"Our first black president" and "before they fucked it up"

Tonight I was watching MTV cribs and they had some rap artist named Pras (I'm not familiar with him) and he was showing a place he had in New York City. One part he was showing some pictures of him and he showed a picture of him meeting president Clinton. The guy said "our first black president: President Clinton." Than they showed Kathy Griffin and she was showing her house and showed some pictures and she had a picture of her with President Clinton and said: "this was during the good years. Before they came and fucked it up." Hehe. I loved that. :D

It's kind of close to the truth if you think about it. He may have been the "right" color but he was definitely not from the priveleged classes of executives of either party. That's part of the reason he was attacked so viciously by the Right while many silver spoon Dems stood back and let it happen. He wasn't one of Us, you know.

He was so comfortable too around them and you could tell he wasn't faking it and things like that. He truly was. :)

I teach 11th grade US History in Washington, DC; our school is 99.9% African-American. On our 90s unit while talking about the election of '92 I gave the students a VH1 bio of Clinton featuring his sax playing, the Sistah Soljah comments and her response after Clinton denounced her, and the Toni Morrison piece on him. Some pretty interesting things came out of the discussion afterwords:

First, they saw the Sistah Soljah incident as Clinton pandering to the "scared of urban thugs" white middle-class, and, after reading the whole of her transcript, felt that the context of her statement was entirely missing from Clinton's jump on her.

Second, they quickly saw how the Hall Show appearance translated to young votes.

Finally, the Toni Morrison article produced an interesting dichotomy--first of all, many of the students empathized with Clinton's broken upbringing and could see where the author was coming from. However, a lot of anger was also directed at Toni Morrison for perpetuating the myth of African-American broken home.

Very on the ball kids who made some very mature observations. I am quite proud of them.

I still have the links or text of all the documents mentioned if people would like to see them.