Young voters' new thinking

Even the dimmest media bulbs have noticed that there's something a little different about this year's crop of Democratic presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton, who won the New Hampshire primary, appears to have an extra X chromosome. Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who won the Iowa caucuses, has been blessed with some extra melanin in his skin, which also makes him stand out from the usual crowd of middle-aged, white-guy candidate-clones.

The media just can't stop gushing and clucking and gasping about it all. Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black! Will American voters accept a female candidate? A black candidate? Are voters more sexist or more racist? What's a bigger problem in America today, sexism or racism?

Snore.

These questions are tedious and inane. Simplistic efforts to evaluate whether racism or sexism is "worse" are inherently meaningless. Racism and sexism operate in complex and different ways. We should reflect on the ways in which racism and sexism have marred our history and cast shadows over our future, but let's not turn it into a parlor game about who's got it worse, women or blacks.

Increasingly, the media obsession with whether Americans will be less likely to vote for a black man or for a woman is also beside the point -- because to an emerging generation of younger voters, the very terms in which the questions have been framed no longer make much sense.

Start with race. In the context of the 2008 election, the question, "Would you vote for a black man for president?" takes for granted certain assumptions: that there is a clearly defined category we can label "black men," that Obama fits into that category and that belonging to that category matters.

For Americans over 40, these may seem like perfectly justified assumptions. Of course there's a category properly labeled "black men." Of course Obama fits into that category -- he's got that extra melanin, right? Which makes him black, which matters, because "black maleness" triggers a set of associations that affect how people think about him.