Ellington

"My black skin does not make me inferior, and might I add, being a female does not make me dumb!" Hallelujah.

Brazile made these comments earlier this month at the New Yorker Festival, which is the perfect antithesis for the tasteless cover that the magazine had of Barack and Michelle Obama this summer. (By the way, if you haven't seen how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert parodies the cover in Entertainment Weekly, please take a look. Hilarious.)

The whole anti-intellectual, not-black-enough, talks-too-proper stuff makes me sick to my stomach, and I'm glad Brazile brought it up in that forum. If you refuse to move up in the world through education and ingenuity, you are essentially sending yourself to the back of the bus, and that applies to all races. Since when did graduating from Harvard become taboo? What's so elitist about subject-verb agreement? Would you rather for Obama to begin a debate by saying, "Yo, what up, homies"? Why is it acceptable for Palin to say "ain't" and "doggone it" at a debate? What is this world coming to?

I heard Jamie Lee Curtis make a profound statement on television the other day. She watched the movie about the life of John Adams the other day, and she talked about how beautifully they spoke the English language in the movie, which was indicative of the time period. But now, and I'm paraphrasing, we just don't sound that good any more. She wrote a children's book called Big Words for Little People in order to motivate the next generation to improve their vocabulary.

As for the whole not-black-enough versus too-black versus "aye-rab" thing, that has nothing to do with dealing with this country's current economic situation or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or renewable energy. Genetically speaking, humans are 99.9% alike, and we're having fits over that 0.01% that makes us different. I care more about what a person's brain and heart looks like than his or her skin tone, and it will take a lot more than matching reproductive organs to convince me that you'll care about people like me when you get to D.C.

Thanks, Donna Brazile, for reminding me that regardless of who wins this election, our society still has a lot of work to do in terms of how we treat each other and ourselves.