Most of y’all are fam, so you know slapping somebody can sometimes be a good thing 
.
A woman in South Carolina speaks her mind on the media coverage and man, I was ready to take my shoe off and throw it at the computer.
Commentary: Issues — not gender or race — on minds of voters
(CNN) — You can’t turn on a 24-hour news channel or your nightly news this week without seeing a feature on African-American women voters. It makes sense, being that the South Carolina Democratic primary is only one day away and African-American women will make up approximately one-third of the voters.
The angle in these news features is virtually identical. The commentators wonder and marvel at the extraordinarily difficult choice for African-American women in this primary — will we vote for the woman candidate or the African-American candidate? Reporters have been busying themselves traveling to crowded beauty shops all over the state to answer this question.
The funniest, or perhaps most disturbing, thing about these stories is how far they are from my reality. I am an African-American woman living in South Carolina. I have African-American women family members and friends who live in this state. I actually visit beauty shops to get my hair done. Never once have I heard a single woman I know frame the choice about whom to vote for as a question of gender or racial politics.
So what are African-American women talking about when the cameras aren’t watching or, more importantly, what are we telling the media that is not being fairly reported? African-American women are talking about the issues!
We talk about the vision that each candidate has for leading this country. We enthusiastically discuss the possibility that real, positive change will come from this election. We even parse the policy distinctions in the candidates’ positions on education, creating jobs and ending the war in Iraq.
Sometimes, the issues we talk about do deal with aspects of gender and racial identity. We debated Sen. Hillary Clinton’s statement implying that Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement did not fulfill its promise until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. We argue and marvel at the significant generational divide in the African-American community that is being exposed by this election process.
If you listen closely to the women in the news features at the beauty shops, they are commenting on these issues, even when the voice-over in the same feature is telling you that the women are discussing whether it’s more important to have the first woman or the first black president. (more…)
One of the things I have been repeating to myself these last few weeks is that both MSM and those who are only supporting Obama because he is Black are playing right into the southern strategy many are accusing the Clintons of implementing. From day one, Obama has gotten pure love from the media–both nationally and internationally–touting not his record and how it differs from the other candidates, but how nice it would be to have a Black man in the White house. In one of his earlier interviews, he even told the media to stop placing all the focus on him being a Black man and look at his record. The more folks make every state caucus a litmus test for race relations, the more they are helping to drive a wedge between the races. Both MSM and the online community tried to do this in Iowa and it did not work. Where folks expected Obama to get creamed in a state comprised mostly of Whites, he actually won. Why? Because I feel that folks were looking more at the issues important to them and not allow folks to scare them into voting a certain way.
Sooner or later, Obama’s new car smell is going to wear off. If you are really trying make a convincing sell to voters on the fence, try emphasizing what is under the hood.
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