Why Hillary Clinton's Black Supporters Should Feel the Bern

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35398-why-hillary-clintons-black-supporters-should-feel-the-bern

Bill and Hillary also championed anti-social welfare policies that hinged on thinly-veiled racial stereotypes of Black women as “welfare cheats.” I will never forget the celebration of Clinton’s anti-welfare bill in the White House Rose Garden in 1996. There he sat, flanked by two Black women who had received public assistance while signing the bill into law. Few at the time knew that, of course, the vast majority of welfare recipients at the time were white women.

Perhaps the most insidious legacy of that era is how the Clintons, and the Democratic Party in general, doubled down on notions of “culture” and lapsed “personal responsibility” to explain the material differences between Blacks and whites. Indeed, Clinton’s welfare repeal law was called the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.” Years earlier, after the Los

Angeles rebellion in 1992, then-candidate Bill Cinton traveled to South Central L.A. and diagnosed the roots of the crisis. He said, “People … are looting because they are not part of the system at all anymore,” Clinton said. “They do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support.” These comments foreshadowed the Clinton Administration’s approach to race politics.

Hillary Clinton, of course, cannot be solely held to account for the crimes of her husband, unless she chooses to wrap herself in what she considers to be a successful aspect of his presidential tenure. But she cannot have it both ways—embracing the positive while distancing herself from the destructive.

Between the Clintons’ thirst for a racist law-and-order political agenda and their simultaneous invocation of racist stereotypes to undermine public support for social welfare policies, it is not a stretch to say that the Black Lives Matter movement is, at least in part, a reaction to the failed and utterly destructive policies and politics of the Clinton era that ended a mere 14 years before its emergence.

[SoapBox]

1. Yup...and Ashley Williams letter.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511340083