“Hey, soror,” a woman half-shouted a few minutes later, as she scooped food into her Styrofoam takeout box. The seated woman looked up, smiled, and responded, “Oh, hey, soror, you see Hillary?"

...
“I thought we’d get that talk from Bernie, but it was Hillary,” the woman said as she took her seat in the restaurant. The man with her nodded his head in agreement, and then they sat in silence, attending to the world in their cell phones.

There was one moment in Rangel’s introduction, however, when his presence — and his actions — were undeniably infectious to everyone in the room, especially the Black Harlemites: “It’s been brought to my attention that some people have been following the secretary of State around to disrupt rather than to instruct. Please be informed, you are in the village of Harlem.”

This was met with wild applause from the room, a big smile from Hillary, and a Holder whisper to Cuomo, followed by laughs from both men. It was one of the more street-cred-pumping moments this campaign has seen. You fuck with Hill, you fuck with Harlem. And it capped off a perfect warm-up act for Hillary — New York State, New York City, and Harlem supporting not only Hillary being the next president, but her as someone who could do a lot of good for black people.


Hillary then followed up the Flint statement with the following series of points, all delivered in about two minutes:

"We still need to face the painful reality that African-Americans are nearly three times as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage."
"Something's wrong when the median wealth for black families is just a tiny fraction of the median wealth of white families."
"Something is wrong when African-American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of the same offenses."
"Black kids get arrested for petty crimes, but white CEOs get away with fleecing our entire country — there is something wrong."
"Just imagine with me for a minute if white kids were 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than black kids — 500 percent."
Imagine if a white baby in South Carolina were twice as likely to die before her first birthday than an African-American baby.
"Imagine the outcry. Imagine the resources that would flood in."
"Now, these inequities are wrong, but they're also immoral. And it'll be the mission of my presidency to bring them to an end. We have to begin by facing up to the reality of systemic racism."
I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The tiptoeing had vanished. She wasn’t trying to win everyone’s vote by flying as close to the middle as possible. And even though the room was markedly black, these thoughts were now on her permanent electoral record for all to see. The use of “imagine” was powerful, because it comes with an almost implied, You can’t imagine it, because that shit wouldn’t fly. She was finally just saying it, bluntly. Hearing this, in February, was so much more powerful than any policy plan. Because before many people want to know your plan — or before people will ever truly consider believing in your plan — they want to know that you understand their world.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/how-hillary-clinton-won-harlem.html