How much of has, what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, transfered to Hillary?
Could this be part of Hillary's support in the minority community? Just asking because the 45 years of Hillary bashing must be identified with by other people who get treated poorly everyday.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Americans-use-to-call-Bill-Clinton-The-First-Black-President
Now, not being black myself, I'm not the first person you should listen to for the following opinion, but I think many literary critics and scholars of African-American studies would agree that if any author alive today has the authority to speak about the black experience in America, it's Toni Morrison. (Read The Bluest Eye, Beloved, or Song of Solomon to see why.)
Here's what she said in a 1998 article in The New Yorker:
African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”
In part, "the first black president" reflects the fact that Bill Clinton, although white-skinned, has lived a life similar to that of many black men in America. But it's also largely a name that reflects the fact that he, as a successful white man, is nevertheless facing an environment similar to that faced by successful black men, where there is a systemic environmental tendency to demean their accomplishments and latch onto any of their failures, no matter how small. In the case of black men who rise out of poverty or troubled households, it's the system of employers or the business community or law enforcement, who all always treated black men as somehow being more worthy of suspicion or scrutiny; in the case of Clinton it's the system of Congress and (especially) the press, who both relentlessly dogged him for his perceived personal failings in a way no prior president had been dogged.
In short, it's a racial analogy to a now-famous comment made by Hillary Clinton earlier that year on The Today Show:
The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President.
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