Commentary: Issues -- not gender or race -- on minds of voters (CNN)

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By Danielle Holley-Walker

Danielle Holley-Walker is a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and is actively supporting the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.

(CNN) -- You can't turn on a 24-hour news channel or your nightly news this week without seeing a feature on African-American women voters. It makes sense, being that the South Carolina Democratic primary is only one day away and African-American women will make up approximately one-third of the voters.

The angle in these news features is virtually identical. The commentators wonder and marvel at the extraordinarily difficult choice for African-American women in this primary -- will we vote for the woman candidate or the African-American candidate? Reporters have been busying themselves traveling to crowded beauty shops all over the state to answer this question.

The funniest, or perhaps most disturbing, thing about these stories is how far they are from my reality. I am an African-American woman living in South Carolina. I have African-American women family members and friends who live in this state. I actually visit beauty shops to get my hair done. Never once have I heard a single woman I know frame the choice about whom to vote for as a question of gender or racial politics.

So what are African-American women talking about when the cameras aren't watching or, more importantly, what are we telling the media that is not being fairly reported? African-American women are talking about the issues!
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more: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/25/holley.walker.op.ed/index.html

O! M! G! They're talking about the issues!

And they're not middle-class, Christian, white males!

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