Am I hindering myself

[greatdane]

It's so easy to cap wisdom (and easier still to reach the softcap of 200) that it really doesn't matter much. You will not be a noticeably worse cleric if you pick gnome.

If you're starting from nothing and have to make your finances off of carrying loot to a vendor, it definitely does suck to be a weak race. It's probably not likely to matter very much at this point in the server's lifespan (whether green or blue), but if we pretend that it's a fresh server, I do think that weak races have a measurable disadvantage for the first long while because most of your money comes from carrying weapons back to vendors. But by the time you're nearing level 50, that largely stops being a concern.

Cleric is one of the least stat-intensive classes. There will never come a day where you sit there going "aw man, we would have succeeded if I had picked a better race." For a brief window of time, there may be a situation on a fresh server where picking dwarf would have let you save up enough for a set of banded armor a day or two sooner, and that will surely help. In the grand scheme of things, though? Nah.

I quite like dark elf and halfling for the ability to hide between pulls so that respawns don't aggro you. It's only like a 30% chance to succeed with the racial 50 in the skill, but if you can target something that cons anything other than indifferent, you can tell if you're successfully hidden (because then it will be indifferent if it can't see you).