In a Saturday Night Live opening monologue during this election cycle, comedian Chris Rock scoffed at the idea that he would vote for Hillary Clinton, a white woman, over Barack Obama, a black man. (See http://jimbuie.blogs.com/journal/2008/01/chris-rock-on-h.html). He said the election was not a “suffering contest”, but that “even if it was, how can you even compare the suffering of a white women to a black man?” He then enumerated the many ways that, in his view, white women’s suffering is “not even close” to the suffering of black men.

You hate to see that. It would be easy to counter all of Mr. Rock’s examples from the 300-plus years of black men’s (and, by the way, black women’s) suffering in America with the oppression of females that has continued since before we walked upright. One could take issue with his dismissive claim that “sure, white woman couldn’t vote for a minute” by pointing out that that minute lasted 144 years–still the better part of American history, and 64 years longer than black men could not vote. But who’s counting?

Mr. Rock certainly is. He says it’s not a suffering contest, then goes on to turn it into one. This kind of thinking, though amusingly stated, helps no one. The fact is, it’s no contest: there’s plenty of oppression and bigotry to go around.

This election is not a battle between black and white, or a battle of the sexes. But it is a battle against racism and sexism. The fact that we finally have a black and a female candidate shows how far we’ve come and is cause for celebration. But to paraphrase Senator Clinton when a heckler asked her to iron his shirt, remnants of sexism (and racism) are alive and well.

Some of us are not aware of that, especially if we have rarely encountered bigotry because we do not associate with the all-too-many Americans who are overtly racist or sexist, or have been fortunate enough to miss its more subtle manifestations. Those manifestations are bound to become less subtle as we near the election and bigots are faced with the increasing likelihood of a woman or an African American commander-in-chief. I’m not living in the past: I know things have gotten a lot better than they once were. But sexism and racism still permeate our society, and the sooner we acknowledge that and condescend to dirty our hands in the fight against them, the better off we’ll be.

That’s why it is so important to break both the race barrier and the gender barrier to the presidency. When that happens, innumerable smaller barriers will fall, too, including many that exist only in people’s minds.

Of course we want to vote for someone who will make a good president, black or white, male or female. This year we have an embarrassment of Democratic riches. If we can elect a good candidate who also makes presidential history by being a woman or an African-American, why not have both?

As Chris Rock ironically said “It’s so hard to make up my mind!” But I’m not being ironic; it really is hard to make up my mind. I don’t want to choose between barriers to break, I want to break them all. I wish Senator Clinton were black and Senator Obama were a woman. Or what if John Edwards, Bill Richardson, and Dennis Kucinich were black women? In that case, I guess Richardson would win the “suffering contest”. He would, after all, be the first black female Hispanic presidential candidate, and, as such, would probably get my vote.