It was appropriate and perhaps even significant that the Democratic candidates for president buried the race hatchet during Tuesday's debate which of course coincidentally fell on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday.
It was however equally inappropriate and perhaps significantly cowardly that all three leading candidates used the moment to pat each other on the back and with such niceties take race and gender off the table:
"I know that John and Hillary have always been committed to racial equality," said Obama.
"I'm proud of the fact that we have a woman and an African American who are very, very serious candidates for the presidency," said Edwards.
"Neither race nor gender should be a part of this campaign," said Clinton.
Don’t get me wrong.
To use race and/or gender as a divisive issue or as a platform to launch unfounded personal attacks on an opponent should not be acceptable. To use those most serious of issues for mere political gain is reprehensible.
But if we think this campaign has nothing to do with race or gender then we are fooling ourselves. Both Obama and Clinton will be hard pressed to secure the nomination if they lose their respective key racial constituencies creating an odd kind of paradox. Obama has to be careful not to endanger his predominance among the young white voters he has so successfully energized and Clinton will not be able to win without the support of older black voters, a fan base she really inherited from that other Clinton.
The media was not only full of the one week race dispute between Obama and Clinton but subtly and perhaps without intention reflected the ever present and so resilient racial contours that still frame today’s America. Yesterday, January 15, the day of the Democratic debate and Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday there was the oddest but in some way telling juxtaposition of two op-ed commentaries on the Washington Post’s website.
On the one hand there was ‘Obama’s Farrakhan Test’ by the American Jewish columnist Richard Cohen. Underneath that appeared the op-ed ‘A Hand The Clintons Aren’t Showing’ by the African American columnist Eugene Robinson. Cohen’s piece challenged Obama to explicitly distance himself from an award given last year to Louis Farrakhan by a magazine established in 1982 by the church Obama is a member of and run by the daughter of the church’s minister who is also Obama’s spiritual advisor. Robinson’s commentary expressed surprise at how aggressive the Clinton campaign had been in keeping the race issue alive over the last many days.
Neither of these venerable social commentators are prejudiced or racists or in any other ways deleterious personalities. But those two articles, next to each other, on that day seemed to hold some curious symbolism.
Race and gender are never far from the surface in today’s America. Have we already forgotten Katrina? Take a look in any American prison. Or even today, take a look in many major corporate boardrooms. The former is drastically and tragically over-represented by inmates of color and the latter is still shocking in its under-representation of women. Look at census figures of home ownership and higher education to see in black and white the lack of equal access to these key pillars of achieving the American dream. Open those figuratively pink and blue pay slips across the country and see that women still take home only 77% of what men take home.
By denying race and gender in this campaign we are not only fooling ourselves. We are doing America a great disservice. We are missing the chance to celebrate the enormous historical importance of this election year. Consider the following facts for a moment.
When Barack Obama was born in 1961, huge numbers of African Americans were still living under the shameful and disgraceful rule of Jim Crow and the last racially motivated lynching of a black man had yet to take place. Martin Luther King Jr was still to give his “I Have a Dream Speech” and America’s monumental civil rights legislation had not yet even been launched by President Kennedy.
When Hillary Clinton was born in 1947 there had only been 5 women senators in America’s 158 year congressional history and no woman had been elected to a party leadership position. There were no women CEO’s of major corporations and possibly not even any women corporate officers. Hillary had to wait until 1972 when she was 25 years old to see the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the first woman director at General Motors.
In the lifetimes of these two candidates we have seen African Americans go from the backseat of the bus to having a real chance at assuming the central seat of the Oval Office. In their lifetimes we have seen women move from the steno pool to having a serious chance of becoming America’s "CEO" and Commander-in-Chief.
The strangest irony of this campaign is that both Obama and Clinton want to become America’s next president. In any other circumstance I am convinced they would be the other’s staunchest supporter. That makes the 'racial tensions' of the last week between the two even more ridiculous.
But to deny race and gender in this campaign is to deny celebrating the great achievements these two individuals represent, achievements that were not possible even a few years ago. But more importantly America denies the incredible challenge it still faces if it wants to finally and truly eliminate race and gender as two of the most hurtful and festering open wounds on its soul.
If Obama can not run as a black candidate making his personal struggle for identity and success as the son of a mixed-race couple a central theme then this campaign is all about race. If Clinton can't run as a woman candidate making her personal struggle for identity and success as a woman a central theme for her then this campaign is all about gender. To think otherwise is the real fairytale of Campaign 2008.
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