if Hispanic women respond to Mrs. Clinton's increasingly strong appeal for support based on sex.

I'm not even going to talk about that Al Sharpton quote.  It's just offensive.

Same thing for Romero.   Although I admit I don't entirely understand her comment.

The New Yorker also has a new article out that discusses race a bit.  This is the most interesting tidbit:

On the morning after Clinton's victory, I talked to Sergio Bendixen, one of her pollsters, who specializes in the Hispanic vote. "In all honesty, the Hispanic vote is extremely important to the Clinton campaign, and the polls have shown--and today is not a great day to cite polls--that even though she was slipping with women in Iowa and blacks in South Carolina, she was not slipping with Hispanics," he said. "The fire wall doesn't apply now, because she is in good shape, but before last night the Hispanic vote was going to be the most important part of her fire wall on February 5th." The implications of that strategy are not necessarily uplifting.

When I asked Bendixen about the source of Clinton's strength in the Hispanic community, he mentioned her support for health care, and Hispanic voters' affinity for the Clinton era. "It's one group where going back to the past really works," he said. "All you need to say in focus groups is `Let's go back to the nineties.' " But he was also frank about the fact that the Clintons, long beloved in the black community, are now dependent on a less edifying political dynamic: "The Hispanic voter--and I want to say this very carefully--has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."

Hillary Clinton's Firewall

[But there may be another factor in Clinton's success among Latinos, particularly with regard to Obama. And it may have less to do with enthusiasm for her candidacy than with a lack of enthusiasm for the Illinois senator. Over the last two decades, there has been evidence of growing hostility from Hispanics toward African Americans. Some of this hostility is the result of conflicts, or perceived conflicts, over politically controlled resources in cities and states. But as Tanya K. Hernandez, a professor of law at George Washington, has argued recently, it may also be a legacy of an older Latin American prejudice against blacks that has been transplanted to this country.

While this conflict passes largely unnoticed in the popular press, African American and Latino sociologists have been conducting extensive surveys in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Philadelphia. These surveys have generally found that Latinos display more prejudice toward African Americans than African Americans do toward Latinos or than whites display toward African Americans. In the words of University of Houston sociologist Tatcho Mindiola, Jr. and two associates, "in general African Americans have more positive views of Hispanics than vice versa." ]

[These attitudes were not confined to working-class Latinos. Yolanda Flores Niemann of Washington State University and four other sociologists discovered among Latino college students the same kind of stereotypes that Mindiola found in Houston. Among the top ten traits that Latino college students ascribed to black males were "antagonistic," "speak loudly," "muscular," "criminal," "dark skin," and "unmannerly."

This hostility of Latinos toward blacks has sometimes showed up in political behavior. While both groups--especially if Florida's Cubans are excluded--generally vote Democratic, there have been instances where Hispanics, faced with a black Democratic candidate, or with a white Democratic candidate closely tied to the black community, have voted Republican.]  

I can attest personally from first-hand experience to this phenomena in South Florida and Miami particularly, where there is a great deal of animosity directed towards the African-American and Haitian community.  Even within the Hispanic community itself among Dominicans and Cubans I've seen these problems within the context of families.  Fathers disowning daughters because the man she plans to marry is two shades darker than she is.

  These are not the kind of issues that can be overcome with policy discussions or platform, it speaks to a much deeper problem in America and society. The truth is that when someone has developed a strong distaste and prejudice for individuals of a certain racial or ethnic group, they will vote against them as a direct result of their emotional response.  It's one of the great motivators in politics actually.