Aspiring black leaders are ...

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.
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 Gwen Ifill

Quotes from the same author

My family was very engaged in the world around us. My father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and an immigrant from Panama. He was deeply involved in civil rights causes, which scared my mother - she was also an immigrant, from Barbados, who had her hands full with six kids, and she worried that my father would get deported. But because of his passion for politics and civil rights, we paid close attention to current events. We would watch political conventions together - for fun!
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 Gwen Ifill
We needed someone to recognize the importance of check and balances, accountability, transparency. There was a real systemic problem at South Carolina State, a problem that has gone on for 25 or 30 years
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 Gwen Ifill
Journalists are accused of being lapdogs when they don't ask the hard questions, but then accused of being rude when they do. Good thing we have tough hides.
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 Gwen Ifill
If it were the Clinton people, they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security, which the needle is not moving on.
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 Gwen Ifill
Folks who are getting their strokes in the South are not as unhappy with Howard Dean. You don't see anybody starting any movement to get him out of office.
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 Gwen Ifill