Navigating Difficult Waters

In the last two days, I have read four editorials from the New York Times and three in the Los Angeles Times exploring how landmark was Obama's speech on race this past Tuesday. Obama's speech made me teary eyed at moments, but somehow it still left me feeling empty, like drinking a diet soda. I still think he's the best choice we have for the next president of the United States, in large part because anyone who voted for the Iraq War should be removed from public office (and should definitely not be president). I think that these authors were so impressed by Obama's speech only because of the depressing lack of deep, thoughtful, and constructive public conversation that currently transpires around the complexities of race, not just in this country, but in this hemisphere.

I did read one editorial of different tenor in today's Los Angeles Times from Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Meyers believed that Obama blew it, that he had the opportunity to point that we are all just members of the human race, and that people like Jeremiah Wright must step aside and make way for a "color blind" America.

I disagree with Wright's take much more than those that laud the speech. Being mixed white and Latina (which are already "racially" mixed and oddly fraught terms), I have learned to distrust anyone who claims they are "color blind;" that's usually a way of stating "I have unexamined racial biases." Obama did not make that claim, and yet I also disagree with Nicholas D. Kristof's editorial that Obama misspoke originally when he claimed there was just America and not a black one and white one.

So this is just a meandering post. I can't tell you something other than that I just need us to be somewhere else right now. And part of getting there is about changing who can be president of the United States, and that's only one reason why it's essential that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton be the next president (even if my clear and unequivocal preference is for Obama).