A brittle reaction to Black
Lives Matter protester on eve of South Carolina refocuses voters on problematic
record
According to a Feb. 16 CNN/ORC
poll, a whopping 65 percent of South Carolinian black voters are
planning to support Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s primary, while only
28 percent are planning to support Bernie Sanders.
The furor that broke out last
night, however, may just shift the political winds.
In the middle of a
$500-per-person Clinton fundraising
event in Charleston on Wednesday evening, a young Black Lives Matter
activist stepped out in front of the former secretary of state, turned toward
the small audience, and held aloft a banner emblazoned with the phrase, “We
need to bring them to heel.”
The protester, as
she later explained, “wanted to make sure that black people are paying
attention to [Clinton’s] record” by drawing attention to the racist
rhetoric Clinton used in 1996, when she, as first lady, strongly supported
the “tough on crime” method of governance, and successfully
lobbied
for a bill based
on that method to be passed into law.
“They are not just gangs of
kids anymore,” Clinton warned the
public at the time. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’
No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but
first we need to bring them to heel.”
The crime bill that Clinton
advocated for is now widely regarded as a “terrible
mistake,” and the demonizing language that she used to describe young
people who belong to gangs (a group that, because of institutionalized
racism and oppression,
is majority black
and Latino/a) would now be political suicide.
Since the ’90s, the Democratic
Party — and Hillary Clinton along with it — has morphed from voicing demagogic,
dangerous ideas about black children and supporting catastrophic crime policies
to, today, speaking of how “we
have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” and
promising an end to the decades-long era
of mass incarceration, which, of course, they hold much responsibility for
creating.
But, despite Clinton’s sudden
populist transformation, the memory of the American people isn’t quite so short
and fleeting.
Americans remember that
Hillary Clinton’s ‘90s policy stances punished
those born into systemic
racism and poverty by instituting mandatory minimums, eliminating
rehabilitative programs for inmates addicted to drugs, implementing the
three-strikes law (which Bill now admits “made the problem worse”),
expanding
the death penalty (which Hillary still supports), and building more prisons
countrywide.
Indeed, the ‘94 legislation
threw millions of black women and men into prison; in fact, throughout Bill
Clinton’s presidency, the black prison population increased by 50
percent.
All of this spelled mass
incarceration and mass disenfranchisement for the black Americans of South
Carolina.
Today, due to felonies, one
out of every 27 black voters in South Carolina is disenfranchised, and,
although black people make up just 28 percent of the state’s
population, they account for a devastating 62
percent of the prison and jail population, in no small part because of
the draconian measures the Clinton administration, along with the strong
support of its first lady, took in the name of being “tough on crime.”
And now, 20 years later,
at the end of February 2016, Clinton finds herself being directly challenged by
a young Black protester named Ashley Williams on her past rhetoric and role in
creating America’s stringent criminal justice system, under which people are
still being penalized
today, including those in South Carolina.
With the state’s primary
looming, a respectful and honest response to this confrontation was vitally
important for Clinton — and she fell dismally short.
“We want you to apologize for
mass incarceration,” Williams said last night, facing the former secretary of
state head-on.
“OK fine, we’ll talk about it,”
Clinton answered.
“I’m not a super-predator,
Hillary Clinton.”
Hisses and grumbles emanated
from the audience.
“OK, fine, we’ll talk about
it.”
“Can you apologize to black
people for mass incarceration?”
“Well, can I talk, and then
maybe you can listen to what I say?” Clinton responded.
Following Clinton’s lead, the
hissing from the audience amplified.
“Yes, yes, absolutely,”
Williams answered.
“OK, fine, thank you very
much. There are a lot of issues, a lot issues in this campaign. The very first
speech that I gave back in April was about criminal justice reform—“
“You called black people
‘super-predators,’” Williams said, interrupting Clinton to bring the focus back
to the words Clinton spoke and the positions she held as first lady.
“Whoa, you’re being rude,”
came voices from the audience. “This is not appropriate.”
“Calling people
super-predators — that’s what’s rude,” Williams shot back.
Clinton cut her off: “Do you
want to hear the facts, or do you just want to talk?”
“You’re trespassing,” a man’s
voice rang out.
“Please explain your record to
us,” Williams asked Clinton. “You owe black people an apology. You owe people
of color an apology.”
“Let her talk, let her talk.”
The audience grew louder and angrier on Clinton’s behalf.
“I’ll tell you what, if you
will give me a chance to talk, I’ll approach your subject — you know what,
nobody’s ever asked me that before,” Clinton said, as Williams was physically
removed by a white security guard.
