America is not yet “post-bullshit”
(posted by Paige)
Here’s a great post from Angry Black Bitch. It has amazed me, though not really surprised me, how much focus there has been on gender and race in this campaign. It is hard to ignore how often they have trumped policy issues in the media coverage of Obama and Clinton as they compete for the nomination. For such a modern country, with an ego way bigger than Texas, we really have not come far from the archaic roots we started from. Ok, that’s an overstatement. It’s true that women were graciously given the right to vote (less than a hundred years ago) , black people are free (to fight it out in courts where the cards are stacked against them) , and sodomy laws were nullified 4 years ago by Lawrence v Texas (which means that now state courts may label homosexuals, among others, felons only at their own risk) . On the surface, things have changed for the better, but, as Shark-fu points out, the fact that a black man and a woman are real contenders for the presidency does not mean that “American society has transcended a damn thing.”
If anyone running for public office needs to swiftly debunk claims that she or he is a Muslim…we are not post-racial.
When pundits gleefully wallow in the stankification of sexism to the extent that an on-air public apology is required…we are not post-gender.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Blacks fare extremely, utterly awfully in the criminal justice system. In the civil, not so much.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Islam is a religion not a race. I think housing segregation and prisons are better evidence for America not being “post-racial”, though I am actually hard pressed to think of any place that is..