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks' troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.

"We still don't like black people," said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.

Word association
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites."

Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn't.

Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks "intelligent" or "smart," more than one third latched on the adjective "complaining" and 24 percent said blacks were "violent."

Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they "try harder."

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

The Clinton factor
Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people's votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Clinton's backers.

Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton's white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.

The survey of 2,227 adults was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

Message to the Unethical and/or Spineless Howard Dean: Obama Won Months Ago!

AP | 4/28/08:

"Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama must drop out of the Democratic presidential race after the June primaries in order to unify the party by the convention and win the election in November.

But Dean didn't say which candidate should drop out, only that it should happen after primary voters have been to the polls."

This statement by Howard Dean is unconscionable at worst, and cowardly at best. For Howard to suggest that it is close, or that Obama should consider leaving the race in June, is absurd and insulting.

The Democratic Party nominates its candidate with pledged delegates, and for some months now it has been considered by most everyone outside the delusional and unscrupulous Clinton campaign, mathematically impossible for Hillary to catch Obama.

There is only one conclusion: Obama won, Hillary lost.

But the mass-media continues to talk about the "close race," and Howard Dean, leader of the DNC continued this weekend to refer to the race as a near tie.

Why?

Let's face it folks ... it's becoming clearer by the moment that the white power structure within the democratic party is, for a myriad of reasons from one kind of racism to another kind of racism, is closing ranks to ensure that a black man will not become the next president of the United States.

Screw Obama out of the nomination he has already won and begin counting the voters that will stay home, or vote for John McCain.

zjm

Alice Walker - "Lest We Forget ... An open letter to my sisters who are brave"

Sometimes, words are simply pure gospel ... this is the legacy of truth I want my daughters to know and embrace - zjm

Alice Walker

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.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.

The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.

When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.

Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.

We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Namaste;

And with all my love,

Alice Walker

Cazul

Northern California

First Day of Spring

Obama owes no apology for his pastor's sermons

March 23, 2008

By Andrea Collier Post-Tribune columnist

My husband has a 5-year-old nephew who says "you're riling me" when he thinks people are deliberately stressing him out. When it comes to race, America, you are riling me.

This past week we have demanded that a presidential candidate get off point in terms of what he wants to do to run this country to fight for his political life and cut his friend off at the knees in the case of Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. We demand this so we can feel comfortable, all because we don't know how to dialogue about our differences and the way our country has dealt with those differences.

I write this from a hotel that faces the Fox Theater in Atlanta. It is the historic theater where, at the premier of "Gone With The Wind," where the colored people had to see the movie in the balcony -- including the woman who would win an Oscar for her performance. It is also the place where much of the Rev. Martin Luther King's strategy was formed. It occurs to me that if there had been CNN or YouTube tracking his every word, history may have judged him in a harsher light. It also reminds me that for years, the King was viewed by whites as a threat to American society.

When I was a kid in the late '50s and early '60s, we went to church on Sunday to talk about God. But we also went to church in the evenings to paint flyers, to hear speakers and to get fired up. I was a little girl fired up. "What do we want? Freedom!," I'd say holding a picket sign. "When do we want it? Now." I am ever aware that generations of my family paid a high price for me to enjoy the life I live now. I never take it for granted. All over this country, it was the preachers who would give passionate speeches and make bold calls to action. For us, the American dream was born and realized in the basements of the black churches. The fear of the dream realized made people burn churches, bomb them -- in my lifetime.

If Wright has said things to offend white America, it is up to him to apologize -- or not. I remind you that Clinton supporter Geraldine Ferraro has said much about race. And she was very clear that she meant it. Not only did she get a pass, but nobody is holding Clinton's feet to the fire for what she said.

So, in 2008, America is outraged at an old-school preacher who speaks about the country as he sees it. We have tried to force Obama into a Sophie's choice of sorts. Choose. Discredit. Distance. Whatever we are so mad about, Obama didn't say it. He doesn't need to apologize for it. We all have relatives, friends, and ministers that we don't agree with all the time. But we know that we don't have to erase them from our lives to be seen as a viable, respectable human being--unless you are a black man running for president. Because if you are going to be a viable candidate, we need to know that your life is free of any black people who still have anger or hurt at the past. You can't associate with anybody who is so frustrated at the slowness of the progress.

I am black. I am a woman. I am a mother, a daughter, a wife and a friend. To discount any of these things is to diminish who I am. I am a citizen of the world and want to leave it in a better place than when I arrived here. No apologies necessary.

Andrea King Collier is a Gary native who lives in Lansing, Mich.

