I don’t remember why the subject came up. But I do remember that you, with your 8-year-old earnestness, asked “Will there ever be a black president?” Do you remember that?

I remember we took a while to answer you. We were all trying to decide whether to tell you what we really thought, or tell you what you should tell an eight year old about his own possibility for greatness.

Your grandmother and my dad (his aunt) grew up in the segregated South. They remembered “colored” signs on rest rooms and water fountains. They remembered packing food on road trips to New York and Baltimore because they wouldn’t be able to find a restaurant that served Negroes until they got north of Virginia. My dad remembers being called a ‘nigger’ on more than one occasion both in South Carolina and Long Island, New York. Their cynicism was deeply shaped by lived experience.

I, on the other hand, had just finished four years of college. What little lefty, wide-eyed idealism I had was beat out of me by all of those electives I took about “intersecting oppressions,” “structural racism” and “cultural imperialism.” I had never been called a nigger to my face — though some of my black friends who grew up in white, northeastern neighborhoods had — but I was starting to feel and notice the impact of racism as a cultural belief. My cynicism was young, but still there.

So when you asked the question, we all thought about how to answer. Do we give you the answer that’s drenched in some unhealthy mix of cynicism and pragmatism? Or do we give you the answer that you should give an 8-year-old who is still able to dream big?

After what seemed like an eternity, your grandmother finally said, “Yes Chris. There will be a black president someday. It probably won’t happen in my life time. But it will in yours.”

I’m not sure any of us fully believed her answer at the time. And, no, she didn’t live to see it. But she was right about us seeing it.

Amazing isn’t it?

Love, Tiffany

By this time tomorrow, polls all along the east coast will be open and ready for citizens to cast their ballots. Roughly twelve hours later, we’ll start to get the nation’s first results in an election that is, for many reasons (starting with how f*ckin’ long ago the campaigning started), historic.

Most of the polls and projections I’ve seen has Obama squarely in the lead. But then I remember the shenanigans of the 2004 election. And I remember that people don’t always tell the truth in polls, and that poll results themselves can be flawed. And that chills me.

See, if Obama loses, I will be forced to believe one of the following scenarios:

1. My fellow citizens like to lie to pollsters and really do support trickle-down economics, unregulated markets, the privatization of everything, and endless war;
2. My fellow (white) citizens are so racist that they can’t vote for a black man, if it’s in their best interests; or
3. My country is essentially a capitalist dictatorship where people “vote,” but results are subject to tampering and therefore meaningless.

None of those scenarios sit well with me — particularly as a black woman who thought it would be another 30 years before it would even be possible to elect a black president — and I’m not sure what I’d do or believe in if, somehow, this election did not go Obama’s way.

Related:

• Blacks see hope, doubt in an Obama victory from the San Francisco Chronicle.
• If Obama Loses, Who Gets Blamed? from Slate.com

My comment was pretty much what I would have said in a blog entry, so I’m posting it here as well.

I think you’re right Dave. But I decided to cut GF some slack when she said that she was her gender was the deciding factor in the 1984 VP candidacy. It’s not that she couldn’t have done the job, she said, but she was chosen over other people because she was a woman.

Now where GF hangs herself with the rope the media handed her is that she doesn’t concede or acknowledge that Hillary is also where she is because she’s a woman and because, frankly, we still like Bill. GF then buried herself with the Oppressed White Person Defense.

But think about it: neither Clinton nor Obama are radical change-bringers. You could make the case that they’re the black male and the white female version of John Edwards (and I’m still not clear on whether Obama has a foreign policy and what that policy might be). They’re really both quite moderate and unremarkable in terms of policy.

But there is a whole lot remarkable about Obama’s blackness and Hillary’s gender. And I think Democrats are caught up in how cool that would be. I know I am, though in terms of policy, I’m much more in line with Kucinich.

That’s not to say that Obama (or Clinton) is unqualified or even less qualified. It’s to say “put 6 Democratic candidates in a bag and 5 would make a good president.” Where Obama and Hillary have an edge is that *physically* they look different from presidents 1 – 43.

And sometimes that’s what a country needs.

Related:

• Expertinent: The Political Psychology of Race and Gender (From Newsweek)
• When ‘Identity Politics‘ Is Rational (From The New York Times)

The pairing of “Islam” and “fascism” has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism – indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain. Protestant and Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland, both deserving the label “fascist,” never had their religions prefixed to that word. Nor have Hindu extremists in India, nor Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka.

No really: watch the clip. Or read the quote:

I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And thats what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than trying to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.

And what scares me even more is that the majority of the Christians in this country wouldn’t see one thing wrong with doing so. The same folks who cower under their blankets fearing ‘Islamofacism’ — a buzzword that denies our effed-up neo-colonial policies as a contributing factor to the current rage against us — are completely okay with making the rest of us conform to the Jesus-loving variant* that I’ll call Christiofacism.

As an atheist with Buddhist leanings who would be one of the first victims of a Christian Society**, this scares me.

*Mind you, Jesus-loving is not the problem. The problem is when we argue that Christianity should be the single, universal moral basis for making laws.

**No, we are not currently a Christian Society or a Christian Nation. We are a society and a state with a predominantly Christian population. There is a difference. Our founders were clear about the role the state in religion and religion in the state, though they were clear that their religion guided their politics.