Letters to the Editor
maureenodonnell
Published Letters: 578 Editor's Choice: 5
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Thrasher
[Read the article: The race vs. gender war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You don't help me to understand. It took me a minute or so to understand your quote from the person I presume to be Mohammed Ali. I think it means that he wouldn't fight in Vietnam when the Vietcong had not insulted him as he had been insulted in his own country. Words can wound. As a boxer and a very witty man, he was admired by all those fans of that sport (which I do not like) but Tiger Woods is also regarded with affection and admiration by everyone interested in golf. His father was African American, his mother Asian, his wife European. Tiger doesn't talk about race because he is tops at what he does.
You say that you are a black activist but you don't explain what you want to achieve. As this is the worldwide web, it might suit your purpose better if you explained why you think you are so entitled. I was reading about Michelle Obama in "Vanity Fair" and she has the attitude that it's now or never for her husband which struck me as just a little arrogant, if, as a white woman, I can say that. There are politicians everywhere who don;t succeed the first time they seek public office. They put that down to experience and they try again. Isn;t there a lot of talk about Barack Obama being young, although as a white woman, I would not be considered young at the age of 47, as Mother Nature tells you that you are not. All the other Democrat candidates - apart from HRC and BO - have valid reasons for being annoyed with the media. I had to go to Wikipedia (which may not be the most trustworthy of sources) to find out anything about them.
It's a very strange type of democracy that you have in the US if some candidates can be completely ignored and other glamorised by various pundits whose motives should be open to question.
As to your protestation that you're not against white women, I think you should read your own posts. Without knowing anything about me, you dismissed me as a privileged white woman. You can't argue with that. You must think that the U.S. is the whole world. As you say over there "Wake up and smell the coffee". I've been writing about the candidate who might bring us a more peaceful world and, as your media has decided to exclude certain candidates, I've only had Clinton and Obama to read about because even Edwards barely gets a look in. We don't need to take any lectures from America about democracy when someone with half an eye can see that democracy is just a hazy concept in the U.S. with money the most important arbiter.
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Brief response to Thrasher
[Read the article: The race vs. gender war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I worked for two years in West Africa, as I've already stated.
What have you done for the people of Africa, if you have such an emotional bond with the land of your ancestors? There is dire poverty in most African countries, genocide in Darfur, and Kenya is now on the brink of civil war. Please don't talk down to me if all you can do is wriggle away from my questions. Every time I ask a straight question here I get condescended to as a "Brit chick" or told how privileged I am because the sun can burn my skin. I'm persistent and will keep asking awkward questions, whether you like it or not.
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Hey, Thrasher I'm not Helene Hanff and this is not 84 Charing Cross Road
[Read the article: The race vs. gender war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm referring to the correspondence that went on between Helene Hanff of New York and Marks & Co., sellers of rare and secondhand books at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. That correspondence spanned a period of 20 years, beginning in October l949 and ending l97l. The letters were kept and made into a book. I haven't got the energy for twenty years of arguing with you because you are irrepressible and incorrigible. You may be an African-American but you seem to be an American first and foremost as you don't think that non-Americans could possibly know anything about your country.
You seem more mellow now and that's good as the medics warn us that "hitting the roof" (getting angry) too often is bad for our blood pressure. You are so anxious to collect apologies from "privileged white women" that I'm thinking you want to paste them into your stamp-collection album. I must go now but I may dip into one of these chat rooms again - although some of the so-called "chat" is far from polite and more closely resembles yelling.