By Lynette Holloway
But is the
steady drumbeat of support and endorsements from African-American celebrities,
activists, lawmakers, and the parents of fallen unarmed Black men is beginning
to look, well, like political pandering?
For months, she
has marched out supporters, including Star Jones, former
co-host of The View; Ben Crump, president of the
National Bar Association and the civil rights attorney who represented the
families of slain Black teens Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; Gwen Carr, the mother
of Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin’s
mother, Sybrina Fulton.
The drone has
reached a pitch as the 2016 presidential election season kicks into high
gear and after rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire
primaries, where Clinton has enjoyed political support in the past.
Even Sanders is
looking to shore up his support among Black voters as the race moves to South
Carolina next week, and where African-Americans play a big role in the
primaries. Fresh off his Tuesday victory in New Hampshire, Sanders rolled into Harlem, which was one-time
considered the Black mecca, to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton.
God knows both
of them need the votes, especially if they’re trying to borrow a page from
President Barack Obama’s
playbook in both elections. In 2012, Black women voted
at a higher rate than any other group—across gender, race, and ethnicity–and
played a large part, along with other women of color, in Obama’s
re-election.
In 2008, when Clinton was
widely expected to win the Black vote because of her husband’s political
legacy, women-of-color showed up at the polls in historically high numbers and
voted Democratic, electing Obama to the White House for the first time.
This time, Clinton’s
campaign is working hard to ensure that those votes do not slip away again. But
scholars like Michelle Alexander question whether she deserves the Black
vote in the first place.
In a scorching
piece in The Nation Tuesday, Alexander denounced Clinton for supporting
policies enacted by President Bill Clinton, including the crime bill and
welfare reform, which have “decimated Black America.”
From The Nation:
Bill Clinton
presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any
president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the
War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before
crack hit the streets—but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had
imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack
versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing
and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.
[…]
When Clinton
left office in 2001, the United States had the highest rate of incarceration in
the world. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans
constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though
they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison
admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more
than 26 times the level in 1983. All of the presidents since 1980 have
contributed to mass incarceration, but as Equal Justice Initiative founder
Bryan Stevenson recently observed, “President Clinton’s tenure was the worst.”
[…]
To make matters
worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the
Clinton administration in its effort to “end welfare as we know it.” In his
1996 State of the Union address, given during his re-election campaign, Clinton
declared that “the era of big government is over” and immediately sought to
prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families
With Dependent Children (AFDC). The welfare-reform legislation that he
signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a
success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant
to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added
work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions,
and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later
restored).
Aside from
serious policy issues associated with President Clinton that Alexander
highlights in The Nation, Clinton’s campaign has stumbled as it tries to help
the candidate relate to people of color and millennial voters. Below are some
examples:
Happy Kwanzaa!
The candidate
got dragged on social media over the holiday when staff changed her Twitter
logo into what appeared to be kinara, the candle holder used by Kwanzaa
celebrators. The reaction was like, um, nope!
