Look, you can just skip this one, but I had to get this out of my system.
So I had a big argument with my mother about Hillary Clinton. I’m the one who voted for her in our primary, but my mother is the one who’s saying, “How can you not vote for Hillary?” She totally said that since we’ve never had a female president, we have to back Hillary. I think that is re-goddamn-diculous (I think I stole that from Dr. Evil—thanks, Mike Myers!), and she would not listen to my argument for why you cannot vote for Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman. Basically, it’s this: supporting for Hillary because she is the lady candidate is still reducing her to her vagina—it is exactly as bad as not voting for her solely because she’s a woman, okay? Now, I’m not saying that the fact that she is a woman can be, like, ignored, because it did factor pretty importantly into my voting decision, but like I said in January, I voted for Hillary because I think that she is the one woman active in politics today who could handle being this country’s first female president, and it is about damn time we had a female president. I don’t agree with her stance on everything, but I don’t agree with Obama’s stance on everything either—and I just think that Hillary would do a better job of running the country, regardless of the fact that we are in need of a female leader. Still, both of them are a billion times better than McCain and leaps and bounds more than a billion times better than George Bush.
Anyway, the important thing here right now is that neither Democratic candidate is a rich white man. As long as we get a Democratic president, we will be making history. It is also about damn time we chose a black person to run this country. If Obama were a woman, it would be doubly awesome. If Obama were a woman, running against Hillary, I wonder who I would have voted for. I wonder if the race would be anywhere near as close. I wonder if that could ever even happen in the near future: if the two Democratic front-runners for the presidential nomination could ever both be women.
God, I hope so.
So black men were given the right to vote (on paper, at least—I know it was pretty dicey for a while) about sixty years before women were. Let’s not wait sixty fucking years to elect a female president, America, okay?
Look, if Hillary were a dude—if she were Bill’s brother and not his wife—would I have voted for Obama because I want some diversity in the White House? God, I don’t know. It’s fucking stupid that race and gender have anything to do with these decisions we make, but when we’ve had forty-three old, rich white men run this country, you begin to want a leader who is different. Someone who represents you—or if the leader can’t represent you, at least someone who can represent a part of the population of this country which has never, ever been fairly represented. This is true of both African-Americans and women of all races in these United States. It is true of all minorities in these United States. We’ve let white dudes run the show for two hundred and thirty years, and it didn’t go so badly for a while, but right now, we are in fierce need of someone with a different perspective on life.
Anyway, my point is this: voting for Hillary because she’s a woman and voting for Obama because he’s not white are just as bad as the reverse. It’s still sexism and racism, albeit with a more positive result than you usually get from sexism and racism.
Well. Being a woman is not just about biology, and being a black person is not just about skin color. Minorities in this country experience things, have to go through things that white men will never, ever understand. Heterosexual white men have never, ever had their rights denied to them because of their sexual organs or their skin color—things over which they had no control. They’ve never been made to feel less than human—they’ve never legally been the property of someone else. So both Hillary and Obama have different perspectives to bring to the presidency, because they are both so different from the people who’ve held the highest office in the land since the beginning. They both belong to groups of people who have had to struggle—and struggle desperately—for the rights that every single goddamn citizen of this country should enjoy. The fact that it is 2008, and we have yet to have a female leader or a leader who is not white means that these groups of people are still struggling. And that is really unacceptable. For me.
So I had a big argument with my mother about Hillary Clinton. I’m the one who voted for her in our primary, but my mother is the one who’s saying, “How can you not vote for Hillary?” She totally said that since we’ve never had a female president, we have to back Hillary. I think that is re-goddamn-diculous (I think I stole that from Dr. Evil—thanks, Mike Myers!), and she would not listen to my argument for why you cannot vote for Hillary Clinton just because she is a woman. Basically, it’s this: supporting for Hillary because she is the lady candidate is still reducing her to her vagina—it is exactly as bad as not voting for her solely because she’s a woman, okay? Now, I’m not saying that the fact that she is a woman can be, like, ignored, because it did factor pretty importantly into my voting decision, but like I said in January, I voted for Hillary because I think that she is the one woman active in politics today who could handle being this country’s first female president, and it is about damn time we had a female president. I don’t agree with her stance on everything, but I don’t agree with Obama’s stance on everything either—and I just think that Hillary would do a better job of running the country, regardless of the fact that we are in need of a female leader. Still, both of them are a billion times better than McCain and leaps and bounds more than a billion times better than George Bush.
Anyway, the important thing here right now is that neither Democratic candidate is a rich white man. As long as we get a Democratic president, we will be making history. It is also about damn time we chose a black person to run this country. If Obama were a woman, it would be doubly awesome. If Obama were a woman, running against Hillary, I wonder who I would have voted for. I wonder if the race would be anywhere near as close. I wonder if that could ever even happen in the near future: if the two Democratic front-runners for the presidential nomination could ever both be women.
God, I hope so.
So black men were given the right to vote (on paper, at least—I know it was pretty dicey for a while) about sixty years before women were. Let’s not wait sixty fucking years to elect a female president, America, okay?
Look, if Hillary were a dude—if she were Bill’s brother and not his wife—would I have voted for Obama because I want some diversity in the White House? God, I don’t know. It’s fucking stupid that race and gender have anything to do with these decisions we make, but when we’ve had forty-three old, rich white men run this country, you begin to want a leader who is different. Someone who represents you—or if the leader can’t represent you, at least someone who can represent a part of the population of this country which has never, ever been fairly represented. This is true of both African-Americans and women of all races in these United States. It is true of all minorities in these United States. We’ve let white dudes run the show for two hundred and thirty years, and it didn’t go so badly for a while, but right now, we are in fierce need of someone with a different perspective on life.
Anyway, my point is this: voting for Hillary because she’s a woman and voting for Obama because he’s not white are just as bad as the reverse. It’s still sexism and racism, albeit with a more positive result than you usually get from sexism and racism.
Well. Being a woman is not just about biology, and being a black person is not just about skin color. Minorities in this country experience things, have to go through things that white men will never, ever understand. Heterosexual white men have never, ever had their rights denied to them because of their sexual organs or their skin color—things over which they had no control. They’ve never been made to feel less than human—they’ve never legally been the property of someone else. So both Hillary and Obama have different perspectives to bring to the presidency, because they are both so different from the people who’ve held the highest office in the land since the beginning. They both belong to groups of people who have had to struggle—and struggle desperately—for the rights that every single goddamn citizen of this country should enjoy. The fact that it is 2008, and we have yet to have a female leader or a leader who is not white means that these groups of people are still struggling. And that is really unacceptable. For me.
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