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    Said It. Meant It.

    Posted Wednesday, May 28, 2008 2:25 AM | By Marjorie Valbrun
    Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine in March. How can she say her comments were prompted in part by Kennedy's cancer diagnosis when she had already said the same thing a few months ago when there was no talk of Kennedy having cancer? Perhaps the fact that her original comments did not get wide notice explains why she wanted to re-telegraph those sentiments to a wider audience. She seems too smart and calculating to be making so many subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged remarks by mistake. Does anyone believe that it's not more effective to send these signals out and then say, "Oops. So sorry. Never mind," than it is to not say them at all? Once she has sown doubts, raised fears, and planted ideas in the minds of people who have racial fears and animosities, she has effectively turned those people against her opponent. In Obama's case, the threat of assassination has real resonance in the black community.

    On another front, the racial overtones of some of Clinton's comments overall are further eroding relations between black women who support Obama and white women who support her. The extent to which these two groups will now see themselves as having shared political agendas is highly in doubt. Judging by the strong reactions of diehard Clinton and Obama supporters to a piece I wrote on this subject in Newsweek this week, it will be a very long time before we see strong black/white feminist coalitions being formed. My feeling is that by criticizing black women's support for a black male candidate over a white female candidate, white Clinton supporters are ignoring the duality of black women's identity and alienating them by expecting them to choose between their gender and their race. This is a luxury that black women just don't have.

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