She Is In A Bigger Harvard Test Room

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.

Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. 

She is still being yelled at. The yelling is being done by the media. Email. Benghazi. Whitewater. And the yelling is being done by the loudmouth dumbo running for president. Get rid of your bodyguards? Is this guy kidding me?

She is being yelled at and her supporters, men and women, need to step in and respond. We are the proctors. This is a democracy. She is not doing this for her. This is not just about America. This is about the women across the globe.

Barack Obama was about 500 years of world history. Hillary Clinton is about 5,000 years of world history.

It's Not Her, It's Us

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.

Black Women Need Clinton

Barack Obama was race, Hillary is gender. Black women need both.

Secretary Clinton, you're no Barack Obama 

No matter how much Donald Trump throws these inequities in our faces, most African-Americans will never vote for him. Polls currently show Trump with only 1 percent of the black vote.

But that doesn't mean that black voters, particularly women, will turn out for Clinton with the same voraciousness as they did for Obama. And just because Obama plans to turn Clinton's election into a referendum on his political legacy, it doesn't mean African-Americans will take the bait.

Clinton has to win over black voters on her own merit. And to do that, she must convince black women, in particular, that they won't get buried underneath the shattered glass when she breaks through the ceiling.