Why Iowa

I'm intrigued that Iowa got the ball rolling for the first serious African American candidate. Could it be the state has been learning the lessons taught by native daughter Jane Elliott, who has been teaching her eye-color exercise since 1968?

What Ifs...

1a. What if Chelsea-gate were turned around, and it was Barack Obama's daughter who had been referred to in that disrespectful manner? Would the call for the TV reporter's dismissal, not merely his suspension, be supported by the general public? I ask this because at the moment, Mrs. Clinton has said his suspension is not sufficient redress, and many people are wondering if that's too harsh.

1b. What if it had been Imus who had made the disrectful remark? He was fired.

2. And what if it was Hillary who was the eloquent one, whose speeches were characterized as soaring rhetoric: would this be a help or hindrance to her? Reminds me of people dismissing the writing ability of Frederick Douglass, some saying he didn't write his memoirs. I'll have to look into that. The ponit is, there is a pattern of our accepting African American eloquence in English, but then dismissing it as so much fakery, smoke and mirrors, not real poetry, real feeling, real thought, real truth.

Obama's Lakota Connection

We called it here first, in the Redwood Forest, that one day there will be a Lakota (or other tribe) woman taking the oath of office on the steps of the capital.

With Barack Obama this dream moves a few steps forward. In one of his speeches about a month ago my ears caught him including "Native Americans" in a list of folks who need to be included. Hmm, I thought; that's definitely unusual, maybe unique in American politics.

Then come to find out, Tom Daschle, one of Mr. Obama's senior advisors, is much about the Native Americans. More to come.

Race-Baiting No Longer Computes

Now that we are some weeks past South Carolina's primary, in hindsight the whole race-baiting thing seemed to parallel what happened to Michael Richards when he used the N-word at a Los Angeles comedy club against some patrons of color, hoping to rally the majority white crowd behind him. Didn't work in LA and sure didn't work in South Carolina.

Can we say that America has turned a corner on the race issue, that we have finally come to the point where neither whites nor blacks can stand the N-word and race-baiting?

For a long time we've heard whites saying they are not racist. Well, I think for a lot of us in the Redwood Forest it's time to sit down and have a few helpings of humble pie.