Author Toni Morrison endorses Obama
WASHINGTON (AP) - January 28, 2008 Author Toni Morrison said her endorsement of the Democratic
presidential candidate has little to do with Obama's race - he is
the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas
- but rather his personal gifts.
Writing with the touch of a poet in a letter to the Illinois
senator, Morrison explained why she chose Obama over Hillary Rodham
Clinton for her first public presidential endorsement.
Morrison, whose acclaimed novels usually concentrate of the
lives of black women, said she has admired Clinton for years
because of her knowledge and mastery of politics, but then
dismissed that experience in favor of Obama's vision.
"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare
authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with
age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other
candidates," Morrison wrote. "That something is a creative
imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too
bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we
call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight.
Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree
in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and
surrounds it.
"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it
in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster
the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom," Morrison wrote.
In 1998, Morrison wrote a column for the New Yorker magazine in
which she wrote of Bill Clinton: "White skin notwithstanding, this
is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person
who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all,
Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent
household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing,
McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."
Obama responded to Morrison's endorsement with a written
statement: "Toni Morrison has touched a nation with the grace and
beauty of her words, and I was deeply moved and honored by the
letter she wrote and the support she is giving our campaign."