Some Truth at the RNC

Date: September 2008

Sponsor: RNC Protest(s)

Location: Downtown St. Paul

In a People’s March t-shirt and blue jeans, with shades and hoop earrings hanging just below a head of black short, spiky hair, a brown Latina women joined our class on the lawn of the Capital.

And when taking a tall, confidant stature that seemed to come so natural, she began to speak about the politics, media, and community that make up her life…

With a calm yet firm tone, one without doubt, this person, this woman, first spoke of her activist work during Hurricane Katrina’s harsh call for a reality check. “There is something different about seeing bodies,” she said when trying to describe her reaction to damages done to the already poor conditions of the area. And the lack of national response during that time, response from those currently in office (including Senator McCain and Senator Obama), reinforced her own politics, ones that almost uproot those of past and present.

According to her, they are not democratic, but elitist. Only certain people with distinguishable attributes, like being heterosexual, male, and educated, are able to get their name on presidential voting ballots. And for this to happen, some have to be silenced. They are hushed by…the American public majority or even their own communities; more importantly, they are censored, silenced, by media including national and local radio stations, news programs, and newspapers and magazines. The “media white-out,” as she called it, put a kind of price tag on people where the wealthy elitists that are invested in media outputs are calling out the directions of to camera crews and journalists.

Her politics, for example, have neither been broadcasted nor invited to any national debates despite having a legal right to. Her politics that call for a multi-racial and multi-generational collaboration to make change; for universal health care; for livable wages; for an end to the war; for LGBTQQ human rights; for adopting Human Rights; for decreasing college student debt; for dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and abandoning the death penalty; for farmers support due to massive loss of land; and more.  So, she decided to run for office.

The running mate of the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente is the first Latina women ever elected to run for office.  She is a mother, a wife, a daughter, an activist, a politician, a manager, a woman, a Latina, etc. And she looks like me.