Last week I watched Michelle Obama's, Hillary Clinton's, and Barack Obama's speeches at the Democratic Convention. Life is too short to spend much time with the GOP, but I just took a 10-minute break from lecture notes to catch a bit of Sarah Palin's red meat address to the Republicans. She'll make a great student body president, folks. What struck me, however, in light of contemporary American demographics, which are abundantly evident in my own classes – the Census Bureau assesses the overall American population at 68% non-Hispanic white, 15% Hispanic, 12% African American, and 5% Asian American, and projects that the non-Hispanic white population will be only 46% of the total by 2050 – is that over the 10 minutes I wasted on Palin, during 6 1/2 of which the camera trawled over the rapt and slavering faces in the packed convention hall, I saw only
one African American.
Why, 5 1/2 years after we invaded that country, are so many people still unable to pronounce Iraq? Whatever the proper pronunciation may be, it's not "EYE-rack," Governor Palin.
***
Update: And it's not just my cynical eye, either: this morning's
Washington Post has a precise count – out of 2380 delegates at the Republican Convention, a whopping
36 are African American.
3 comments:
Given what Jon Stewart is doing tonight, I can't wait to see what he does to Palin's speech tomorrow. He ate Thompson and Lieberman alive tonight.
Re the delegate count:
There are probably very few African Americans willing to be the Clarence Thomases of their race, as Sarah Palin is of her gender.
now matter who "wins" this coming election
"we the people" lose
when 'they' make the movie about this election it should be called:
The Young and Hopeless
did they ever fix thos voting machines in Fld ? the ones here have a 27-32 % error rate (Diebold) and only the manufacturer is allowed to "check" them
we got ourselves a two party dictatorship
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