Last post!

I'm presenting tonight so I don't want to give away any spoilers... but if I had to pick one thing out of this week's readings, it would be my annoyance with the section on the Locke vs. Craswell campaign in Chapter 19. I realize that this book focuses on racial minorities rather than gender (specifically women as minorities), but Larson completely overlooks the fact that women, even white women, in politics have a harder time being taken seriously than men of any ethnicity (think Hillary Clinton vs. Obama--I seem to recall reading something that attributed Obama's victory to his race being the "lesser of two evils," the other evil being the female gender). She spends quite a bit of time discussing the criticism of Craswell's appearance, but never comes to the conclusion that gender was more of a cause for inequality in the coverage of the two candidates than race. Craswell did have other problems that impeded her progress as a candidate (her extreme religious stance, for instance), but even based on the evidence given in the book, it seemed clear to me that simply being female hurt her chances against Locke. I think that that should have been acknowledged or at least entertained, even if the book is about racial minorities.