Hillary vs. Obama? Do Democrats really want my vote?

It's 2007; not 1970 or '80 or even 1990. I've just watched the Democratic candidates debate each other on the campus of Drexel, one of two private universities (the other being Penn) which have been allowed to colonize my old neighborhood, West Philadelphia, (yet again conveniently pushing out Black Philadelphians). John Edwards isn't doing bad and Bill Richardson finally seems to have found his voice. Better late than never? I think of the two Dems whose names get the most play these days: the Senator-wife of a former president, and a Black guy who bears his family's very own Kenyan surname. To some, perhaps, this surname issue with the Black candidate is no big deal. To me it's one of many facts which set Barack Obama apart from the Black American ethnic community. For whites and even some others, perhaps Mr. Obama is "just Black enough", yet, with a father from Kenya and a white American mother (descended from Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy), in a way the chap is commended by some and recommended by others for not "dragging in all of that nasty old Black American U.S. history." Then there is Mrs. Clinton. I look at Obama and Hillary side by side and I think, "she could be his mother."

What is the meaning and message of a Black man in U.S. society - who at the same time is not from the Black American community - and his white American mother? I am a Black American child of two Black American parents. Both of my parents have significant racial mixture, as do most Black Americans, a fact conveniently ignored by Americans and U.S. society. As the daughter of a Black mother, and mother myself of a young Black woman, I am very aware of the realities of gender and motherhood and the many ways in which womanhood and motherhood are treated disparately on the basis of racism and race. The multiple meanings of these powerful experiences will never be lost on me. In a white settler society like the U.S., the Black mother and the Black woman (and her children, regardless of the father's ethnicity/race) remain reviled and/or rendered invisible. Unlike Hillary, my country has never yet had, nor intended to have,  a "first lady" who was Black or another woman of colour: neither Native American nor Latina (and a Latina who's not preferring to identify as "white"). No Asians or Pacific American women either, though statistics show white men to be more comfortable with them. I know Mrs. Clinton has several Black women and other women of colour staff (including Patti Solis) and l still have

concerns about someone like her, particularly knowing she's an ex-Republican. No one, especially the candidate, is being open in discussing Hillary Clinton's significant Republican past. So, we are left with a black candidate who, for far too many, conveniently is not Black American; and a woman not only with enormous social, political and racial privilege, but also the luxury literally to have switched political sides. All this leaves me in an uncomfortable place. Is this just another election where millions of us, U.S. women of colour, Black American and others, whom our own party rarely nominates, are expected to just hold our collective noses and pull the damn lever and sit down and keep going along for the ride? Like I said, it's no longer 1990; in fact, next year is already 2008.