TheConfirmationFiles

Michelle Alexander author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color blindness shares  her thoughts on Hillary Clinton and the black vote.  Very interesting.

Here is an excerpt:

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

More from The Nation

It should be noted that, and I discovered this in reading Ian Haney Lopez’s excellent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked The Middle Class, Toni Morrison did not mean “first black president” in the sense that has been portrayed in the media for years. Lopez explains that she argued that many aspects of Clinton’s biography connected to stereotypes of blackness such as single-parent, born poor, working-class, and, yes, saxophone playing.

Posted by Libergirl and The NON-Conformist