Toni Morrison Endorses Obama

Toni Morrison, the only African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote an article in a 1998 issue of The New Yorker in which she (in)famously called Bill Clinton, "America's first black president" because of both the way he understood African-Americans and the similar way that the media treated him and black politicians. It was a comment that Bill Clinton (and some white media) took FAR too seriously--more than it was intended and more than African-Americans ever took it. Well, now, Toni Morrison has endorsed Barack Obama.

In giving her reasons, she writes that she admires Hillary Clinton but that gender has little to do with her reasons for that admiration. And she says the same about Obama's race--that she would not endorse him just because he's black or "makes me proud." What are her reasons:

"In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that 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. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.

"Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb.

"There have been a few prescient leaders in our past, but you are the man for this time."