Rosa Brooks: "Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black!"

finally, a voice of reason...

The media just can't stop gushing and clucking and gasping about it all. Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black! Will American voters accept a female candidate? A black candidate? Are voters more sexist or more racist? What's a bigger problem in America today, sexism or racism?

Snore.

These questions are tedious and inane. Simplistic efforts to evaluate whether racism or sexism is "worse" are inherently meaningless. Racism and sexism operate in complex and different ways. We should reflect on the ways in which racism and sexism have marred our history and cast shadows over our future, but let's not turn it into a parlor game about who's got it worse, women or blacks.

Increasingly, the media obsession with whether Americans will be less likely to vote for a black man or for a woman is also beside the point -- because to an emerging generation of younger voters, the very terms in which the questions have been framed no longer make much sense.

snore indeed...! when my youngest, my daughter, was in high school, i was both surprised and extremely gratified to discover that she and her group of friends included guys, gays, and people of color, and that they thought absolutely nothing about it... they chose each other because they all had many interests in many things - movies, books, issues, music, interesting facts - none of which had anything to do with sexual orientation, gender, or color of skin... while i'm from the high school generation of the early 60s, my high school, a small school (450 in grades 9-12) in a small city (100,000) along the front range of the rockies, featured a noticeable percentage of blacks and hispanics, and we, too, thought nothing of it... (gay...? we hadn't a clue, unfortunately...) anyway, i was delighted to see my daughter and her friends blithely carrying on as if none of those things mattered, which, of course, they don't...

rosa brooks is spot-on... voting for a black man or a woman is a non-issue, and anybody of any generation who has two brain cells to rub together knows and accepts that... to have our national media talking heads go on, and on, AND ON, endlessly, about these non-issues is nothing more or less than all those salacious and suggestive television ads, craftily designed to stimulate our sexual desire, sprinkled liberally between news stories about the societal benefits of abstinence as the only approved form of sex education... in short, it's total crap...

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