Bill Clinton and Black America

The subject has been coming up often in the last few weeks in GD-P about the Clintons and why in the world would AAs vote for Hillary over Bernie after all the terrible, terrible things Bill Clinton did while in office.

While wandering around the internet today I happened to find an old (2002) article about the relationship between Bill Clinton and the black community. I thought it was a perspective that I've never seen so well described before. I hope you'll find it interesting.

http://www.salon.com/2002/02/21/clinton_88/

In her now-famous defense of a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison, went so far as to call him “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” “Clinton,” Morrison wrote in the 1998 New Yorker essay, “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

I remember reading Morrison’s essay and choking. Morrison’s estimation of Clinton’s blackness seemed shallow, offensive and beside the point. At the time, I wasn’t the only one unnerved, and I’m sure many people still have problems with calling Clinton “the first black president,” no matter how Morrison intended it. Yet, in retrospect, I realize that my sharp reaction had something to do with age: I was pretty young when Reagan and Bush were in office. Like most white people, I didn’t understand how Clinton related to the African-American community; I also had a limited memory of how other presidents treated blacks.

DeWayne Wickham’s “Bill Clinton and Black America,” mostly a collection of interviews he conducted with such African-Americans as NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, actor Tim Reid and columnist Betty Baye, fills in both gaps. The book specifically illuminates how blacks responded to Clinton and just how different his presidency was from every other one in American history. The latter might be Wickham’s more important point.

More at the link...