At Stake in Election 08: The Conscience of America

The great sin and crime of humanity takes place when the supposed 'good people' of society remain silent in the face of unspeakable wrong and evil. Racism has been, and remains the central ugliness of the American experience. Finally, one journalist, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, echoing the indignation of Howard Beale in 'Network,' and the real life courage of Edward R. Murrow in his stand against McCarthyism, has spoken the truth - in an authoritative manner that most leadership of the Democratic Party cannot even imagine. Watching this clip will be the best use of ten minutes of your time that you will ever spend. | zjm

Change is Possible: The New South; The New America

Karl Rove, Darth Vader, and Hillary Clinton - 'Color-coded Hillary Alerts' by James Moore

by James Moore | Huffington Post | March 11, 2008
If anyone has paid acutely painful attention to the political ministrations of Karl Rove over the past two and a half decades, it's me. And if there is anyone qualified to make comparisons between democracy's Darth Vader and Hillary Clinton, I stand at the head of that line, as well. And sadly, the similarities are so brutally obvious as to be disturbing.

First, there is this matter of her husband, a man I admired as president in spite of his teenage behavior. Sen. Barack Obama has run a campaign that has never mentioned race. In fact, ethnicity was not an issue until President William Jefferson Clinton made his comparisons of Obama in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson. We were on the verge of almost transcending such superficial nonsense until Mr. Clinton brought us back to 1968.

And presently, we have the first female vice presidential candidate ringing the bell on the same topic. Geraldine Ferraro is, of course, a part of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Senator Clinton plays the innocent on most of this by refusing to denounce these pronunciations. When she had the opportunity on 60 Minutes to tell the world that it is nonsense for the fear mongers to suggest Obama is a Muslim, she demurred with a qualified, "as far as I know" he's not. But she does know. Sen. Clinton and Obama have attended numerous Capital Hill prayer breakfasts together. Does she think he was playing the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, perhaps trying to see what is going on with that whole Christianity thing? Isn't any person believable when they declare their faith until they have been vetted by the Clinton campaign?

She saved her campaign in Texas by acting like George W. Bush drunk on the ideas of Karl Rove. The 3 a.m. call ad that used fear to drive voters in her direction was nothing more than a desperate politician's attempt to tell everyone not even duct tape will save them if they vote for Obama. Created by Roy Spence of Austin, the ad was first deployed in 1984 in the Mondale campaign. (His ad agency also gave us, "You are now free to move around the country," and, "Don't mess with Texas," as memorable slogans.)

As Karl Rove has proven and as Orlando Patterson pointed out in the New York Times, campaigns and their messages are often more about image than substance. Was it an oversight or a design that the children sleeping safely in that 3 a.m. ad were white? Isn't everyone in politics astute enough to know these days that everyone who needs protecting isn't white? When Bush was running for president, Rove never let him be photographed without a rainbow coalition of children. Are we supposed to believe that Hillary's minders didn't see the racism implicit in her phone call ad?

The Clinton campaign doesn't seem to understand that the depth of Obama's appeal comes from his willingness to look forward with optimism instead of over his shoulder in fear. When he says, "We need to talk to our friends, but we also need to talk to our enemies," he is speaking for every mother and father who has a son in Iraq or one who might end up toting a gun for an amorphous cause that few can any longer explain. Who doesn't want to know why we are so despised that people will strap bombs to themselves to blow us up? Oh, I forgot, they hate our freedom. That's one Sen. Clinton hasn't tried yet.

It is also obscene in the extreme for the Clinton campaign to compare Sen. Obama to Ken Starr. Many voters from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California want to know how much money the senator and the former president are earning, to whom he is speaking for large sums, and how he paid for his library in Little Rock. Do the Clintons really want to remind us what Ken Starr was looking for? As a friend of mine has suggested, this utter lack of judgment to bring his name back into the public discourse is "breathtaking."

Clinton is unwilling to sully her own hands with these absurd references. Like Rove, she relies on surrogates to go out and fire the gun. After the targets are wounded or dead, Rove had his clients come in and call for gun control and explain how they admired the political victim. Not Senator Clinton. She does nothing to denounce the nastiness. By pretending Obama is not prepared to lead, she proves her own desperation to acquire power and she denigrates the remaining historical reputation of her husband's administration. Historians might look beyond this dust devil she has spun, but the general public won't be able to see through the dirt flying through the air.

We are all tired of this. We all have Bush-Clinton fatigue. We need a hopeful, fresh start. Hillary might have made a fine president. But she has turned into an ugly campaigner.

This is not her time.

James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. His second book, Bush's War for Reelection included his groundbreaking ten year investigation into the president's National Guard record. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976. He is also the author of The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. His political columns and insights have been published in leading newspapers and periodicals around the globe. Moore is also an award winning documentary film producer. His current book project, When Horses Could Fly: A Memoir of the American Dream is a narrative examining the hopes and dreams of southerners in the aftermath of World War II.

Obama on Ferraro