The former secretary of state
then turned to her remaining audience and said, “OK, back to the issues.”
The crowd let out a huge sigh,
and one woman said, “Thank you!”
Yikes.
(Later
Thursday, Clinton sent a statement to the Washington Post apologizing for
her ’90s remarks):
In a written response to The
Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart on the issue Thursday, Clinton said:
“Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them
today.”
“My life’s work has been about
lifting up children and young people who’ve been let down by the system or by
society, kids who never got the chance they deserved,” Clinton continued in the
statement. “And unfortunately today, there are way too many of those kids,
especially in African-American communities. We haven’t done right by
them. We need to. We need to end the school to prison pipeline and
replace it with a cradle-to-college pipeline.”
And indeed, three
days ago, Clinton stated that, “White Americans need to do a better job at
listening when African-Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers they
face every day. Practice humility rather than assume that our experience is
everyone’s experience.”
In South Carolina last night,
Clinton blew right past that doctrine.
While the virtually
all-white crowd hissed and verbally attacked Williams, Clinton did nothing
to quiet them. She did not wield her privilege and position of power to demand
those following her show respect to a young woman understandably and rightfully
upset by racial injustice.
Instead, she repeatedly
snapped at Williams — “Do you want to hear the facts, or do you just want to
talk?” — and tried to quickly answer Williams’ call for an apology by
discussing the speech she made 10 months ago, instead of the language she
used in the ‘90s.
When Williams pressed her to
be more specific, Clinton grew even more visibly annoyed and her tone further
sharpened — a bad “job [of] listening” with “humility” and giving credit to
Williams’ experiences and concerns.
It was a poor showing of
Clinton’s comprehension of the severity of the issues facing black Americans.
Despite the institutional racism and mass
incarceration drowning black Americans today, Clinton acted as though
Williams’ emotionally charged protest was completely out of line.
Then, when a white, male
security guard put his hands on the young, black, female protester, and
forcibly coaxed her away from Clinton, Clinton’s response was, “OK, back to the
issues,” not only allowing a young activist to be physically removed from
Clinton’s presence, but problematically implying that Clinton’s trustworthiness
on black rights and black lives to black voters is not, somehow, one of “the
issues.”
Let’s be real: Clinton helped
create the mass incarceration state, period.
If she cannot swiftly and
straightforwardly apologize to a young black woman for what she did in the
‘90s, Clinton reveals herself to have never thought about her actions, to have never
unpacked her white privilege, and to be largely incapable of “practic[ing]
[the] humility” she is now calling upon her fellow white Americans to employ.
Williams’
concerns before her protest were in no way dispelled by Clinton’s actions,
but rather intensified:
“Hillary Clinton has a pattern
of throwing the Black community under the bus when it serves her politically.
She called our boys ‘super-predators’ in ’96, then she race-baited when running
against Obama in ‘08, now she’s a lifelong civil rights activist. I just want
to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from ’96, ’08, or the
new Hillary?”
Additionally, Clinton’s record
and response last night do not contrast well with Bernie Sanders’, who had this to say in the
‘90s while Clinton was calling young black children “super-predators”:
“We have the highest
percentage of people in jail per capita of any nation on earth — what do
we have to do, put half the country behind bars?
Mr. Speaker, instead of
talking about punishment and vengeance, let us have the courage to talk
about the real issue — how do we get to the root causes of crime?
…And, Mr. Speaker, I’ve
got a problem! I’ve got a problem with a president and a Congress that allows
five million people to go hungry, two million people to sleep out on the
street, cities to become breeding grounds for drugs and violence — and
they say we’re getting tough on crime.
If you want to get tough on
crime, let’s deal with the causes of crime. Let’s demand that every man, woman,
and child in this country have a decent opportunity and a decent standard of
living.
Let’s not keep putting more
people into jail and disproportionately punishing Blacks.”
In comparison to Sanders’
positions in the ‘90s, and in light of how Clinton responded last night to
questions about her past —over which there is already a growing
controversy — South Carolinian black voters may very well shift their
support to the candidate who has never depicted their children as having “no
conscience, no empathy” or being “super-predators,” but called for “every man,
woman, and child in this country [to] have a decent opportunity” since the
‘90s.
Either way, the entire country
will find out the day after tomorrow.
Eliza Webb is a writer based
in Detroit. Her work has appeared in the Hill, Truthout, CounterPunch, Alternet
and the Michigan Journal of International Affairs. You can contact her at
lizawebb@umich.edu and follow her on Twitter @ElizaAWebb.
No comments:
Post a Comment