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Reading this called to mind the opening paragraph of Hortense Spillers's landmark essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987):

"Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. "Peaches" and "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire" and "Earth Mother," "Aunty," "Granny," God's "Holy Fool," a "Miss Ebony First," or "Black Woman at the Podium": I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented."

I don't have anything really profound to say (other than to read Hortense Spillers) -- just that watching women being reduced to rhetorical devices is somehow even more exhausting than usual -- and if I feel like that, how exponentially worse must it be for the woman in question?

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Sad reality but here is my thought, once she and Biden win, she will have four years to refine, groom and learn from a life long politician. She just needs to be herself. There will always be ignorant people with narrow minds. She has a double hurdle (unfair) black and female but the tide is turning IMO and in the long term we will see change. I for one feel she can lead the country after watching her for 90 minutes. My God folks anything is better than Crazy Don!

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And here I thought she had threaded that needle skillfully. I heard a few people say she had come off too cautiously! I explained to them about the threading the needle. This sucks. And good for the lone black woman for speaking up.

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