The specter of Black leaders like Charles Rangel, Andrew Young and BET President Robert Johnson dissing Barack Obama- while cuddling up to the Clintons was enough to make me spend a minute to take a second look at the Clinton record on race and its lasting effects on the Black community. I’m still debating whether the fact that so many African Americans to this day regard the Clintons as some sort of Black saviors is a testament to our gullibility or their political acumen. Either way the record needs to be set straight about the Clinton years and what they meant for African Americans. This is a step in that direction.
Much of Bill Clinton’s appeal among Blacks is his Southerness. Most Blacks still live in the South and many more have roots their. For them Clinton remains a sympathetic figure who they think they can identify with- down to earth, politically centrist and racially tolerant, gifted yet flawed. In 1992 this regional solidarity often gave Bill Clinton the kind of political and policy space to slap Blacks in public to communicate to White folk that he shared their contempt for us and the next day to show up at our churches to shuck and jive in the pulpit. Black folks let Bill Clinton have it both ways because we liked him.
The slaps came early and often. During his run for president he made a point to interrupt his campaign schedule to preside over the execution of a retarded Black man in Arkansas. This was his “I’m no Michael Dukakis ACLU liberal on crime” slap. Then came the Sista Souljah slap. At a Rainbow Coalition conference he made it a point to single out an obscure member of the rap group Public Enemy for an off the cuff statement she made to a Washington Post reporter about how White America was in denial about Black on Black crime. She said that if Blacks took one week and killed Whites in the same numbers that we were killing each other that the government might sit up a take notice of the crisis of violence talking place in our communities. Governor Clinton shot back “”If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”
We all know that that America values White life more than it values Black life. That’s why when a Black person kills another Black person he gets 15 years but when he kills a White person he gets the death penalty. That’s why when a little blond girl is missing its front page news until she’s found and when a black person is missing you might see their face on a milk carton if you’re lucky. Sista Souljah spoke the truth and Bill Clinton’s reaction was to chastise her for daring to. Even Hilary Clinton acknowledged this point when she recently told a crowd of Black women that if the AIDS epidemic was killing white women at the same rates as its currently killing Black women this country would be much more serious about finding a cure.
This was before Bill Clinton was President. A few years into his administration he proceeded to fire Agricultural Secretary Mike Espy, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, and force his Drug Czar Lee Brown out to make room for General Barry MaCafferty. Apparently Brown wasn’t treating the drug crackdown on Black and Brown youth enough like a war. While one could argue that George W Bush has been loyal to his appointees to a fault, Bill Clinton was just the opposite when it came to his Black underlings. He routinely failed to stand by Black officials under fire from the Right or fight for his appointments. He let talented blacks like Lani Guinier twist and die in the wind before Senate Committees
But that’s not the worst of it. Its Clinton’s policies that really did damaged to the masses of blacks during the 1990’s. In 1994 Clinton signed his Crime Bill that introduced mandatory life sentences for certain felons and expanded the death penalty to 60 new criminal offenses. It also put 100,000 new police in our neighborhoods at a time when Blacks were calling for a peace dividend and an urban Marshall Plan in our communities. These and other “get tough” policies accelerated the already high arrest and incarceration rate in Black communities. This along with the 1996 Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act devastated Black neighborhoods, families and individual lives.
The Clinton’s also broke with the African American community on so called Welfare Reform. Black leaders like Marian Wright Edelman pleaded with the Clintons not to support the bill in 1995. They did anyway. While the worse case scenario of masses of children starving in the streets never materialized, the law had no effect on the poverty rate and helped to fuel the large increase in female incarceration of women, some of whom had hit the five year cut off for assistance. Desperate people often do desperate things to survive.
Bill Clinton also supported Don’t Ask- Don’t Tell, the ridiculous military policy that forces gays and lesbians to remain silent about their sexual orientation in order for them to keep their jobs and a sanctions policy in Iraq that essentially lead to the deaths of over 500,000 innocent children throughout the 1990’s. No one who believes in social justice, Black or otherwise, can be proud of that record.
Clinton’s foreign policy towards Blacks around the globe was a farce. His Haiti policy of returning poor, refugees back to the Island while welcoming Cuba exiles as “political” migrants laid bare the blatant racist double standard in American’s refugee policy.
And of course who can forget the 1998 Lewinsky bombings in the Sudan and Afghanistan which reportedly killed 20 innocents and destroyed a baby milk factory. Clinton’s wild “retaliation” for the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did manage to get stories of his affair off the front pages for a day or two but Black people paid in blood for that diversion.
The Clinton’s, more than anything else, provided Blacks with gestures of support. Bill Clinton’s “Race Initiative” and his trip to Africa had very little substance to them. No resources were allotted, no political risks were taken, no policies were pushed. We didn’t even get the much talked about “apology for slavery.” In fact, it was all talk- something the Clintons are good at. Even Bill Clinton’s feeble support of Affirmative Action- “mend it, don’t end it”- was hollow in the end. He spent zero political capital defending the policy.
The saddest part of all of this is that comparatively speaking, the Clinton’s record on race was better then his predecessors. Within the context of the Reagan/ Bush years Clinton sometimes did seem like someone Blacks could trust. But a quick glace at his record indicates something else. Andrew Young is wrong. Bill Clinton is not just as Black as Obama. Toni Morrison was wrong. Bill Clinton was not the first Black president. Rather than projecting on to the Clintons our daydream desires to be politically accepted by White Americans, Blacks should be clear headed about the real record and legacy of the Clintons and what four more years of their rule would mean for us.
Roger White
January 18, 2008