"Don't sell your life to law school." --mom
"You are uptight, you know? You need to calm down." --mom
"You are like a tree, tree needs energy. Don't forget to feed yourself." --mom

On Valentine's Day:
"I think you should buy yourself a flower." --mom

"I know you are a little bit slow, but it is ok as long as you are not dumb." --mom

hello, who is stupid enough to be a masochist and go to law school . . . duuuuuuumb.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/politics/02race.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=02a3300d7e7da57f&ex=1202619600

That article infuriates me!  I think it's bad journalism, bad writing, and poor sense of racial sensitivity.  I can't believe the NYT would print something like this.  I can't believe it's on A-1 of the paper.  First of all, the title: "Clinton's Gradual Education on Issues of Race."  How many articles have we read for the last 14 months, and how many times can you pit the same story and then claim, contemporaneously, that the debate is moving away from race.  There is not only an underlying unstated race battle going on between the R's and D's that's just plain offensive in the way the country is polarized, but there's this other stupid fight between the two D contenders, raising issues of race and gender just based on the social categories that the players fall into rather than their policy issues or voting records.  Three days before Super Tuesday, and this is all we can come up with. 

I think this article is really shallow.  It attempts to map Hillary Clinton's "gradual education" in the framework of what she has been exposed to, "racially," beginning in her late teens.  First of all, we're defining race here to be "African American."  Secondly, we're defining education to be external, spoon-fed visions and understandings of race like classes (ie Sociology ) and speeches.  The article parenthetically cites her two-page campaign list of civil rights accomplishment--if she's going to generate a laundry list of all of her gold medals and speeches from the NAACP for press purposes, why does the press have to latch on to the same shallow representations of activism or political accomplishment -- the press' job is to look past those two pages, into the reals workings of how her policies have come to be.  What kind of legislation did she vote on?  What kind of initiatives did she work on with Civil Rights that gives her the A-record with the NAACP?  Why the "political enlightment" after her Goldwater days?  I could just imagine a reporter looking up every single black kid she went to school with and calling the person up and then asking a question like "how do you think Senator Clinton's views on race have changed since you've known her?"  It is so disheartening to see what lengths the press will go to to make a point without making a better effort to look at the bigger picture, the social implications of what they're writing about.

And, how can you track and judge Hillary Clinton's "exposure" to race based on her first "realization" of racism, her first black friend, and her first Sociology class?  Black racism is all around.  You don't just learn about it from an MLK speech or in your history book.  It's in every single class of every single school, and every street corner of every city in America.  It's in every grocery store, department store, TV show.  I would like to give her a lot more credit and a lot more depth than to attribute her "understanding" of race in America than a ride through an "It's A Small World"-like boat ride through black America, starting with a trip through Boston's poor areas and a term with Cambridge's "underprivileged negroes." 

And what the fuck is with these wow-she's-come-a-long-way headings? "First Awareness." "A Move to the South." "Frayed Good Will."  Frayed Good Will.  It's like they're giving in more and more to highlight the futile campaign slurring about really stupid meaningless shit, like....making racial innuendos to the black candidate.  Ugh.