Race and Politics -- Part III

I'm going to steal this idea from Rachel's Tavern, where she posted a serious question for everyone:

Who are you planning to support in the upcoming Presidential primary/election?

And I don't necessarily mean who do you plan to vote for (there were some slightly snarky comments that pointed out that her question was meant only for those eligible to vote in the upcoming elections), I really mean regardless of whether you are eligible or plan to vote (although let me put in a plug for the civic process and say if you are eligible, please REGISTER TO VOTE--PLEASE VOTE IN THE PRIMARIES AND THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION--SERIOUSLY, IT'S THE ONE TIME I DO GET VERY NATIONALISTIC/PATRIOTIC AND BELIEVE THAT IT'S INCUMBENT ON ANYONE WHO CAN VOTE TO VOTE. ONE ONLY HAS TO LOOK AT THE 2000 GORE/BUSH ELECTION TO UNDERSTAND THAT TRULY EVERY VOTE COUNTS.)

Where was I?

Oh yes, I am curious what you think about the upcoming Presidential race (even if you only clicked on accidentally, for example, if you typed in "I love Asian women" hoping to find something salacious and instead found my post about anti-Orientalism and castigating people for sexualizing Asian women--no joke, that post gets a lot of hits and I'm not sure it's by people who are Project Runway fan).

There were some at Rachel's Tavern (click here for her original question) who really felt that it didn't matter who was President, at least they seemed to insinuate this by their lumping of the 3 Democratic frontrunners together (and the largely dismissive nature of the entire Republican pool) and by a few folks saying they were supporting Green Party candidates (although, again, we see what happened in Florida and Ohio in 2000 and while I like the Green Party I really don't want to see a repeat of what happened in 2000 happen in 2008 because I (and I'm sure millions if not billions of people around the world) want an end to the madness).

Actually, I am very curious for people who are living in the U.S. and who are unable to vote (like my many academic colleagues who are from China, Canada, Britain, Jamaica, among other places) or for those of you few readers outside the U.S. who have a much different take on U.S. politics--how much do you care, in France, in Brazil, in Malaysia who the next President of the United States is?

And because this is a blog about Mixed Race America--for those of you who care about this topic, how important is the next president for a mixed-race America? Clearly Obama embodies the essence of a mixed race America in his biography, but that's not the reason I'm supporting him. (I did talk about why I finally threw my support behind him after doing some research and you can read about it in some May blog posts if anyone is curious enough to dig them up).

I had the father of one of my friends castigate a group of us (we were all women) for not supporting Hillary Clinton and chiding us that we were voting against our own self-interest by not supporting a woman to be the next president. He said that if we were really feminists we would vote for her. This kind of argument drives me crazy! It's like saying I have to be friends with the only other Asian American person in my classroom or that I must support all Chinese Americans running for public office because of our shared ethnicity. So just because Obama is black doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to be the best anti-racist president (interestingly enough there was a study done about the racial diversity of the staffs of the top 3 candidates in each party and Hillary Clinton had, by far, the most diverse staff--in fact, she was the only one who had less than 50% white staffers and she had the most representation among all racial groups, including a perceptible Native American staff presence).

OK, I meant to make this brief but again got carried away. So really, what I'm curious about is: who would you like to see in the White House in 2009 and why and if you want to share your thoughts about how the candidates line up under issues of race/anti-racism, I'd love to hear your perspectives as well.