A recent commentary by Rosa Brooks has the headline: "Can a Woman or Black Man Be the Next President?" Which of course I found annoying, but it did pull me in to read the article.
She not only makes a case that it CAN, but given the way America has changed in the last generation, she concludes with:
"Can a middle-aged white guy possibly be qualified to lead us into the future?"
She lays out some interesting statistics, including the fact that in 2006, less than 20% of older Americans (60+) were of color, compared with about 40% of younger Americans (under age 40 - I'm still there!) And she points out that the range of people of color is so much broader now, both in ethnicity and socioeconomic level, that the old black-white paradigm just doesn't fit anymore.
Thus, she asserts, questions like "would you vote for a black man for president" make no sense to the younger generation, because "black" is not a fixed notion for them the way it might have been in the past.
Food for thought!
A related aside - when I looked up her original piece in the LA Times, it had a different headline: "Sex, Race and Gen Y Voters" - I think it's interesting that the Strib changed it...
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