"The Clintons’ War on Drugs: When Black Lives Didn’t Matter"

BY DONNA MURCH

In August 2015, an uncomfortable encounter between Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors and Hillary Clinton finally broke the silence of many mainstream press outlets on the Clintons’ shared responsibility for the disastrous policies of mass incarceration, and its catalyst, the War on Drugs. Although a number of prominent academics have written on the subject, little popular discussion of the racial impact of the Clintons’ crime and punishment policies emerged until the opening volleys of the 2016 presidential race.

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As we approach the 2016 election, it would be good to remember the human consequences of the Clintons’ “tough on crime” stance, and how Hillary has tried to replicate this strategy of “strength and experience” again and again to prove both her appropriateness as a female presidential contender and blue dog Democrat. Candidate Clinton has embraced hardness as political qualification, as evidenced by her proclamation “We came, we saw, he died,” about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi; her threat to obliterate Iran; or her embellished Bosnian sniper story. As a mainstream feminist icon, Hillary has more in common with Britain’s Irony Lady Margaret Thatcher, or the European Union’s austerity champion Angela Merkel, than her beloved Eleanor Roosevelt. If the history of the War on Drugs is any indicator, however, outstripping Republican belligerence from the Right will not end well for the rest of us.

This essay originally appears in Verso Books’s False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton, forthcoming June 14.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/129433/clintons-war-drugs-black-lives-didnt-matter