From The Recorder

A 2008 vice presidential candidate came to CCSU to share her views on the historic elec- tion and what it means to African-Americans. She was the other woman who was running for Vice President of the United States, but many may not have heard of Rosa Clemente.

The title of her talk was “Running for All Our Lives: Rosa Clemente’s Vice Presidential Campaign as a Black, Puerto Rican, Hip Hop Activist” and it was standing room only in Founders Hall. Last Monday Clemente came to talk in Founders Hall about her experiences running with Green Party candidate, former Democrat Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and expressed her mixed emotions about the first African-American president-elect Barack Obama.

Her pride of the historic first was also tem- pered with a charge to the students.

“Now is the time for the work to begin! We need to hold him accountable for issues he cam- paigned on,” she said. “Students can’t think that they can just sit back and rest.”

One by one, Clemente listed differences between the Greens and the Democrats in charge now. She advocated for a Canadian-style single-payer health care system instead of pro- big business system that doesn’t cover everyone. She pushed for a living wage that would remove people from welfare and get them back to work, instead of Obama’s slight increase in the mini- mum wage.

In 2008 campaign, she worked to bring more Latinos, working class people and women in the political movements of the United States. In 2003, Clemente helped form and coordinate the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention, drawing 3,000 activists to gener- ate a national political agenda for the hip-hop generation. But Clemente worries that hip-hop is becoming too male-dominated and may be- come a male-only art form in the future.

As an undergrad at the University of Albany and a graduate student at Cornell, Clemente was highly involved in both on cam- pus and off campus politics. In 2001, she was a youth representative at the United Nations World Conference against Xenophobia, Racism and Related Intolerance. She urged the students to get directly involved with local politics and issues.

She related how the Greens had over one million votes for their candidates and was the first party to have two women at the top of the ticket. After the talk, many students expressed an interested in forming a Campus Greens club to work on issues that Clemente had spoke of and said that she inspired them to get more in- volved with “ Green” politics.

Tim McKee is a returning CCSU student and National Committee representative for the Green Party. He can be reached at mckeetil@ccsu. edu.